Tell us about yourself. Where did you grow up? What’s your background?
I’m Kristy. I am a Jewish and Filipino environmentalist who is very passionate about discussing climate education, using online media platforms to educate and inspire people about the different environmental issues going on in the world and how they can take action. I’m also the co-founder of the Green Jobs Board, which is a job platform that’s focused on trying to get people opportunities for work and employment that’s also focused on social impact and environmental change. So a lot of my work centers around thinking about how to use media and storytelling to bring more people into the conversation, take action and get involved with addressing the climate crisis. So that’s a lot of my work on my platforms. And then in terms of where I grew up: I grew up in Southern California, and I went to UC Berkeley for undergrad. For college, I studied environmental policy and city planning. I would say that I grew up, you know, kind of knowing about environmental issues. But it wasn’t necessarily the focal point of my childhood by any means; it was very much something I discovered and went deeper into once I went to university. [There I] also realized that there were a lot of gaps when it came to equitable access and representation of, especially, black, indigenous and people of color in the environmental space. Even though these issues impact a lot of our communities, they are not necessarily the ones that are having their stories told or the ones highlighted as guiding those stories. And so a lot of my work is thinking about those gaps as well.
How did your community impact you wanting to see more diversity in the environmental field?
When I was in university, a really big thing that kept coming up was in classrooms and with professors, and even in some climate activist circles, was that there weren’t a lot of people of color that I saw in those spaces. So I did feel like a fish out of water, where it felt like: “Why am I here?” I feel like there are not really clear road maps on how to navigate this space or this field. A lot of people came in with a lot more exposure and experience to things that I just never had access to or understanding of. The ability to feel seen and heard properly in these spaces just kept being overshadowed, and so I just kept seeing that there was a really big need for more diversity. And during university, I actually was one of the cofounders of the Students of Color Environmental Collective at UC Berkeley, and that was kind of the beginning of me exploring, “Why is it important to create spaces like that?” especially for young BIPOC in the climate space. And I think what we came to realize is [that] a lot of us didn’t come from, maybe, the wealth and privilege to maybe pursue a full life of living off the grid. Being a conservationist is a lot of these things that you think of and associate with being a, quote on quote, “Environmentalist.” A lot of those narratives of trying to get into those roles don’t necessarily fit if you have to send money back to your family, or you have your family questioning why you are in a field or working on something that doesn’t necessarily contribute back to your community directly. Some people do the work to go to school and go into academia to give back to their community, but those of us that maybe don’t come from those kinds of roots, but still see those inequities and disparities: what do we do about that?
Then we’re concerned about our families, we’re concerned about what we are going to do after you graduate, because we don’t just come from a trust fund. It’s all these things, and I feel all of those gaps just kept coming up when it came to wanting to care about environmental issues. Even when it came to activism, there was a lot of “Direct action is the only way,” and it’s like: getting arrested is the only way. That’s not necessarily an accessible narrative to people of color, especially Black folks. There are notions of just, “Who are the environmental leaders?” And if you look at a lot of these websites or these talks it was all white men. You didn’t see many people of color being highlighted in those positions. And so there’s just all this messaging both implicit and explicit that just kept saying, “There’s not a space for you,” or if there is a space, it’s probably not going to be as funded as things that are, quote on quote, “less political” (aka more white) and not necessarily addressing things such as racial justice. I know that that was a long answer, but that goes into the complexities of it. It’s not just about representation; it’s the much deeper roots of colonization and genocide and imperialism that has caused this disconnect. Because a lot of us come from diasporas all over the world, we had these connections to nature, we had these roots. Due to these very violent and oppressive systems, we’ve been separated from that. There’s a reason for that. I think that as you dive deeper into it, it’s not just about bringing more diverse voices. It’s addressing that very deep, violent history that’s happened that has disconnected us from the planet and from ourselves. I think that it goes deep, but I would say out of the baseline the way that people digest it and understand it, is this need for more diverse voices and representation. It’s a symptom of such a bigger, multi-century issue.
How have you grown your platform, and been able to get at this history, and get all of these things that you’ve mentioned?
