Melinda Kramer.
Photo: Caitlin Sislin.
With what environmental organization are you affiliated?
I am cofounder and codirector of Women’s Global Green Action Network, an international organization that unites and empowers grassroots women advocates, entrepreneurs, and community leaders around the world who are working in the areas of environmental, economic, and social justice.
How does your organization relate to the environment?
Both in rural and urban settings, women’s everyday contributions as mothers, food producers, and managers of essential natural resources place them in an indispensable position with respect to their communities and their environment. Too often, they are also the first to be affected when the environment is mismanaged. WGGAN works to equip women around the world with the communication tools, training opportunities, information sharing, and services required to secure a foothold in environmental and social policy-making — especially at the local level, where resources are most limited.
What are you working on at the moment?
We’re quite excited about WGGAN’s first regional training, which is being hosted by our Southeast Asian WGGAN coordinator in Palawan, Philippines. This will introduce grassroots women to the BioSand Water Filter, an inexpensive slow sand water filter built out of local resources, which helps women reclaim water security at the household level. This will be the first in a series of trainings that WGGAN regional coordinators will design and host over the next year.
What long and winding road led you to your current position?
My vision for WGGAN was inspired by multiple encounters over the years with women activists who were mobilizing their communities toward environmentally sustainable solutions — often in the face of incredible odds. In my work with citizen-based environmental NGOs — whether in East Africa, China, the Russian Far East, rural Missouri, or here in California — I witnessed the tremendous leadership of women who were launching campaigns, lobbying government officials, and shifting mind-sets.
At the same time, I also saw many of my sister activists struggling to access needed resources, information, and networking opportunities that would empower them to be even more effective.
I began to realize that a groundswell of energy would be available to these dedicated and resolute women activists if they had a “space” to build a powerbase, share best practices, and model the solutions on the global stage.
What’s been the best moment in your professional life?
Kramer, right, with women from around the world.
Photo: Caitlin Sislin.
The best moment was undoubtedly this March in Mexico City, when I looked around a circle of 30 grassroots women environmental leaders who had traveled from communities around the world to take part in WGGAN’s first global strategy meeting. This was an opportunity for our women, many of whom had never before left their regions, to multiply their effectiveness, build strategic alliances across borders, and make their voices heard. We stood looking at each other in amazement and silence until one woman said, “I just traveled three days to get here, and I feel like I just got home.”
Tell us about the women you work with.
The women are the activists, mothers, entrepreneurs, educators, and stewards who have taken a firm stand for the health of our communities and our planets. Devorah Brous founded the first environmental-justice organization for the disenfranchised Bedouin community in Israel. Kaisha Atakhanova led a campaign to prevent nuclear waste from being commercially imported into Kazakhstan. Sizani Ngubane founded the Rural Women’s Movement in South Africa, which mobilized over 500 women’s groups to participate actively in sustainable agriculture, local governance, and land-rights issues. Pati Ruiz Corzo spearheaded the establishment of a million-acre community-managed Biosphere Reserve in Mexico’s Sierra Gorda. These women are shaking things up.
Who is your environmental hero?
My environmental hero is Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai of Kenya. Maathai started out by planting a small tree nursery in her backyard. Before she knew it, her leadership had sparked the Green Belt Movement, which has now been responsible for the planting of over 30 million trees across Africa and the education of thousands on environmentally sound alternatives. When Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize, she illustrated the vital linkages between what she calls the “three pillars of development”: environmental sustainability, democratic governance, and human rights.
What’s your favorite movie?
Read any good books lately?
I just read Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan.
What’s your favorite meal?
Anything created by the hands of my confidants and colleagues at Back to Earth catering, an inspiring organic catering business in Berkeley, Calif.
Environmental advocacy work can be draining. What do you do to ease the stress?
A few years ago, I started wearing two different colored socks to work. If I’m feeling stressed, I can look down at my feet and remember not to take myself too seriously.
What’s your favorite place or ecosystem?
Deep in Yaeda Valley, Tanzania, where you can still hear the earth whisper things and where you can take a nap in the soft folds of baobab trees.
If you could have every InterActivist reader do one thing, what would it be?
Plant something. As Wangari Maathai says, “When you plant a tree and you see it grow, something happens to you. You want to protect it, and you value it.”
Melinda Kramer, Women’s Global Green Action Network.
Woman on Top
What can/should we do to get more women at the helm of environmental decision-making? — Kirstin Henninger, Palampur, India
In villages and cities around the world, grassroots women are protecting their communities, stewarding their forests, rivers, and land, and transforming their local economies. The problem is many women leaders are isolated and cut off from each other’s efforts. There are tens of thousands of grassroots women leaders who are a part of a movement they cannot even see.
Women’s Global Green Action Network is building the mechanisms for women to locate each other, build their own alliances, and comprehend the powerful movement they are standing within. Through its regional hubs, WGGAN is working to identify and reach the burgeoning numbers of women “under the radar” who are not yet networked globally with other women advocates. We are empowering a new wave of leaders to harness the resources, information, and training they need to engage more readily in policy arenas where their important perspectives are often missing.
I have no doubt that with expanded access to communication tools, increased decision-making in resource flows, and a much greater stake in the natural capital of their communities, these women can begin enacting a global shift toward environmental sustainability and social renewal.
What lessons can environmental activists in the U.S. learn from grassroots women leaders in the global south? — Jacob Harold, San Francisco, Calif.
The grassroots women leaders I have worked with model a powerful style of leadership — one that is collaborative, participatory, and relationship-based. They are often contending with limited resources and significant social, economic, and political barriers, and therefore draw their strength from working in coalition, pooling resources and building broad alliances. Their messages resonate because they draw upon personal accounts; their campaigns persuade because they highlight the inextricable linkages between our environment and the health and equity of our communities; and their strategies last because they are designed to uphold generations to come. If provided the space, these women leaders can reign in a new wave of leadership that is grounded in connection, community, commitment, and sustainability.
Can you tell us all about the work you did prior to WGGAN? How did that work inspire you to form WGGAN? — Rory Cox, San Francisco, Calif.
Prior to founding WGGAN, I was the program head for Pacific Environment‘s China and marine programs, where I worked alongside everyday citizens who have committed their lives to working on the front lines of the world’s environmental challenges. These local activists — many of whom were women — pursued sustainable local economies, indigenous rights, environmental justice, and healthy equitable communities while simultaneously driving social change. It was in these communities where I witnessed the remarkable change that can emerge from a networked and empowered citizenry.
In working with the grassroots environmental NGO movement in China, for example, I watched people harness simple communication technologies in strategic and savvy ways in order to forward their efforts toward social change.
What is a constant obstacle in the work you do, and how do you overcome it (or try to)? — Melissa Prior, Renton, Wash.
One of the biggest challenges Women’s Global Green Action Network seeks to address is the lack of communication opportunities, information, and resources reaching grassroots women. Our founding grassroots women leaders are now working as a team to design the mechanisms for connecting women working across a broad and disparate range of communication access. We are mapping out the strategies for creating a multi-tiered support structure with regional hubs. These hubs will channel information, resources, and training between WGGAN and the grassroots.
Our central challenge as we grow is to continue to design our organization to take on a true peer-to-peer form, in which technology, trainings, resources, and opportunities are not only brought to the grassroots, but wherein local knowledge and expertise is also shuttled outward so it can inform a global audience.
Was there an experience or event in your early life that led you to value the earth and its resources? — Jennifer Kramer, Chappaqua, N.Y.
Clearly it was the deep, intrinsic wisdom of my mother. (Hi, Mom.)
