Heidi Affi: Channeling Passions, Art, and Hope into the Environmental Justice Movement

The environmental justice movement in Minnesota needs more wickedly bold, unforgivingly honest, and open-minded people; cue in Heidi Affi (she/her/hers).

On a brisk and sunny day, Affi and I sat in Dunn Brothers surrounded by the strong aroma of roasting beans and constant bustle of cafe-goers to discuss Affi’s journey within the environmental justice movement. Racial justice, food insecurity and indigenous peoples’ rights are Affi’s passions, but her drive to be an environmental justice activist stems from a fundamental moral belief that complacency and passivity are unacceptable. Her candid responses and willingness to invite me in to explore her struggles with the movement provoked me to think about the gap between social justice theory and the reality of what truly happens on the ground.

Affi’s academic journey took a roundabout approach before she found herself pursuing environmental justice. Affi graduated from Macalester as a double major in Religious Studies and Political Science with a minor in Environmental Studies. Through her time at Macalester, Affi became acutely aware of the constant increase in injustices throughout the Twin Cities. By the end of her Macalester career, her studies mainly focused on environmental justice and modern US policies and politics.

During her college years, Affi capitalized on Macalester’s unique location and allowed herself to get involved off-campus and begin specializing her career path before entering the professional post-graduate world. Affi had the opportunity to work with several non-profits in the Twin Cities and intern with the Pollution Control Agency. The path was winding and long. Affi’s first experience working with nonprofits in the Twin Cities was with Food and Water Watch. From February 2014 to May 2014, Affi worked as a Campaign Intern; in this role, her responsibilities included petitioning and phone banking in the St. Paul community in the fight against the use of antibiotics in livestock. After her four months working with Food and Water Watch, Affi was an Elementary School Intern for the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center. Soon after, she found herself working with the non-profit Clean Water Action. During her time with Clean Water Action, she was a Legislative Program Intern and Field Canvasser. Through this position she fostered her communication and fundraising skills through the community engagement portion her job entailed. Then from September 2015 to December 2015, Affi was a research intern for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA). Her major task for PCA included researching and drafting the preliminary Clean Water Act 404 State Assumption Study. During her senior year, Heidi worked at the Science Museum of Minnesota in the Kitty Andersen Youth Science Center, providing support to high schoolers in an STEM Justice focused after school program.

After graduating from Macalester, Affi continued to develop her professional skills through community engagement and outreach positions. For nine months, Affi worked for Honor the Earth, a nonprofit aimed at raising awareness and financial support for Indigenous environmental justice[1], as a community organizer. Her responsibilities included campaigning and protesting against pipeline construction in Minnesota’s Great North, planning community building events, and advocating for the recognition of treaty rights and tribal sovereignty in Minnesota’s state government.

While she gained consequential skills and worked with some fantastic people throughout all her volunteer positions and internships, there was a significant obstacle Affi did not expect to encounter: Affi became a victim and observer of the nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC). The NPIC is a system of relationships between the State (or local and federal governments), the owning classes, foundations, and non-profit/NGO social service social justice organizations that results in the surveillance, control, derailment, and everyday management of political movements.[2] With these partnerships, the state manipulates nonprofits to pursue and spend their energy on actions that ultimately end up proliferating injustices even further. For example, state power structures often co-opt nonprofits and activists’ energies away from mass-based organizing because these strategies would in reality create legitimate change. Another prominent and common issue within the NPIC is that corporations mask their exploitative and colonial practices by using nonprofits or grants in their “philanthropic” work. Consequently, social movements are encouraged to follow capitalist structures rather than challenge them. All the while, employees and interns working at these organizations are made to believe that they can only make a significant difference within the field only through expending all their energy in nonprofits, often creating overexertion and exhaustion. This is quite problematic not only because it further perpetuates the harms of the NPIC, but is also a recipe for high rates of burnout; Affi shares that her energy and efforts were exploited from within the organizations she worked for.
Nonprofits are not as pure as they are romanticized to be. Affi describes these pre-disposed idealistic assumptions about working with non-profits as one of the factors that pushed her towards burnout. Her acute sense of awareness of NPIC problems combined with the ever-growing sense of urgency to push for change caused the pressure to accumulate into a monstrous personal obstacle. “How do we get urgency out to the community but maintain our sense of wellness?” asked Affi. The demand for better work standards, self-care and reflection are under-appreciated and underlying facets of the world of environmental justice. Affi discovered these aspects through her journey to find her place in the movement, where she believed she could make the greatest change without compromising her morals.

Another frustration Affi faced in the nonprofit system was a lack of recognition for serious social justice issues within the organizations. Affi sees this issue largely as a product of environmental justice being a blanket term often encompassing non justice related work in combination with an overall lack of understanding of the intersectionality between different social injustices. Affi found that within one organization in particular, there was a narrow vision of what issues the non-profit should and should not consider to tackle. “The beautiful thing about environmental justice for me is that it really puts in perspective how everyone is connected.” It was a shock that nonprofits did not seek a vision of complete equity but rather, strides in their personal agendas. That organization in particular was rife with sexual transgressions and racism amongst and towards employees. As Affi saw it, the passivity towards these problems violated not only the overall goal of environmental justice but also her personal morals. The non-profit organizations that Affi worked for often ignored issues outside their “domain of interest,” which ultimately was a manifested version of racist passivity and gender violence through institutional practices. Affi saw these harmful flaws within the system and decided that she did not want to be a part of an organization that pursued this model. “The beautiful thing about environmental justice for me is that it really puts in perspective how everyone is connected,” said Affi. The scope of importance and chosen fights should not be limited but rather embraced and encompassed in their entirety. But with this multitude of intersectionalities between social, economic, cultural, racial, and political spheres, the problem that arises is: Where do we start?

