Past Speakers
ESLP has had the honor of hosting some brilliant speakers in the past years and we'd like to share with you more about them.
Dr. Mustafa Santiago Ali
Climate Emergency & Building Hope
Dr. Mustafa Santiago Ali, recognized as a prominent thought leader, international speaker, policy maker, community liaison, trainer, and facilitator, currently holds the position of Executive Vice President at the National Wildlife Federation. Additionally, he is the visionary behind Revitalization Strategies, a venture dedicated to advancing our most marginalized communities from mere survival to prosperity.
With a rich history spanning 24 years at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Mustafa's commitment to social justice began at a young age of 16. Joining the EPA as a student, he played a pivotal role as a founding member of the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice (OEJ). In his most recent roles as Senior Advisor for Environmental Justice and Community Revitalization and Assistant Associate Administrator, he vigorously advocated for environmental justice causes, fortifying policies, programs, and initiatives. Throughout his tenure, he collaborated closely with EPA administrators from William Riley to Scott Pruitt, leaving an indelible mark on the agency's approach to environmental justice.
May 9th 2024
Lakota Harden
Climate Organizing
May 15th, 2024
Lakota Harden (Minnecoujou/Yankton Lakota and HoChunk) is a highly-respected, award-winning organizer, community leader, and elder who has been part of Native American struggles for the past four decades. Much of Lakota’s work focuses on the healing of intergenerational historical trauma that stems out of the systematic genocide implemented by the U.S. government. The colonization of Indigenous communities has had multiple affects on those who have survived "Manifest Destiny" tactics.
Lakota is also a founder of the Herring Rock Water Protectors, an environmental group, under the guidance of the Sitka tribe, that works to protect herring and salmon from overfishing by corporate interests. In following the spirit of Standing Rock, this group focuses on the issue of herring depletion as a local embodiment of the destruction of culture and earth.
Leo Grandison
Climate Justice & Community Activism
April 27th 2024
Leo is dedicated to the realm of sustainable horticulture, presently serving as an instructor and researcher at Southwestern College in the vicinity of San Diego. During his time at UCSC, Leo held a prominent position as a SUA officer and actively participated in various student organizations including Haluan, African/Black Student Alliance (BSU), Black Voice, and was instrumental in establishing e2. He frequently revisits Santa Cruz as a guest speaker and mentor for present-day students, imparting inspiration and fostering a mindset open to new perspectives and paradigms.
Creating Movements
Tiffany Dena Loftin is a 2011 UCSC alumna who has a substantial career throughout different levels of government. She was the National Director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Youth and College Division, and worked as the community engagement director for Vote.org.
Loftin has a five-year background in national labor union organizing. She has been a part of various organizations such as the American Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of Labor-Council of Industrial Organizations.
“The labor movement has never won anything without the community,” Loftin said to the Labor Tribune in 2016. “It’s important that the Labor Movement remembers and understands that it is accountable to the community it lives in.”
May 20th 2021
April 15th 2021
Tiffany Dena Loftin
May 29th 2024
Mark Lopes
Longevity in the Movement
June 5th 2024
Mark! Lopez comes from a family with a long history of activism. He was raised in the Madres del Este de Los Angeles Santa Isabel (Mothers of East LA Santa Isabel – MELASI), an organization co-founded by his grandparents, Juana Beatriz Gutierrez and Ricardo Gutierrez. This set his trajectory as a community activist. He has engaged in a wide array of student activism at UC Santa Cruz where he earned his B.A. in Environmental Studies, and taught university courses at UC Santa Cruz, Cal State Northridge, and UCLA Extension. mark! earned his M.A. from the Chicanx Studies Department at Cal State Northridge, where he completed his Masters thesis titled The Fire: Decolonizing “Environmental Justice.”
Mark! joined East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice as a member three years before joining the staff. After serving as Lead Organizer for East Yard Communities and Co-Director with EYCEJ Co-Founder Angelo Logan, mark! accepted the Executive Director responsibility. He organizes in the area where he was born, raised and continues to live.
Flora Pacha
May 27th 2021
Loba (they/Loba) is a Queer Peruvian migrant herbalist, gardener, seed saver, full spectrum birth worker, podcaster (@wildweedspodcast) and Patreon content creator (patreon.com/lalobaloca) Loba is invested in sharing Abuelita Knowledge in hopes that we build communities that depend on each other and a little less on imposed systems.Mark! joined East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice as a member three years before joining the staff. After serving as Lead Organizer for East Yard Communities and Co-Director with EYCEJ Co-Founder Angelo Logan, mark! accepted the Executive Director responsibility. He organizes in the area where he was born, raised and continues to live.