It’s evolved over time. I think I used to just post endless amounts of articles and pieces that were touching on this, posting my own critiques of what I felt everyone was maybe agreeing to in the environmental space. Then I saw a gap here, and I was just continuing to speak my mind on things without worrying about what other people were thinking about it, and I kind of used the platform to try to find mentors. Originally, I started as a podcast, before it became an Instagram. When I had it as a podcast, honestly, it was my last semester of college and I was like, “I have no idea what I’m doing, I need to find people who get it.” And so I was honestly creating the podcast to start trying to make networks and platforms. I was specifically looking for, [originally] all diversity, equity and inclusion practitioners in the climate space that were people of color. I was looking for that, mostly because I had other mentors who recommended that that would be a strategic thing to do with starting a podcast. I was like, okay, if we’re going to really address the lack of this representation, that might as well talk to people that live and breathe understanding equity gaps and organizations. So that’s actually how Browngirl Green started. It was through a podcast where I was interviewing DEI practitioners. As time went on, I started becoming more of a general platform, where I was making blogs and posting articles and memes and content, all just talking about environmental issues, but specifically trying to find pieces that I felt weren’t being as shown or as seen compared to other content. A lot of that was talking about pipeline fights or protests or demonstrations or organizations I thought [were] doing really cool work that I felt wasn’t being platformed. Or articles talking about how inaccessible they always can be, or what originates from BIPOC communities. I was posting a lot of, I guess you could say, intersectional content before that became a term, because I started my page in 2017. For the past five years, it went from a podcast, to a blog, to just different types of content, seeing what stuck. Towards 2019-2020, I started making videos and [becoming] more involved in case study concepts. My team and I would do research and partnerships with an organization or a campaign with different nonprofits trying to highlight the issues that they were tackling. Then, I basically made content to highlight the issue that they’re facing, whether it was the Flint water crisis, or talking about plastic pollution in rural communities, or talking about the connections between incarceration and climate disasters. I would say I just kept experimenting and putting a lot of content out there. I just felt it is out there in academia but is not out there on social media. I feel that was a big part of my work, it’s not [that] these concepts were anything new. It’s just [that] they weren’t being showcased in a way that was digestible or accessible to the public, to educate people on what was going on. That’s pretty much how my platform has evolved over time, and I think it’s been a lot of experimentation. And I would say in terms of growing that community, there was also a lot of experimentation. Some things stuck, some things went viral, and some things didn’t get any attention—and there are times when my account was shadow-banned and I wasn’t getting any engagement for weeks. And that continues to happen. The algorithm continues to be crazy for creators but I would say that it’s been an evolution. I think where things are at now is, I have a more quote on quote “established” brand or platform. Which obviously comes with its own set of bullshit, and good things, but also a lot of bullshit, to be honest with you. The haters, the criticism, the difficulty of maintaining it all. I would say the other piece of it is obviously the Green Jobs Board which is, now, less than a year old. Due to the strong community from Browngirl Green, that translated into creating this next community that is a whole other platform. Which kind of feels like starting from scratch all over again in a way which is kind of fun. That’s why I’ve really enjoyed it. But I would say that’s kind of been the evolution of the platform. Now I feel there’s so many younger people that have so much access, including yourself, to this information. Especially on the Internet that just didn’t exist even five years ago. It’s cool to see how overall the ecosystems evolved and how I get to be a part of that.
What are your struggles?
I would say the biggest thing is to really be an independent media platform. Like, sure, some people are able to do it as a side thing. I was doing it like that for a long time, but now it’s my full-time job. It’s a whole other thing because it’s people I don’t know expecting a lot out of me. Which is funny because this wasn’t even my full-time job. Then that creates its own sets of instability sometimes where you’re at the whims of the Internet. Even though part of that is a genuine community, and I know who’s genuinely in the community with me because they’ve been with me since the beginning. There are some people that just come in that are there to consume content which is fine: you don’t know anything, you’re about to make all these judgments about me just based on one post, shit on me, and then dip. That’s the nature, it’s the beauty, and the evilness of the Internet, and that’s the difficulty of having my work on a medium like social media.
