Beloved Community,

It is my honor to introduce myself to all of you. My name is Emily Terrana and I am the Leadership Development Director and Environmental Justice Organizer here at Clean Air.
If you had told me 10 years ago when I began organizing that I would find myself doing environmental justice work, I would have told you that you were totally off base. I began organizing in college, mostly around the issues of LGBTQ rights, reproductive justice and immigration reform. While I certainly cared about public health and the environment, I didn’t think that it really affected me. Boy, was I wrong.

I am a Buffalo girl through and through; I even have a tattoo of a butter lamb on my forearm and one of my grandmother’s house on Roesch Avenue on my other. My tight knit family and I grew up in Buffalo’s Riverside neighborhood– three blocks and four high speed lanes of the 190 away from the Niagara River, two blocks away from Riverside park and one block away from the start of Tonawanda’s 53-site industrial zone. It was totally normal for us as kids to walk across the pedestrian bridge to the riverwalk and stroll up to the shadow of the Huntley coal-fired power plant or to take a drive down River Road to Old Man River, holding our noses as we passed the very active Tonawanda Coke factory. Sure it stunk in the summer time and none of our little vegetable gardens grew in the backyard, but it was home.

Only recently did I realize how my family was affected by where I lived and the decisions made by our industrial neighbors. Just like it was normal to walk within yards of a coal plant, it was also totally normal to me that so many of my family members, friends, and neighbors had cancer or other devastating illnesses and disabilities. In 2018, when my mother Julie was diagnosed with Stage IV pancreatic cancer at age 54, it hit our family like a ton of bricks. This wasn’t normal, it wasn’t okay, and we had to do something about it. The work I do each and every day with our incredible environmental justice campaign team members to ensure that no one ever has to deal with the pain and heartbreak of pollution and hazardous waste is what I’m doing about it, and I have no plans to stop.

I do this work with the memory of my mom in my heart everyday. I do it to honor my grandmother, my former neighbors and friends, and the countless people I do not know around Buffalo and WNY who are living and dying from the effects of corporate greed, government inaction and environmental racism and classism. I do this work for my three young children, Oliver, Yael and Muna and for my future children and grandchildren. I do this work for you, though we may have never met.

This holiday season, I want to invite you to join us as we continue to fight for one another. Join us as we step into 2021, unabashed and unafraid to put our audacious dreams into action. We have work to do, and we need you to come along with us. Your donations fuel and feed our smart, dynamic and visionary organizing that wins, for all of us.

This week you will hear a lot more from the teams I have the privilege to shepherd: our environmental justice campaign teams at American Axle, Tonawanda Coke and Huntley/NRG. As you read their stories of the work we have accomplished this year and our dreams for years to come, know that they are fighting for you.

With bread and roses,
Emily Terrana

Emily Terrana (she/her) has been a member of Clean Air since 2015, serving in a number of leadership roles throughout the organization, including being a member of the Tonawanda Coke campaign team. Emily is a Buffalo girl through and through, growing up in the working-class neighborhood of Riverside with her extended family and community. Before joining the staff of Clean Air in 2020, Emily worked at local and state-wide organizations working towards housing, climate, racial and reproductive justice. She believes deeply in a rigorous, disciplined and care centered organizing practice that builds our communities’ power to live in a just, dignified and joyful world we all deserve. Emily should have been a teacher and brings her passion and skills of popular and political education to her work at Clean Air. Emily is a lover of good Buffalo pizza and Paula’s Doughnuts and is always happy to be a Buffalo tour guide. She lives on the West Side with her three children, Yael, Oliver and Muna, partner Jason, their three cats, Mortimer, Chunky Boy and Polystyrene and old-man dog, Mangia. Emily holds a degree in Women and Gender Studies from Buffalo State College and has been published in Selves, Symbols, and Sexualities: An Interactionist Anthology.

This post comes from the Tesla team at Clean Air.

Hello,

We’re a team of former employees of Tesla’s Gigafactory 2 in South Buffalo. We represent a much larger group of current and former Tesla workers. We’re here because we have all faced hostility, abuse, and discrimination while working at Tesla, and we’re fighting for justice and accountability.