Jessica (she/her) started a passion project in July 2020 she calls Planta Whisperer. This is a social media platform she created to talk about environmental justice content with an intersectional lens. She is getting her undergraduate degrees at UCSC in Community Studies and Environmental Studies with a concentration in Global Environmental Justice. Jessica is passionate about reproductive justice, sustainable fashion, and food sovereignty. In her free time, she bakes vegan desserts and thrifts!
Jessica Zubia, Plant Whisperer
Nina Gualinga
May 13th 2021
Gualinga is of Swedish and indigenous roots of the Ecuadorian Amazon, where she was born and raised in her mother’s community of the Kichwa People of Sarayaku. Nina started advocating for indigenous and territorial rights at the at a early age, after an oil companies violently entered her peoples’ lands with military troops provided by the Ecuadorian government. The people of Sarayaku successfully forced out the oil company and military and won a historic case against the government in the Interamerican Court of Human Rights, setting an important precedent for indigenous rights across Latin America.
Megan Red Shirt-Shaw
May 6th 2021
Megan Red Shirt-Shaw (Oglala Lakota) is an inspiring educator, writer, and researcher in Higher Education. Passionate about Indigenous rights issues, college admissions, and greater Native presence in media and higher education, Megan believes in empowering young people to use their voices for the issues they care about in their communities.
Megan is currently the Director of Native Student Services at the University of South Dakota and is also currently pursuing her PhD in Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development with a focus on Higher Education and a minor in American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota.
Valentin Lopez
Valentin Lopez has served as Chair of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band since 2003, and the President of the Amah Mutsun Land Trust since its inception. Valentin is a Native American Advisor to the University of California, Office of the President on issues related to repatriation. He is also a Native American Advisor to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Valentin is actively involved in efforts to restore tribal indigenous knowledge and ensure our history is accurately told.
Rosa Celemente
April 8th 2021
Rosa Alicia Clemente is an organizer, independent journalist, producer and scholar activist. A Black Puerto Rican born and raised in the Bronx, NY she has dedicated her life to organizing, scholarship and activism. From Cornell to prisons, Rosa is one of her generations leading scholars on the issues of Black-Latinx identity. Rosa is the president and founder of Know Thy Self Productions, which has produced seven major community activism tours and consults on issues such as hip-hop feminism, media justice, voter engagement among youth of color, third party politics, United States political prisoners and the right of Puerto Rico to become an independent nation free of United States colonial domination. She is a frequent guest on television, radio and online media, as her opinions on critical current events are widely sought after. Her groundbreaking article, “Who is Black?”, published in 2001, was the catalyst for many discussions regarding Black political and cultural identity in the Latinx community. She is creator of PR (Puerto Rico) On the Map, an independent, unapologetic, Afro-Latinx centered media collective founded in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria
May 20th 2019
April 16th 2017
Speaker Panel: Adlemy Garcia, Tash Nguyen, and Keiera Bradle
April 1st 2020
Rick Flores is a Horticulturist and Steward of the Amah Mutsun Relearning Program (AMRP). His professional experience at the UCSC Arboretum is with California native plants, but currently works in other gardens as well, helping to maintain displays of extraordinary plants. As Steward of the AMRP, Rick fosters the relationship between the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band and the Arboretum, oversees educational programming, and helps develop displays of culturally important native plants. In addition, Rick assists with fundraising and grant writing.
Ildiko Polony
April 15th 2020
Founder of Wildfires to Wildflowers and Executive Director of Sutro Stewards. Ildiko is a consultant on land stewardship for habitat restoration and biodiversity.
Born in Oakland, California, Ildiko has been a lifelong environmentalist. She focused most of her energy on advocacy for action on climate change, until she started gardening in her San Francisco backyard and discovered local wildlife. Asking herself the question, “how can I foster the birds, bees, butterflies, and surprisingly diverse wildlife I see,” the answer came in planting locally adapted California native plants. She quickly became a native plant and habitat restoration enthusiast.
Alvaro Sanches
May 13th 2020
Alvaro S. Sanchez is an urban planner with extensive experience crafting, implementing and evaluating strategies that leverage private and public investments to deliver community benefits to priority communities. Alvaro is The Greenlining Institute’s Director of Environmental Equity. He leads a team that develops policies to improve public health, catalyze economic opportunity, and enrich environmental quality for low-income communities and communities of color by leveraging public resources that address pollution, fight climate change, and helps vulnerable communities adapt to a changing environment. Alvaro oversees Greenlining’s climate equity portfolio including monitoring the implementation of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, SB 535 (De Leon, 2012), and AB 1550 (Gomez, 2016), and implementation of Greenlining’s frameworks on equitable and clean mobility, climate adaptation and resilience, and creating an equitable economy.