There have been so many times when I’ve posted what I would consider more radical work or highlighting very political topics, and it just gets suppressed, or [throughout] my entire account no one’s engaging in my stuff. I’ll post something that’s an advertisement or some stupid sponsored content. I need to do that to pay my bills and survive, and then all of a sudden it’s this, “That’s the only content I’m seeing from you! You’re a sellout, you’re terrible!” It’s crazy because people don’t even understand the journey that you have to go on as an independent media creator to even be able to put out years and years of free education. It’s fine, I’m happy that I did that for a long time, doing it for free and putting out so many resources all the time, for hours and hours. I needed to do that in order to create what I have now, but at the same time it’s funny because now that I have created what I have now, people already expect me to be at this caliber. When I’m still just building the plane while flying it.
Now I’m at a baseline where I’m independently funding my content. I’m not funded by any foundations, academic institutions, no one, because when I tried to get funding from those places, I was rejected, was laughed at, and was looked at like my work didn’t have value. No one took that seriously. So then it’s like, well, I want to do this in the world, how am I going to fund my work, how am I gonna survive? I don’t want to work for one of these extractive nonprofits because I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to work directly for a corporation that I didn’t believe in. Then, if I want to operate and do my own thing, what does that look like? And it’s getting clients, and being able to build a whole team, and all these things that all require so many resources. Whereas I have friends that are also content creators that come from intergenerational wealth, or came from access, who are able to take their time and get funding for a nice camera and team and editors. Those people blow up and it’s great but it’s for those of us that don’t have any of that, we don’t have a road map and we had to figure it out ourselves. It’s just one of those frustrating things where I’m building a road map for I guess what social impact content creation can look like because there are not necessarily exact models of that. There are models of that in activism of course, and models of that with storytellers and journalists of the past. Those are the people who I look up to, when trying to learn to do ethical storytelling, how can I make sure that my platform is giving back? How can I make sure that I’m building up those using the platform to build intentional relationships with the organizations and communities that I want to serve and support, while also knowing I don’t need to be a martyr and sacrifice myself at the same time? That’s a hard balance, and I would say that being in this niche of intersectional environmental content on social media, I know pretty much all the people doing that right now around the world in different countries. We know each other because it’s such a small group of people, and so I would say that we’re sharing those things with each other. I can tell you we have conversations, we’re all [discussing] what are we doing, we’re figuring it out. We’re gonna get it wrong sometimes, and we’re gonna get it right sometimes. I think it’s interesting, because in this world of social media, everyone just wants to be this completed product. Everyone feels you are on a pedestal, this is your brand, this is your aesthetic, this is what we keep expecting from you, and that’s kind of how the algorithm works. This is the nature of the TikTok world: how it works is you go back to the “corn kid” because you always associate them with the corn. With climate or intersectional content, you’re always gonna expect that from that person. It’s interesting because this specific type of work is so complex and requires so many sectors and knowledge bases, it’s hard to just stay within a niche. Unfortunately, that’s the limitation when it comes to social media: you can’t dive that much into the nuance as much as you’d want to. You can create the conversation which is great, but you’re limited compared to having in person conversations, reading academic reports, or attending seminars and conferences. That is the limit of the work that I do. And it frustrates me all the time. But at the same time, I view it as a gateway that can serve something bigger. When I think about it that way, it’s okay. And it’s part of the ecosystem that we’re all building as part of a movement. It’s not just all on me. Even though social media makes it portrayed that way for some people like Greta’s little world, that’s just not accurate.
Do you have staff working with you? Do you have interns? Is it just you? How do you pay people?
So when I was first starting out and I had no resources, I was having people volunteer with me, and I was having people who interned for me just because they were passionate about it. Overtime and then as time went on, it didn’t really feel right not to be paying people – but I had to do what I had to do when I was first starting out. But as time went on I was like, “no, I need to pay people, I want to pay people.” Starting probably at the end of 2019, there were some people that I was able to pay and support. And now I fully pay for people to work with me. Right now it’s mostly all for the green jobs board and not for Browngirl Green, and so actually I need to find a contact for Browngirl Green. That’s actually my next thing I’m in search of for next year, but that’s a next year thing. The thing is, a lot of these organizations that exist do volunteer work, especially in the creative space. They do free stuff for that, volunteer work, serving a community, supporting. But when it comes to actually putting your expertise into something that you would otherwise charge for.
