Unity.
Healing.
Justice.
We are aligned as stewards of the natural and built environment.
We build and lead powerful coalitions to run focused campaigns, helping frontline communities reverse the legacy of redlining and disinvestment. Through advocacy, partnership, and public education, we empower communities to build a just, healthy, and equitable future.
The Roots of Resilience: Weaving Climate, Economic, and Environmental Justice
Environmental Justice is the broader framework. It addresses the inequitable environmental burdens placed on marginalized communities from a wide range of sources, including historical injustices like redlining that affect land, water, and energy systems.
Climate Justice is a specific focus within environmental justice. It concentrates on the disproportionate impacts of the climate crisis and the transition to a new energy economy. BEL projects address this specifically by creating frameworks for democratizing climate finance and building community hubs for resilience against climate events.
In short, environmental justice is about fairness in all environmental issues, while climate justice zooms in on the inequities related specifically to the causes and effects of climate change.
In BEL's framework, economic justice is the active process of building wealth and financial autonomy in communities that have been historically and systematically denied it.
We define Economic Justice as the process of reversing systemic disinvestment by creating community-led pathways to wealth creation and ensuring equitable access to capital for frontline groups.
It as an integral and inseparable component of environmental and climate justice, defined through three key actions: Wealth Creation, Reversing Systemic Disinvestment and Democratizing Capital.
Our Focus: Climate Justice
The work of the Black Environmental Leaders Association (BEL) is guided by a clear, actionable, and community-centered definition of climate justice. This principle is the foundation of our strategy and informs every initiative we undertake.
BEL defines Climate Justice as the process of dismantling systemic environmental and economic inequities by empowering frontline, BIPOC-led communities to build the independent infrastructure, wealth, and political power needed to lead their own climate solutions.
This definition moves our work from theory to practice. It directly confronts the historical injustices, such as redlining, that have created modern environmental crises and ensures that our projects are designed not just to mitigate climate impacts, but to build lasting community power and reverse cycles of disinvestment
Board of Directors & Leadership Team
Jocelyn L. Travis, Co-Founder, Chair
Sierra Club, Deputy Regional Field Director (IL, IN, MI, MN, OH, WI)
Crystal M.C. Davis, Co-Founder, Director
National Parks Conservation Association, Midwest Senior Director
Shelley Francis, PhD, Director
EV Hybrid Noire, Co-Founder, CEO (National)
Alexis Smith, Director
Junction Coalition, Program Co-Director (Toledo, Ohio)
Iyanna Blue Donald, Director
Enterprise, Vice President, Ohio Market Leader
Mark McClain, Co-Founder, Emeritus Director
Retired (East Cleveland, Ohio)
SeMia Bray, Co-Founder, Executive Director
Renauld Jones, Special Projects Director
Queen Enigmatic, Office Manager
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