Edgar Xochitl
May 40th 2020
Edgar Xochitl works on cross-pollinating traditional ecological knowledge, queer politics, and indigenous philosophies to connect the dots between decolonial botany and queer liberation. Xochitl is the Farm Manager at Hummingbird Farm, a collective organizing farm in the Excelsior district in San Francisco. As an urban campesinx and artist Xochitl raises awareness on the importance of flowers as resistance tools to colonialism and climate chaos while healing the bodies and spirits of Queer and Trans People of Color, rehabilitating the soil, capturing carbon, and providing new genetic memories. As the 2016 Propagation Specialist at the UCSC Center for Agroecology and Sustainable food systems, Xochitl worked on intercropping the Decolonization of Flowers and Queer Ecology into the discussion of sustainable agriculture, environmental justice and climate chaos.
Rachel Dreskin
April 8th 2019
Since joining CIWF in 2013, Rachel has managed the development and growth of the US Food Business program. Her partnerships with dozens of leading companies have contributed to widespread change in corporate supply chains that are set to impact the lives of hundreds of millions of farmed animals. These partnerships focus on incorporating and strengthening animal welfare within corporate sustainability programs and seeing these policies through to implementation. In addition to working extensively with Fortune 500 companies, Rachel has guest lectured at top US universities and has had her work covered in the Chicago Tribune, Bloomberg, Fortune Magazine, and more. She also serves on the Board of Directors for Global Animal Partnership and for the Regenerative Organic Alliance. Prior to joining CIWF in 2013, Rachel ran a pioneering farm-to-table restaurant in Manhattan where she converted the animal protein sourcing from conventional to higher welfare. She previously worked with News Corporation where she specialized in consulting consumer packaged goods companies on marketing, advertising and consumer-promotion solutions.
Adam Millard
April 15th 2019
Adam Millard-Ball is an associate professor of Environmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Trained as an economist and an urban planner, his work focuses on the potential of city policy to tackle global climate change, and his current research examines urban sprawl worldwide, local climate plans in California, and the potential impacts of autonomous vehicles. Dr. Millard-Ball teaches classes in environmental policy, environmental economics and urban planning, including a new seminar in bicycle planning. Before coming to UCSC, he taught at McGill University, Montreal, and worked as a transportation planner for Nelson Nygaard Consulting Associates in San Francisco and New York. Dr. Millard-Ball holds an MA in Geography from the University of Edinburgh, and a PhD in Environment and Resources from Stanford University.
April 16th 2017
JP Rose
April 22nd 2019
J.P. Rose is a staff attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity’s Urban Wildlands program. J.P. uses litigation, advocacy, and policy to fight unsustainable development that destroys wildlife habitat and contributes to the climate crisis. His work is particularly focused on protecting Southern California’s landscapes and rivers and ensuring wildlife connectivity for species like the mountain lion. J.P. is a Bay Area native and obtained his B.A. and J.D. from Santa Clara University.
John Laird
May 6th 2019
John Laird was appointed California Secretary for Natural Resources by Governor Jerry Brown on Jan. 5, 2011. He has spent nearly 40 years in public service, including 23 years as an elected official. He sponsored bills to establish the landmark Sierra Nevada Conservancy, restored community college health services, expanded and clarified state civil rights protections, reformed the state mandates system, and significantly expanded water conservation. He is currently running to be a state senator.
April 16th 2018
Terisa Siagatonu
Terisa Siagatonu is an award-winning poet, teaching artist, mental health educator, and community leader born and rooted in the Bay Area. Her presence in the poetry world as a queer Samoan woman and activist has granted her opportunities to perform and speak in places ranging from the White House (during the Obama administration) to the UN Conference on Climate Change in Paris, France. With numerous viral poetry videos garnering over millions of views collectively, Terisa's writing blends the personal, cultural, and political in a way that calls for healing, courage, justice, and truth. Offstage, Terisa delivers keynote speeches across the country on issues such as youth advocacy, educational attainment, Pacific Islander/Indigenous rights, climate change, LGBTQ+ rights, gender-based violence, and others.
April 9th 2018
mark! Lopez comes from a family with a long history of activism. He was raised in the Madres del Este de Los Angeles Santa Isabel (Mothers of East LA Santa Isabel – MELASI), an organization co-founded by his grandparents, Juana Beatriz Gutierrez and Ricardo Gutierrez. This set his trajectory as a community activist. He has engaged in a wide array of student activism at UC Santa Cruz where he earned his B.A. in Environmental Studies, and taught university courses at UC Santa Cruz, Cal State Northridge, and UCLA Extension. mark! earned his M.A. from the Chicanx Studies Department at Cal State Northridge, where he completed his Masters thesis titled The Fire: Decolonizing “Environmental Justice.” mark! joined East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice as a member three years before joining the staff. After serving as Lead Organizer for East Yard Communities and Co-Director with EYCEJ Co-Founder Angelo Logan, mark! accepted the Executive Director responsibility. He organizes in the area where he was born, raised and continues to live.