What inspires you? What kind of information makes you think, “I gotta get up and do something,” and then what have you found that works with your own content that makes other people really feel, “That’s horrifying” or, “That’s so cool” or, “Let me go see what I can do?”
I would say that trying to plug organizations that do really incredible work, I think, getting people to know about their work. I think a lot of the climate space can be so insular and deep that we forget that there’s this whole bigger society that cares but does not have the language. So, I’m always thinking about how to create more awareness around who’s doing really good work and coming up with solutions that already exist, instead of people trying to come up with, reinventing, the wheel themselves. That’s one piece of it. I’ve always included a good CTA whether that’s a petition or learning more about an organization, getting involved, there’s been that. I’ve also used my platform to host in person meetups, whether before a thing like a climate march, or meeting in person just as a social space. Something that friends of mine have been thinking about is, how can people come to climate salons like discussion spaces where people can share either a book or a discussion? I think the way that I’m viewing proactive media now is how this content influences the material situations in the real world. The only way that you can tell that, because people always ask me how you measure the impact of your work[…] in my opinion, is because it takes time.
The way I view it is, a lot of people don’t even have the baseline and know the relationship they should be building, the information they should be experiencing. Because a lot of this has just been so gatekept by climate scientists. So [making] that accessible requires building relationships to build the bridge or the pathways to get people from point A to point B. I think I finally have kind of gotten there, but it took five years and we don’t have another–– we don’t have five years, right? But you also can’t just be okay doing all of these things, and then it’s sporadic, and then you can also destroy relationships that way because it’s too quick. This is all an Adrian Marie Brown emergent strategy. It’s a big part of things to feel emergent, is that you have to move at the speed of trust—I think is what she says in her book, and I think that’s a big part of it. I know that’s not a great answer to your question. A big reason why we decided we wanted to create Green Jobs is because that’s one tangible thing that we can really put out in the world that will change material circumstances and give people employment, making that easier, helping people feel supported in a transition into this world. That is probably the biggest transitional impact in my world of transitioning media into real-life things. And now there are organizations going to be hosting jobs, and all of it’s about addressing equity gaps and climate work.
Green Jobs is the result of me feeling really frustrated by keeping and putting out information and feeling it was sticking with people, yet still wondering: is this actually doing anything? I’m sure it has–– I think in general with the process of shifting collective consciousness, just putting out enough messages on what you care about is going to penetrate the right people. But at the same time, I have gotten burnt out many times over the years. When you get frustrated–– when you’re like “I want to see this result in this,” but if you’re just one person and you’re just one media outlet and you’re trying to be a part of this bigger ecosystem, it’s hard. Again, that’s the issue with social media, it’s people just trying to be all those things, and that’s not actually how it works. Actually, all of these things, especially when it comes to climate resilience and policy, require so many people that don’t even use social media. But how do we get this information in the public? Both groups are trying to figure it out, and that’s the work I really find interesting right there.