We’ve had a busy year: we’ve shared our stories with journalists, elected officials, and policymakers. We organized Tesla shareholders to speak on our behalf at Tesla’s 2020 Annual Meeting of Shareholders and we organized people from all across the country to amplify our demands with the Tesla Worker’s Toolkit.

And then we made the impossible happen: we disrupted Tesla’s 2020 Annual Meeting of Shareholders by getting our comment read live, forcing Tesla’s powerful executives to face the truth in real time.

Along the way, we have built real and deep relationships with each other, and connected with more and more workers who have experienced the racism, sexism, and abuse that happen every day at Gigafactory 2.

We are committed to this fight because it is bigger than what happened to any one of us: when workplaces are allowed to abuse their workers with low wages, harassment, discrimination, and exploitation, and without consequence, we all suffer the consequences. And when the government gives $959 million of our public money to companies owned by multi-billionaires in order to do so, we are all responsible for holding them accountable.

In 2021, we are going to continue to fight for New York State to intervene at Gigafactory 2, on behalf of all the workers who have been harmed and our entire community, who was tricked into spending nearly a billion dollars on a workplace that was supposed to transition our economy into the future, and instead is cementing structural racism and sexism into Western New York’s economy for generations to come.

We are asking you to make a donation to Clean Air this month to help our fight next year: for the next month, every dollar you donate will be matched, so your gift will go twice as far.

This post comes from Jarrett and Diane, of Diane’s Land.

Diane’s Land is a brand new project of Clean Air, founded this summer, but it’s been in the works for a long time.

Residents on Peabody Street in Seneca Babcock spent years organizing against Battaglia Demolition, an illegally operating cement crushing facility that filled our neighborhood with silica dust and cement, and tore up our residential street with huge trucks. We spent summers inside with our windows closed, because the air wasn’t safe for us to breathe in our own backyards. In April 2018, we won: Battaglia Demolition was ordered to close.

We were excited and relieved, but still had a long road ahead of us: nearly three years later, the property still sits, now abandoned, a home for illegally-dumped garbage and rats.

We deserve better than abandoned land. Our neighborhood has been exploited and neglected for too long. We created Diane’s Land because we are fighting to take over the abandoned land and transform it into a remediated, community-owned Land Trust. Diane’s Land was named in a vote by Peabody Street residents to honor Diane, a longtime neighborhood leader in our work, who has fought for all of us for many years, and who continues to lead us forward.

We have had a busy 2020: we officially established Diane’s Land as a new organization, did deep learning on the history of the site and the environmental and health risks it poses, different options for remediation, and different legal pathways for acquiring the site. It’s been a long, hard fight for many years, and we’ve got more battles ahead of us, but we are building the path forward with a powerful vision: transforming a derelict property from a symbol of neighborhood harm to peace, quiet, community and possibility.

We’re writing to ask you to invest in this work, and this fight, in 2021. For the next three and a half weeks, every dollar you give will be matched, so your donation will go twice as far. Will you make a matched gift to Clean Air today?

My name is Linnea and I work for Clean Air.
I come from a working class family from Niagara Falls. I am the youngest of six children — I have five older sisters (and thirteen nieces and nephews, with the fourteenth arriving any day now!). I grew up in my dad’s childhood home, with stories of the city he grew up in and how it had changed. He described a bustling local economy, full of jobs you could support a family on. As he tells the story: if your boss was a jerk, you could quit, go next door, and get a job with the same pay. By the time I heard those stories, the Niagara Falls he described was unrecognizable to me, and difficult to reconcile with the reality of the city I saw around me, where my family and neighbors struggled to make ends meet.

It was also years before I learned that the economy he described only ever worked like that for some people — that workers who weren’t white or weren’t men never had that kind of freedom.

I first found Clean Air in 2014. I had just finished grad school at UB, with a Master’s degree in Urban Planning. After months of cover letters with no responses, I was thrilled to find an energized, supportive, and loving workplace and a temporary position as a canvasser. I spent months knocking on doors in Buffalo and Tonawanda, and when my position ended, my mounting student debt and I were hired as a Sales Associate at Macy’s, but I was hooked on organizing.