Mark! Lopez
Max and Thao
Max Jimenez was born in Philippines and moved to Highland Park in Northeast Los Angeles when they were 8 years old. In LA, they worked with the Alliance for Climate Education in hopes to bridge and engage community members in organizing around environmental racism and institutional neglect that families of color and low-income folks struggle with. Max’s work is focused on basic needs such as food and housing insecurity. They live a plant-based lifestyle and strive to encourage others that eating real and healthy food should be accessible and affordable to all. The gentrification happening in their community is causing displacement and houselessness, which shifted their focus on housing justice. Max is now a third-year as Community Studies and Politics double-major at UCSC. They are the Student Union Assembly President and they have been working tirelessly to make sure that students are living in habitable and just housing conditions. They, along with other students, established a new organization on campus, the Student Union housing Working Group, where they have campaigns and projects that revolutionize the housing movement in UCSC, the City of Santa Cruz, and even on a UC Level.
Mark! Lopez
mark! Lopez comes from a family with a long history of activism. He was raised in the Madres del Este de Los Angeles Santa Isabel (Mothers of East LA Santa Isabel – MELASI), an organization co-founded by his grandparents, Juana Beatriz Gutierrez and Ricardo Gutierrez. This set his trajectory as a community activist. He has engaged in a wide array of student activism at UC Santa Cruz where he earned his B.A. in Environmental Studies, and taught university courses at UC Santa Cruz, Cal State Northridge, and UCLA Extension. mark! earned his M.A. from the Chican@ Studies Department at Cal State Northridge, where he completed his Masters thesis titled The Fire: Decolonizing “Environmental Justice.” After serving as Lead Organizer for East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice and Co-Director with EYCEJ Co-Founder Angelo Logan, mark! is now the Executive Director. mark! was also given the honor of the 2017 Goldman Environmental Prize, North America. The prize "honors the achievements and leadership of grassroots environmental activists from around the world, inspiring all of us to take action to protect our planet." (www.goldmanprize.org/)
Francisco Ferreyra is a Community and Regional Development undergraduate at UC Davis, and a recent transfer from Oxnard, CA. After representing California Community College students through legislative advocacy for two years, they began organizing against the encroachments of multi-billion dollar oil and gas companies including NRG and the forces behind DAPL. Today they help lead the Fossil Free UC movement and serve as Environmental Sustainability Officer for the UC Student Association. Ferreyra spoke about Resistance in the Age of Climate Armageddon: Non-Compliance or Non-Existence. He gives first-hand accounts of strength and sacrifice from Standing Rock that show us the 500 year old context of dominant forces that have plunged our species into a full on climate crisis.
Vegan Voices of Color’s mission is to spread awareness on the connections of oppression that connect animal agriculture and People of Color. From health epidemics to environmental racism the links between our communities and those of non-human animals cannot be ignored. The plight of billions of sentient beings is integrally connected to our own. Unfortunately mainstream veganism is severely disconnected from most PoC as we see very few of our own faces reflected in the movement. This white veganism is also too often non-intersectional. They see that issues ranging from income inequality to food access are ignored, problematic connections of racism to speciesism runs rampant without enough critical thought put into these comparisons. Tired of seeing how this problematic veganism turn so many people away we strive to provide a space to link culture, race, income, and ethics together under the solidarity of social justice.
Francisco Ferreyra
Chris Lepe and Fahad Qurashi in "Mobility movements - Student and community engagement to advance affordable, accessible, and sustainable transportation options"
Chris Lepe is the Silicon Valley Senior Community Planner for TransForm. TransForm is a Bay Area-based non-profit organization that promoting walkable communities with excellent transportation choices to connect people of all incomes to opportunity, keep California affordable and help solve our climate crisis. Chris engages community leaders, elected officials, transit riders, and the broader community in transportation, land use, and housing plans, projects, and policies in order to advance social justice, environmental protection, and community health. He received his BA in Environmental Studies with a minor in Latin American/Latino Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) and his Masters in Urban Planning at San Jose State University (SJSU).
Unique Vance & Aaron Luxur
Chris Lepe & Fahad Qurashi
Ryan Camero is arts activist and community organizer whose work focuses on visual storytelling, cross-cultural understanding, and inter-generational communication in achieving social justice.
Fahad Qurashi: Bay Area Directo - Fahad has worked at YLI for over 11 years transitioning from a program participant in San Francisco, working up the ranks to his current position as Bay Area Director of Program. He is a diplomatic and tenacious leader with deep content knowledge and practical public policy experience in the areas of public health, land use/ zoning, housing rights, health equity, legal rights for immigrant youth, violence prevention, sexual health education, and youth development.
Ryan Camero
Karina Gonzales
Karina organizes around social justice, racial justice, and climate issues. She believes that these topics are all interconnected and aims to weave these major issues into a coherent narrative that will move us toward a more sustainable and equitable future. This year she is co-leading a youth delegation to the 2017 Climate Negotiations.