Gracie Brett

Divest Ed

Gracie is a Campus Organizer at Divest Ed: the national training and strategy hub for the college fossil fuel divestment movement. There, she supports student leaders in the College Climate Coalition. She first got involved in the movement as student organizer at Fossil Free American University. She views the climate crisis as an opportunity to reshape the global political economy to serve people over profits—seeking prosperity for the people, not the polluters. She enjoys ecosocialist theory, free jazz, and laughing.

Alec Connon

350 Seattle

Alec is the Stop the Money Pipeline Coalition Co-Coordinator. He has spent the last six years organizing, movement building, and running campaigns with 350 Seattle, where he also works at the Campaigns co-Director. He’s been involved in a number of fossil finance campaigns over the years, including the efforts to get the City of Seattle to break ties with Wells Fargo, fights to get the Gates Foundation and the City of Seattle to divest from fossil fuels, and the ongoing campaign to push JPMorgan Chase to align its business model with the Paris Agreement and respect human rights. Alec’s first novel, The Activist, was published in 2016 and was named BBC Wildlife’s Book of the Month. He serves on the board of 350 Seattle Action, and lives with his family on Duwamish land in north Seattle.

Ben Cushing

Sierra Club

Ben Cushing is Senior Campaign Representative for the Sierra Club’s Financial Institution Advocacy campaign. In this role, Ben leads the strategic planning and implementation of the Sierra Club’s advocacy work with Stop the Money Pipeline and other coalitions and partners to challenge Wall Street’s roles in the climate crisis. He serves as the campaign’s point person to engage with financial institutions, policymakers, regulators, activists, investors, and the media regarding relevant climate and energy issues.

Before joining the Sierra Club, Ben worked at Climate Advisers on global policy and corporate campaigns to protect tropical forests. He got his start as an environmental organizer through the Green Corps fellowship program. Ben grew up in Oakland, CA, graduated from Carleton College in Northfield, MN, and now lives in Washington, D.C.

Jackie Fielder

Stop the Money Pipeline

Jackie Fielder is Lakota, Hidatsa, and Mandan and a citizen of the Three Affiliated Tribes in North Dakota. She previously worked with Mazaska Talks and organized Divest the Globe in 2017, a major international day of action targeting banks funding fossil fuels. In the Bay Area, Jackie helped to found the San Francisco Defund DAPL Coalition & the San Francisco Public Bank Coalition and has worked on a wide variety of campaigns. She is based on Yelamu, Ramaytush Ohlone land, in so-called San Francisco.

Amy Gray

Stand.earth

Amy is the Senior Climate Finance Strategist at Stand.earth, her focus is the Climate Safe Pensions Network supporting pension divestment campaigns. A former organizer at 350.org, 350 Colorado and Stop the Money Pipeline, Amy is an expert in organizing mass mobilizations and forming diverse coalitions. She is a trainer in anti-oppression and intersectional climate justice organizing and is passionate about divestment and climate finance. Amy also sits on the Board of Directors for 350 Colorado Action and The Chinook Center. She was the recipient of the 2020 Climate Warrior Award from the El Paso County Democratic Party for her work on decommissioning the coal plants in El Paso County.

Tara Houska

Giniw Collective

Tara Houska (Couchiching First Nation Anishinaabe) is a tribal attorney, founder of Giniw Collective, and a former advisor on Native American affairs to Bernie Sanders. She spent six months on the frontlines fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline, and is currently engaged in the movement to defund fossil fuels and a years-long struggle against Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline. She is a co-founder of Not Your Mascots, a group committed to positive representation of Native peoples.

She is a TED speaker, the 2017 Harvard “Public Interested” keynote, received an “Awesome Women Award” from Melinda Gates and a 2019 Rachel’s Network Catalyst Award, is featured in “Women: A Century of Change” by National Geographic, and was named an “Icon” on the cover of Outside Magazine’s 40th Anniversary edition. Tara has contributed to the women-led climate anthology “All We Can Save”, the New York Times, the Guardian, Vogue, Indian Country Today and been featured on CNN, MSNBC, CBS, Democracy Now, and BBC. She lives in a pipeline resistance camp in Northern Minnesota.

