Speaking from the Heart: An Open Dialogue on Climate Action

What’s missing from our conversations about climate? What creative ideas and perspectives should be brought to the table? And how can we find new common ground together? Join us online for a spirited discussion sparked by the exhibition Climate Action: Inspiring Change [link to exh page] that centers the perspectives of three young environmental leaders, an innovative climate researcher and the director of the Climate Museum. This event is co-hosted with Rare and made possible in part by the Lowell Institute.
About the Presenters
Jordan Sanchez currently studies math, physics and education at Harvard University. Born and raised in the Bronx, she has always loved sharing her perspective through creative writing. Now a spoken word poet dedicated to leaving the world better than she found it, her words have reached hundreds of millions of people, including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Chadwick Boseman and Lupita Nyong’o. Sanchez has also been commissioned by the United Nations Environment Programme, writing and performing the curtain-raiser film for the 2021 World Environment Day launching the Decade of Restoration.
Noela Altvater grew up on the Passamaquoddy reservation at Sipayik and is a student at Washington County Community College. She is a 2022 Brookie Awards recipient and has presented her work at University of Maine’s Sustainability & Water Conference. Using the Passamaquoddy tradition of storytelling and modern technology in the form of story mapping, Altvater weaves together pictures, videos, scientific research, statistics and personal stories into compelling research that gives voice to the needs of local communities.
Natalia Jacobs, now a freshman at Bates College, received a Merilyn Penn Grant in 2019 for her tree-planting project 2020Tree. In 2022 she was part of the planning team for the Western Mass Youth Climate Summit, a collaboration between the Hitchcock Center for the Environment and Mass Audubon. She also collaborated on the American Repertory Theatre production of WILD: A Musical Becoming. Jacobs’ passions include supporting underrepresented voices in the sciences and musical theater.
Miranda Massie is the director of New York City’s Climate Museum, the first climate-dedicated museum in the US. She left a career in civil rights law to establish the museum after being awarded a Mentorship-in-Residence at Yale Law School and a Harvard Law School Wasserstein Public Interest Fellowship. She is a Public Voices Fellow on theClimateCrisis with the OpEd Project and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Massie also partnered with PEM on the exhibition Climate Action: Inspiring Change.
Kevin Green leads Rare’s Center for Behavior & the Environment, a team of behavioral scientists, designers and trainers using insights from the science of human behavior to solve the world’s most pressing environmental challenges. Green regularly speaks about the intersection of human behavior and climate change, and how our understanding of behavior can help transform individual action into large-scale change. Kevin lives with his family on a small farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.