Something else I explored and started doing with Harvard this year is talking with academic researchers who actually help and produce content with the incentive that we are giving PR exposure for their academic reports, because they want people to read their reports. That is something we began exploring. We started experimenting with what it would look like to take a report from a public health program and have them curate the research. And we are building out the scripts and creating the content. I think that’s very interesting, the synergistic collaboration with researchers, with organizers, the ways these people have access to media tools and create this in a collaborative way. This past summer I participated in this thing called Harvard C-Change. And it was a climate summit that brought high schoolers to Harvard to talk about science and climate communications, and basically, the whole thing was trying to teach these high schoolers how they could also think about using academia to create content to bring back to their own schools. They were designing a website with all these things which was really interesting. They were like “Let’s build out a directory of climate information and maybe make some videos and podcasts ourselves,” and then their final project was making a website where they put it all together. I talked to other Harvard graduate students, and that was earlier in the summer. This both happened over the summer in two different situations. We were teaching them about the benefits of using social media to get their research out as environmental health scientists, what opportunities there were for collaboration and things like that. I did a case study with a Harvard public health grad student who was from Flint, MI, and her research was all about neurotoxins resulting from the lead poisoning that was happening. She was [like], “Yeah I really want to get this out to the public, but this presentation, it’s really confusing.” So we had to sit down for two hours. I was basically doing this process with her where we broke down her research to turn it into a test flight carousel for Instagram. It was very challenging, it’s very hard. All my case study content, which I really want to make a separate Instagram account for because we haven’t done those in a long time, requires hours of research. It’s literally just condensing it down into these 10 slides or contact information and then calls to action at the end for people to get more involved. Basically, some academics are interested in that model, and so I want to bring that back this upcoming year with the content idea of trying to get more researchers involved again to do that exchange. That way I could make denser content that doesn’t feel like content that you’re just, “Oh simple, simple things.” It’s like, let’s go a little bit deeper, but then also try to make it digestible. That requires a lot of research and a lot of conversation.
Who are your two biggest parts of your system? Like, other organizations that you just really like or have been helpful and relate to your organization?
I would definitely say the community I built with intersectional environmentalists when it first launched. I think all the folks that were part of the original council that existed for a year are still really good friends of mine, and we’re all doing very similar work. I’d say that ecosystem has definitely been really supportive. I would also say the group that’s a part of the outdoors oath, they’re also a coalition of folks who are trying to bridge the equity gap in the outdoors up. So they’ve partnered with a lot of different organizations and companies to address the outdoor equity gap and those people I met through a bunch of different networks a couple of years ago, all focused on bringing more people of color where, we say, people in the global majority into nature and outdoor spaces. So I would say those two groups have definitely been a really solid support network for me.
Is there anything you’re excited for in your organization or anything coming up?
So the Green Jobs world is, you know, we just got started and there are going to be so many more events and things. And we don’t even exactly know what that’s gonna look like yet because we didn’t expect things to blow up as big as they have in this way. So we’re kind of figuring that out right now–– getting reoriented–– but we’re planning on community events and we’re going to be launching the official first iteration of the platform, because right now it all just exists on the Browngirl Green [platform]. It doesn’t even have its own website yet so we’re going to be launching it as its own website which will hopefully be a lot more user-friendly. So I would say building it will be huge and then creating more of this collaborative content–– continuing to push social impact campaigns–– that’s all going to be a big part of Browngirl Green as well.
Any last advice, ideas, questions, or remarks?
I would say that if you heard anything that I just spewed from the past hour and you are someone that maybe wants to start your own thing, and you feel in your bones that maybe you don’t want to just join something. You want to be a part of a bigger movement, but you kind of want to guide your own path. There are so many more resources and support that exist for you than ever before. I think it’s just a matter of tapping into your network and finding mentors who believe in you. That could be your neighbor, that could be your friend, that could be a teacher. And once you find them, talk about your big dreams and visions for what you want to see in the world. Make it a practice to talk about that and not being scared to talk about that, especially with people who maybe have “more experience” can really help build your own confidence that you have your own path to forage. Especially for myself as someone who maybe has done this work for a while, there need to be more people like me doing this work, and I think that we need to keep building out those ecosystems and so it doesn’t matter how old you are, it matters about the truth that you step into and when you need to step into it. Today, that’s not something you need to wait for. You don’t need to wait for permission from some older person, from your parents, from your future boss, or from a professor, you don’t need permission. I’m giving you permission if you need that, but beyond that point you don’t need to ask anyone’s permission for liking impact in this world. We need just more fearlessness. This is the time to take risks and make mistakes and take on things because we have our health. And that’s something that you don’t realize is so valuable: you have time. You don’t realize how valuable that is, so take advantage of all of it. Make sure to have fun and find balance, make sure that you have something that you hold onto outside of it all, or else you will lose yourself in it.
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