Tracey Lewis

Public Citizen

Tracey Lewis is a policy counsel for Public Citizen’s Climate Program, where she advocates for financial regulators to direct companies, banks, money managers, and other private actors to better identify and address the risks related to the climate crisis. Tracey has broad experience advising organizations on equity and environmental law and policy.

Tracey is also a fellow at the Climate & Community Project, based at the University of Pennsylvania McHarg Center, Weitzman School of Design. She has a JD from Vermont Law School.

Doug Norlen

Friends of the Earth

For 18 years, Doug Norlen has conducted successful advocacy to achieve environmental, developmental and accountability policy reform of multilateral trade and finance institutions, export credit agencies and private banks. His work has been instrumental in successful efforts to achieve improvements in U.S. bilateral financing policies, beginning with reforms at the Overseas Private Investment Corporation announced in 1997 by President Clinton.

More recently, his efforts have helped establish and implement climate change and accountability reforms at OPIC and the U.S. Export-Import Bank. Doug is also a leader in international NGO coalition efforts to reform export credit agencies. His work has helped lead these agencies to adopt environmental and social policies that, since 2002, have been applied to over $130 billion in financing for environmentally risky projects worldwide. Doug has also worked extensively with local communities to address environmental and developmental impacts of extractive and energy projects funded by public and private finance institutions. Doug received a master’s degree in International Studies from the University of Oregon.

Scott Parkin

Rainforest Action Network

Scott Parkin is the Organizing Director at Rainforest Action Network (RAN). In his time at RAN, he has led campaigns against Wall Street banks, mountaintop removal coal mining and the Keystone XL pipeline. He is also organized with Rising Tide North America and its San Francisco Bay Area chapter Mt. Diablo Rising Tide.

Erika Thi Patterson

Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE)

Erika Thi Patterson is a Campaign Director for ACRE’s climate and environmental justice work. Erika grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and credits her early radicalization to punk music for exposing her to the imperialist forces that drove her mom to resettle in the U.S. from Vietnam. Prior to joining ACRE, she served as Jobs to Move America’s Deputy Director, where she led a coalition of industrial unions and community groups to winning the first community benefits agreement and union agreement in the U.S. with an electric bus company, which created pathways into good union jobs for communities of color, people returning home from incarceration, and women.

Erika earned her Master of Urban Planning and Community Economic Development degree from University of California, Los Angeles. In her spare time, she loves wandering around cities, summiting mountains, and co-leading a women-of-color centered book club.

Matt Remle

Mazaska Talks

Matt Remle (Hunkpapa Lakota) lives in Duwamish Territory – Seattle, WA with his family.He is the editor and writer for Last Real Indians and works for the Office of Native Education for the Marysville School District. He is the co-founder of the group Mazaska Talks which focuses on global divestment from banks and corporations that negatively impact social welfare and the environment. Matt is the author of Seattle’s Indigenous Peoples’ Day resolution, Seattle’s resolution calling on Congress to engage in reconciliation with Tribes over the Boarding School Era policies, Seattle’s resolution to oppose the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline and Seattle’s ordinance to divest from Wells Fargo.

He’s currently serving on the City of Seattle’s stakeholders committee to establish a public bank and served on Seattle’s Green New Deal Steering Committee. In 2014, Remle was awarded Seattle’s Individual Human Rights Leader award.In 2017, he was awarded the National Indian Education Association’s Educator of the Year, the Billy Frank Jr. Natural Resource Protection Award and was named one of Seattle’s Most Influential People. In 2020, he was named by the Seattle Times as one of the top ten most influential people to watch for in the next decade.”

Jason Schwartz

Sunrise Project

Jason Schwartz is a writer, activist, and communications strategist focused on climate, labor, and economic justice. Currently he campaigns for accountability from U.S. banks and financial regulators with the Sunrise Project. Previously he worked with Athena, Greenpeace USA, Change to Win, and The Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy. He lives on Munsee Lenape land (Queens, NYC) with his wife, the artist Sara Jimenez, and their daughter.