This is a question Affi finds herself constantly pondering. A question that seems simple, but when we dive deeper into its hidden implications, the answer becomes incredibly complicated. Then to make matters more difficult, Affi expressed the difficulty in finding her place in the movement and what she could do best to contribute. Affi found herself trapped in an environmental justice inception. The movement as a whole is trying to fight for justice, recognition, and change for marginalized communities yet, as an active participant inside, Affi found herself fighting for validity and recognition of pertinent issues to be included.

Affi also recognizes that many mechanisms of environmental injustice stem from our Western dominant ways of thinking, which are  being exported around the world at an exponential rate. There is an ugly and damaging drive that manifests itself into an attitude of claiming superiority over the earth, resources, labor, so called ‘races’, law and order, and religion. We are all engulfed in this system and as a consequence, it consumes all of us. “I have felt very small and overwhelmed by facing the power and embedded strength of this worldview. This country was founded on that field of thought,” expressed Affi. The repercussions of this particular field of thought is dangerous, harmful and parasitic.

This harm is amplified at an even larger scale due to the intense corporate control in Minnesota. Within the Twin Cities, there is a corporate presence of companies such as 3M and Target which act within the non-profit complex as large stakeholders. With these corporate ties, the motivation and the fight for justice becomes blurred. From Affi’s experience, she expressed that there appears to be a strong symbiotic relationship between the corporations in Minnesota and the non-profit organization system. To fight corporate power and their grasp on the environmental justice movement is an enormous undertaking. Additionally, many of these environmental justice organizations, in addition to being up against very powerful social structures, are also very implicated in white supremacy, colonization, and the nonprofit industrial complex. The lines of what is the right work and what is the wrong work become even more blurred and we are once again faced with the question: Where do we start?

A good place to start with this question is through self-reflection. Some advice Affi gave me during our interview was that no one individual is going to fix all the injustices completely and to be in this line of work, one needs to make sure they evaluate what they can do realistically to optimize the change they can create. One needs to make sure they evaluate what they can do realistically to optimize the change they can create. The projects she is now pursuing are examples of her own advice. For Affi’s professional career, she is working with the Kitty Andersen Youth Science Center (KAYSC) in the Science Museum of Minnesota as a crew member. KAYSC is an out of school program that provides programing for underserved youth with the goals of building leadership skills, career readiness, and fostering confidence and appreciation of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM)[3]. As a crew member, Affi has had the opportunity to work with about 70 high schoolers consistently and directly manage a smaller subset group of 11. While Affi helps and manages the group, the high schoolers are the ones who spearhead projects that have a larger emphasis on environmental racism and social justice. The types of projects they pursue range from making videos and zines – noncommercial publications devoted to specialized and often unconventional subject matter[4]– about food insecurity, segregation, and pollution in the Twin Cities.

Personally, Affi is undertaking a project where she will create art narrating and explaining her Syrian, Arab-American identity. This personal endeavor will depict the relationship between Syrians and their environments as they exist in a war, as refugees, and/or as settlers in a new land. It will also depict the civil war and other conflicts as results of the same worldview that feed the fossil fuel industry, globalization, and the domination of race and religion. For the past 60 years, the Middle East has experienced severe environmental injustices such as being dominated by white superpowers, the ever-growing presence of the fossil fuel industry, and land exploitation. Affi hopes that with her project, she can bring to light this topic to the Twin Cities.

Affi’s persistence, passion and veracity are unquenchable. While her journey through environmental justice has been a rough road, she still has retained a pocket of optimism for the future. “There are some really smart youth out there and the work that they are doing inspires me too,” said Affi. As tensions in the Twin Cities continually increase, the need to fight the good fight becomes even more demanding. A couple of issues Affi has her eyes on for the future of Minnesota are gentrification, elimination of food deserts, disrupting the fossil fuel industry and pushing for the establishment of renewable initiatives. The trials and tribulations through the NPIC in the Twin Cities are indicators of problems larger than any one person and the fact that Affi has come out of the system with the urge to continue to fight for what she believes in, is admirable beyond words. Our national stage is ready for social justice warriors like Heidi Affi.

References

[1] 23, 2018 February, et al. “Honor The Earth.” Honor The Earth, www.honorearth.org/.

[2] “What’s the Non-Profit Industrial Complex and Why Should I Care?” Sprout Distro, www.sproutdistro.com/catalog/zines/organizing/whats-non-profit-industrial-complex-care/.

[3] “High School Programs.” Science Museum of Minnesota, www.smm.org/kaysc/high-school.

[4] “Zine.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/zine.