I eventually found a 9-5 where I felt comfortable making rent, but kept in touch with the women I had met at Clean Air: they were brilliant, snarky, warm, strategic, and funny, and I often found the time to come to canvasses, meetings, and events. I also started organizing with Showing Up For Racial Justice (SURJ) on nights and weekends, learning direct action, refining my canvassing skills, and learning the nuts and bolts of community organizing. When I joined the Clean Air staff in 2018, it truly felt like coming home.

We call the kind of work I focus on at Clean Air “Just Transition”: how are we moving away from an economy that extracts labor from our bodies and resources from our environment, and fills them both with poison in return, and what are we creating in its place that is better?

I know we can have an economy that meets our needs, that is rooted in our dignity, rather than the profit we can make for a select few at the top. But we need to demand it, and design it ourselves.

When Tesla workers come together to demand justice and accountability for a racist, sexist, and abusive workplace, they are doing this work for all of us: because we all need and deserve jobs that pay us enough to afford to live and where white supremacy and misogyny do not define our experiences or our opportunities.

When community members in Seneca Babcock see a derelict industrial site, whose owner spent more than a decade illegally crushing cement behind their homes, filling their yards and houses with silica dust and diesel fumes, and they say: we can take that land for ourselves, restore the soil, and plant trees, they are doing this work for all of us: because the climate crisis is upon us, and land restoration and community control are sustainable solutions for a livable planet.

So I’m asking you to invest in our work in 2021: we have raised $48,658 dollars so far, and this month, every dollar you give is matched, meaning your donations go twice as far!

Linnea Brett first joined Clean Air as a canvasser in 2014, returning in 2018 as an organizer. The youngest of six, from a working class family from Niagara Falls, Linnea studied at the University at Buffalo, earning a Bachelor’s degree in Public Policy, and a Master of Urban Planning, specializing in Environmental and Land Use Planning. She is also a coach for Showing Up For Racial Justice (SURJ) chapters across the country, and is active in her home chapter, SURJ Buffalo. She loves the rush and intensity of direct action and the new connections forged through door to door canvassing, finds data entry soothing, and feels best when she’s creating brave, loving spaces for folks to vision, strategize, struggle, and take risks together. When she’s not doing organizing work, you can find her trying new recipes, trying to keep her plants alive, and hanging out with her partner Clarissa and their cats, Waffles and Rafael.

Hello! This post comes directly from Clean Air’s Membership Team… Sue Kelley, Gary Schulenberg, Rob Walsh, Jenn Carman, and Julia White.

Three years ago, we established our Membership Team. Well, we started as the Fundraising Team, but quickly decided that “fundraising” really didn’t encapsulate or do justice to the work that we were actually doing. Yes, we agree… money funds our work, but we believe that it can be so much more than that. Money can actually be a part of how we organize for a better world.

At Clean Air, we are in the business of building a movement
for justice that cannot be defunded, broken or stopped.

That’s why Clean Air’s Membership Team is building out Clean Air’s grassroots movement for health and justice. We bolster the work of the Battaglia, Tesla, Tonawanda Coke, Huntley, and American Axle Teams by creating intentional and welcoming space for people in our community and beyond to join us as we reimagine a world that works for all of us.

In a world where the strength of our people and our commitment to our shared liberation is everything, we refuse to be divided. We are rewriting our own story about money. For Clean Air, fundraising is part and parcel of our organizational identity. Who we are and what we believe specifically informs how we approach fundraising.

Because we know that when we fund our work from the ground up, we not only ensure that we maintain power over the decisions we make and the actions we take, but that if we raise this money through authentic and honest conversations, we are also building the community and the collective power necessary to win.

We are so proud of the work that we have done so far. We have created Clean Air’s first ever Membership Handbook, hosted Growing Strong Together: An Open House to Root our Power, created Membership resources on our website, and have had hundreds of conversations with our friends, family, and comrades.

