Why SOP

The environmental movement has long ignored, undervalued, and discriminated against non-white and/or poorer people and communities.

How We Create Change

In 2014, we started creating anti-oppression trainings to:

Improve the experience of underrepresented students and community organizers in the sustainability movement.
Achieve environmental and social justice through an intersectional lens (how the overlap of race, gender, sexuality, and class contributes to systemic oppression). Workshops include Queer Liberation, Politics of Veganism, Decolonization, De-carbonization, Youth in Climate Justice, and Storytelling.

Here’s what we’ve done to reduce our oppressive practices:

Featured projects, theories, and voices from people of color, people that are LGBTQIA, socio-economically disadvantaged, and disabled at our Convergences. We emphasized diversity in keynotes and workshops. We made our leadership team more inclusive.
Re-evaluated our community norms, recruitment practices, and hiring methods to provide leadership development tools and positions to marginalized people.
Offered anti-oppression trainings to our students leaders, staff, and board of advisors at leadership retreats. These trainings and resources are also available to campuses and communities.
Paid a diverse group of student and young professional organizers to develop new training tools and workshops.
Increased our documentation of member identities to understand areas for improvement.