Toni LaBarbara

Bio

My neighborhood in South Brooklyn will be under water by the end of this century. With imminent flooding, more intense superstorms, and rising sea levels, neighborhoods like Gravesend, Coney Island, and Sheapshead Bay are threaten with unignorable horrors. Climate resilience is urgent; we need project planners and funding.

In 2021, I joined a movement of 2000 working class adults attempting to organize a labor strike. We built ten demands and called ourself Labor Movement X in protest of the inhuman living conditions facing working class American neighborhoods. My job was to research our environmental demands, proposing legislative improvements and regulation governing the US's approach to climate change. I learned that mobilize everyday people to enact systemic change was difficult.

We need to start small, our proposals, precise.

A few years after organizing some failed climate protests at school, a group of four girls--whom knew to be treehuggers like me---asked me to join their campaign, Fossil Free Villanova.

We strategized increasing transparency on our university's sustainable investing frameworks, but most importantly, we ran for the divestment of Villanova University's $48 million in fossil fuels. Organizers from Fossil Free Penn and Philly-local climate groups trained to campus. Fomenting student support while garnering public view of Villanova's climate investment frameworks began a long project to elicit the adminstration's committment to Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) principles with the endowment.

Speaking at Villanova's AntiPoverty symposium at the grassroots rose climate change to the front of administration discussions with the Office of Financial Affairs. After only 6 months, Villanova announced the endowment was free of direct investments in the fossil fuel industry. We even got them to switch the campus electricity source 95% to renewable energy. (Mostly hydro and wind for the nerds reading this).

We deserve to love our common home. I hope we can make the world safer place, because maybe, if we uproot some of the corruption preventing our neighborhoods from healing, there will be less suffrage.

After college I went into economics research and once a week I teach a class at Villanova. Our classroom pedogogy is based on my belief that the human brains learn best through languages. The 16 of us sit down, learn some Python, and use data analtyics to discuss the ethics of climate change, artificial intelligence, incarceration, and homelessness.

If you're invested in my thoughts head over to The Social Mobility Journal where we share important stories from everyday people. It's nonprofit, and the publication is partnered with East Harlem's CB 11 to uplift community voices with writing workshops.

It's through community advocacy that we can rebuild the nature we've destroyed and heal the wounds of economic oppression.