With more than 40% of our 2020 budget projected to come directly from grassroots Members and Supporters, we know that we are building a movement that is stronger, more creative and more resilient than our enemies could have ever imagined.

And so we invite you to join us as we laugh with each other, cry with each other, and have one another’s backs as we reimagine a world that works for all of us.

Sign up as a Member or Supporter today and join our movement for justice!

Over the next few weeks, Clean Air’s staff and Clean Air’s campaign teams will be re-introducing ourselves… who we are, our beliefs and visions, and why we wake up each day and organize for a better world.

My name is Julia, and I’m Clean Air’s Grassroots Development Organizer.

Ten years ago, I walked door-to-door talking to my neighbors about stopping fracking from coming to our state. Little did I know then that those conversations and connections would be my entry point into 10 years of building the most beautiful and fierce community I could have ever imagined. I want to thank each of you for being a part of that… for so generously and courageously sharing your laughter, tears, and anger along the way.

For me, it has been 10 years in the making. For those that have been in this decades longer, thank you so much for welcoming me with open arms and instilling in me the armor of love that keeps me going each and every day.

For those of you that are newer to this movement for justice, welcome! I am here for you. I love you. And I am proud of you. In a world that too often divides us, wears us down, and leaves us hopeless… let’s continue to come together and show it otherwise.

I get to do that every day as Clean Air’s Grassroots Development Organizer. At Clean Air, we’re rewriting our own story about money. We know that the way money works in this country is not going to change overnight. So while we hold our institutional funders to our same values, challenging them to listen and respond to our lived truths through better practices, we are also creating our own grassroots fundraising systems.

And the heart of that reimagined system is you and me. I don’t just love my job because I get to raise money to fund badass organizing work. I love my job because I get to organize people and their relationship with money to create a grassroots movement that not only is ready to take on the most well-funded adversaries you could imagine, but actually has the power and heart to win. In a world where we are purposefully divided—fundraisers or organizers; nonprofits or foundations; delivering hard numbers or simply keeping the bills paid—we are pushing back.

On Giving Tuesday, y’all raised $21,586 to fund our movement for health and justice. I want to be clear… you did that. This is a movement. This is the work of many, not a few. This is why, as my fearless colleagues and comrades in arms will share with you over the next few weeks, we can take on Elon Musk and the largest Trump donor in WNY, and we can win.

This is why I love working for Clean Air. Because I get to work with the most fearless people in Tonawanda, Delavan Grider, Seneca Babcock, and across Buffalo that have come together to organize for a better world for all of us. I cannot wait to watch what we will do next.

Will you join our unstoppable movement for justice by becoming a Member or Supporter today?

This is the work of many, and we need you on our side.

Love,

Julia

Over the next few weeks, Clean Air’s staff and Clean Air’s campaign teams will be re-introducing ourselves… who we are, our beliefs and visions, and why we wake up each day and organize for a better world.

Julia White
Grassroots Development Organizer

Julia joined the team at Clean Air in 2018 as the Grassroots Development Organizer. Julia was born and raised in Vermont. While she regularly returns to the green mountains to visit friends and family, she has come to call Buffalo home over the past six years. She received her bachelors at Syracuse University, and kept moving her way west to Buffalo. Julia received her Master of Urban Planning from the University at Buffalo. Prior to joining the Clean Air team, Julia worked as a Canvass Director and Project Coordinator with NYPIRG and the Development Specialist with PUSH Buffalo. Julia ran and organized campaigns to stop fracking (a dangerous form of natural gas drilling) from being approved in New York State and has directed grassroots fundraising campaigns, written and won millions of dollars in private and public grants and hosted large-scale fundraising events to fund community-based work across Buffalo.

Julia has been funding and training others to fund the movement for justice for over 10 years. This work has allowed her to deeply understand the tools and skills of fundraising, but more importantly has equipped her with a decade-long analysis of how we can align our fundraising practices with our values and build a stronger movement for justice in the process. As Clean Air’s Grassroots Development Organizer, Julia is a fundraising organizer. She organizes people, their relationship with money, and money itself to fund a movement for health and justice that not only cannot be defunded, but cannot be stopped.