By Adam J. Blust
Diamond Spratling’s career as an environmentalist and educator started with polar bears.
As a child, she saw a heartbreaking TV commercial on the plight of the polar bear, complete with an emotional music score.
“That reeled me in,” she said. “I thought, who’s sticking up for the animals? Who’s sticking up for the planet? Where are their voices? I didn’t see that.”
Spratling, who gave the keynote speech at Sustain Dane’s Summit on November 3 at Monona Terrace, went on to study environmental policy in college, got a Master of Public Health degree at Emory University, and went on to found Girl + Environment, a national non-profit dedicated to empowering women of color to stand up for environmental justice.
It all started with the polar bears. But soon she realized the challenges that lay ahead.
“I went home after [my degree], and I tried to talk to my friends, my family, everyone in my space. I went on Facebook and said, ‘You guys, we need to care about the environment. We need to care about sustainability. It’s impacting us. It’s not just the plants. It’s not just the earth and the animals. It’s the people too.’”
The data was not moving people’s attitudes, Spratling said.
“They were just trying to put food on the table. They were just trying to pay the bills and protect us as kids,” she said.
That’s when she had another breakthrough, realizing that stories – personal stories – were what would engage people. Those stories are key for getting audiences to understand how sustainability and environment were connected to their lives in all kinds of ways.
At an internship at the West Michigan Environmental Action Council, Spratling began to understand the links between health, the environment, and economics. Specifically, she studied the links between asthma, its causes and its economic impact.
“As a kid growing up in Detroit, either you had asthma yourself, or you knew two other people who had asthma,” she said.
Black and Hispanic kids were two times more likely to be hospitalized for asthma, Spratling said. And then there are the lost school days, and lost work days of parents caring for children with the condition.
Studying asthma and its effects led her to consider “environmental racism,” where marginalized communities are disproportionately affected by environmental factors like pollution that affect their health and economic circumstances.
“It’s all connected,” Spratling said. “And that’s the story that we have to tell: the intersectionality of it all…because yes, it’s about sustainability. But it’s also about health. It’s about economic development. It’s about businesses thriving. It’s about social justice, everything else, housing, all of it, but we have to tell that narrative.”
To help tell these stories, Spratling discussed with the Summit attendees the framework developed by Marshall Ganz of Harvard called “Self, Us, Now.”
- Self: What are our personal stories that bring us to this moment? Why does this work matter to us?
- Us: What are our shared values? How can we emphasize how we are all in this together?
- Now: What is the urgency of this action? Why is it so pressing?
Spratling had the audience discuss these frames among themselves. The most difficult of the three is “Now,” she said, because we all have so many pressing issues in our lives and in the world at this moment. But nothing changes unless we feel the need for action right now, not in five or ten years. If it’s not pressing, it’s easy to put off.
The other focus of Spratling’s talk was community engagement: making sure that the people who will benefit from this work are involved at every stage.
“Community engagement is a ceaseless, iterative process. We can’t rush it. We can’t do it overnight,” she said.
One way to look at community engagement is through the spectrum publicized by Rosa Gonzales in the project called “Facilitating Power.” The steps move through:
Ignoring – Informing – Consulting – Involving – Collaborating – Deferring
At each step, the community affected is more involved, culminating in “deferring,” where the community itself takes the lead.
Girl + Environment has worked on several community projects, including helping to develop a community engagement plan with SoCalGas, and the Activate ATL project with the City of Atlanta’s Parks and Recreation Department to create a comprehensive parks master plan.
More than 6,000 people participated in public meetings – all virtual, since it was during COVID.
“We can always do better,” Spratling said. ”But this was a great example of the city putting their foot down and really making an effort to co-create and build a movement, and build a engagement plan, and build a 10 year plan that essentially empowered community to take meaningful action and engage in this work.”
Spratling had four major points for Summit attendees to take back to their communities and projects.
- Be intentional in the narratives you want to tell.
- Stop looking at frontline communities as victims, and start looking at them as solutions.
- Always think about ways you can build trust, taking the time to really know the community and in the end, deferring to their knowledge.
- Understand that numbers bring people in, but stories are the things that keep them there.
If anyone needs proof of the power of stories, just think about Diamond Spratling and the polar bears, and where that single moment took her.
“The stories we tell matter,” she said. “And how we tell those stories matters.”