Environmental Science Virtual Camp

Idowu Jola Ajibade, Ph.D.
Dr. Idowu Jola Ajibade is an Assistant Professor in Geography at Portland State University. Her research focuses on how individuals, communities, and cities respond to global climate change and their different capacities for adaptation and transformation. She explores adaptation in the context of resilience planning, eco-industrialization, eco-gentrification, uneven development, and managed retreat. She draws on urban political ecology and environmental justice lenses to interrogate both conventional and alternative approaches to adaptation, disaster risk reduction, and sustainability. She calls academics to partner with grassroots coalitions, frontline communities, indigenous groups, cooperatives, social entrepreneurs, and small businesses in building a resilient, inclusive and sustainable future. Jola’s work has been featured in many academic journals and media outlets including Science Friday, NPR, Yale Environment 360, Science, New Internationalist, and Vice.

Haley Crim 
Haley is a climate researcher with a focus on justice and community climate action. She works for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on just climate action, environmental education, and coordinating federal climate programs. She also works with local governments to conduct greenhouse gas inventories, vulnerability assessments, and climate action plans to better prepare governments and residents to address the climate crisis. She serves on the U.S. Action for Climate Empowerment Coalition coordinating team and has represented U.S. universities and organizations pushing for society-wide climate action at the UN Climate Conference in Glasgow, Scotland. Haley is originally from Maryland and holds a B.S. in Ecology and Earth Systems from Bates College.

Rona Kobell 
Rona Kobell is the co-founder of the Environmental Justice Journalism Initiative. She has covered the Chesapeake Bay and its people for 18 years, beginning at The Baltimore Sun, then at the Chesapeake Bay Journal, and most recently as the managing editor and lead writer for Chesapeake Quarterly magazine. She is an adjunct professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, where she recently earned her Master’s of the Arts in Journalism. For five years, she co-hosted and co-produced a Chesapeake Bay show on WYPR. Her writing has appeared in Slate, Grist, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, National Parks Magazine, and many other publications. Her work has won two APEX Awards for communication excellence; one MARCOM Platinum Award for research-paper writing; the Lowell Thomas Award, Bronze, for national environmental travel reporting; the Rachel Carson Award for Women Greening Journalism, National Audubon Society; and several honors from the Maryland-Delaware-DC Press Association. Baltimore magazine named her Best Bay Watcher in 2015. She lives in Towson with her husband, her two children, and her rabbit.

Felicia Davis
Felicia M. Davis is staunch advocate for measurable reductions in greenhouse gas emissions through energy efficiency retrofits, green building, renewable energy solutions and an array of sustainable practices. In 2016 she co-founded the HBCU Green Fund to help finance green projects at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. She has cultivated an extensive network of faculty, professionals and student climate, energy and environmental justice advocates. A lead organizer of the HBCU Geosciences Working Group, she also serves as co-chair for the National Technical Association 92 nd & 93 rd Annual Conferences. She is a founding board member for Green 2.0, dedicated to increasing racial diversity in environmental leadership and a Chattahoochee Riverkeeper board member, dedicated to protecting and restoring the Chattahoochee River Basin. Additional projects under her management include the BIPOC Climate Scholars Project, HBCU Energy Fellows Project, and the Senegal, Ghana and Haiti Elementary School Weather Station Project. All are managed in collaboration with HBCU, environmental, and business partners. Until March 2021 she directed sustainability for Clark Atlanta University and served on the CAU Sustainability Council.

Felicia began her environmental career with Ozone Action and Greenpeace working on air quality and climate justice as the Georgia Airkeeper director. She served as the first director of Mothers & Others for Clean Air when it was housed within the Georgia Conservancy. She directed the two-million-dollar UNCF Building Green Initiative advancing sustainability for Black, Hispanic-Serving and Tribal Colleges and Universities. She is an Environmental Leadership Program Senior Fellow, IGEL Fellow, and serves as a Steering Committee Member of the Intentional Endowments Network, PowerForce and Croatan Institute. An author of the Air of Injustice Report, she also produced the MSI Green Report, Sustainable Campuses-Building Green at Minority Serving Institutions, and the 2014 HBCU Green Report.

Climate Justice has been her primary focus since attending the 2000 UNFCCC Conference at The Hague followed by UN meetings in Dakar, Durban, Geneva, Cancun, Bangkok, Copenhagen and more with an international focus social, economic and environmental equity. She is a member of Gender CC Women for Climate Justice, a contributor to “gender into climate policy” a toolkit for climate experts and decision-makers.

As a social justice advocate and community organizer, Felicia also works to increase Black civic engagement and helped to mobilize turnout in Clayton County, Georgia for the 2020 Presidential Election and historic Georgia Senate Runoff Election, January 5, 2021. She serves on the board of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation and Convener of the Clayton County Black Women’s Roundtable. Economic and gender equity are central to justice and for more than a decade Felica worked in partnership with the late Rita Jackson Samuels as a member of the Board of the Georgia Coalition of Black Women and vice president of Women Flying High, LLC a boutique consulting group credited with increasing women’s participation in Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta Airport from 3% to 14% during the administration of Atlanta’s first Black woman Mayor Shirley Franklin.

Felicia’s favorite question is, “if we get it right what will it look like.”