Sam Grant: Creating Pathways Towards Justice

I sent Sam an email on a Monday and not an hour later we had a meeting set up for the following morning at 11 am. My professor had mentioned that he can often be found in the Macalester library, and sure enough we met in a group study room on the 3rd floor. I knocked lightly on the door when I arrived, before I pushed the door open. It appeared that Sam had been in the middle of working on something, and although I didn’t get a chance to ask what, I might be able to guess based on the conversations we had about his passions and his life work.

When we met, Sam Grant was leading the Environmental Sustainability program at Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs (HECUA). However, he recently shifted to become the new Executive Director at MN350, which is organizing in Minnesota and the midwest to strongly intersect racial justice and climate justice movement building.

Sam’s work at HECUA seemed like a full-time job in and of itself, but in reality, it only scratched the surface of the work he does. In addition to HECUA (then) and MN350 now, Sam is also faculty at the Metropolitan State University where he teaches a foundational course in community organizing and community economic development. He is also a founding member of the Environmental Justice Coordinating Council (EJCC), which brings together community organizations and activists in North Minneapolis. And, Sam leads initiatives on the African continent to build ecovillages centered around schools that teach about environmental justice. While it may seem like Sam has a lot of different or separate areas of focus, his philosophy of intersectionality ties all of these projects together.

When I asked him about how he got into this work Sam explained that it was during his Junior year at Mac, as an environmental studies major, when he attended a protest on campus around asking Macalester to divest its resources from South Africa, that he began to think more deeply about the intersections within environmentalism and the lack of curriculum that highlighted those intersections. So, all of the work that he does stems from this realization and his passion for promoting common liberation on the planet by way of intersectional solutions.

The intersections of environmental, economic, and cultural justice that frame Sam’s lifework is clearly present in his work with the communities in North and Northeast Minneapolis. In addition to the work that Sam does with the Environmental Justice Coordinating Committee (EJCC), he also is trying to work with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) and Clean Air Minnesota (CAM) to develop a partnership with three high schools in this community that equips each of the schools with air quality monitors and works with the science teachers to train the students in in using them so that the students are the ones who publish the air quality data with the MPCA. This partnership, Sam details, not only builds consciousness and capacity within the students with regards to environmentalism and environmental justice, but it is also building career pathways for these youth to already have this training and hands-on experience.

This theme of self-determination, or as Sam describes it, “not waiting for you to tell us what you’re willing to do…not acting like dependent people anymore”, is not only present in his work in Minneapolis, but also in the ecovillage building he does on the African continent. This project was born after a good friend of Sam’s, Hindolo Pokawa, came into his office to vent about his frustrations with being an African man in the global north, with a graduate education, and being forced to drive a taxi cab to support his family. Sam, pained from the sight of someone he considers a brother breaking down in trauma, responded by pulling a calendar off of his wall, setting it on the table and telling his friend to “pick the day you’re going to turn in your taxi cab, so we can define and work on your dream for the planet and people. They settled on a date 30 days out, did a training in permaculture and agroecology, and began dialoguing with the leaders in Pokawa’s Sierra Leone village on what this project would entail. Despite the role that Sam and Hindolo played in the creation of the ecovillage, this project was very much collaborative with those that would be most affected. On the first day that Sam arrived at the village with five students from his HECUA program, he and 110 people from the village sat in dialogue all afternoon making plans and outlining what their specific needs were and what this ecovillage would look like.

Much of Sam’s philosophy of environmental justice and addressing climate change stem from those who are most affected, who make up the majority of the earth’s population to take charge of resolving this problem. The way to do this, he says is through expanding our definitions of environmental justice, decolonizing our minds, and healing our consciousness and bodies in relationship with one another. Sam is not worried so much with fighting the system (like the conversation around climate change has often focused) but instead on thinking up ways in which we can nourish the critical and creative imagination of people in communities.

This work is taxing, and painful, but Sam explains that what is vital in this work is to practice really good self-care. This work is taxing, and painful, but Sam explains that what is vital in this work is to practice really good self-care. It’s hard to imagine that someone as accomplished as Sam struggles with this seemingly simple practice, but the reality is that everyone struggles with it. Sam talks about how in some of the major campaigns, members of the community have trouble staying in healthy relation with each other. Self-care is not only about relaxing or ‘treating yourself’ but also about doing some of that more difficult work and continuing to bring water (support for active healing-in-relation) to it so that everything can continue to move forward.

And the thing that is most motivating for Sam, is to see how the work that is being done is actually working. He describes how since he started this work in 1983, he has seen a tremendous increase in the support and consciousness around environmental justice. Even the ecovillage building in Africa has begun to spread across the continent, as people are seeing the work getting done and being inspired to do the same things in their communities.

And this work is so inspiring. Sam talks about the giants of heteropatriarchy, colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy as being the systems that we are ultimately fighting. His work is not narrowly focused solely on climate change, or strictly environmental justice issues, but instead Sam imagines regularly in his work what a future without the dominance of these systems would look like. What a future in which we have a healthy relationship with the earth and its people would look like. And this is integral to Sam’s definition of environmental justice, as a discipline that calls on us to care about and to rethink our relationship with the earth and other earthlings.

What this looks like, for Sam, is people realizing that there are fights on the local basis, like those he works on in North Minneapolis with the Environmental Justice Coordinating Committee. Working in Africa, and in BIPOC communities across the U.S. reinforces his understanding that everyone has gifts to bring to movement building, and it is a joy to amplify and connect these gifts. But also realizing that there are national fights that unite us, bring us together in our common struggle for liberation from the systems, which have not honored us or our livelihoods and consistently advanced Anti-Black, Anti-indigenous, Anti womyn ecological violence. This nationally can look like the fact that 50% of humanity collectively had as much income as the richest eight people on earth, and that this divide is getting wider and wider as time goes on. Working in Africa, and in BIPOC communities across the U.S. reinforces his understanding that everyone has gifts to bring to movement building, and it is a joy to amplify and connect these gifts. This fight for environmental justice is not one that can be unique to any one place. It must be a global movement that is cognizant of the many intersections between all of our forms of oppression and violence.