Green Latinos: Uniting Communities for Climate Justice

Mark Magaña, founding president of Green Latinos, shares how his group serves as a convenor to help move the needle in addressing climate justice issues, particularly those hitting hardest among Latine communities.

Mark Magaña, founding president & CEO of Green Latinos, a policy and advocacy group dedicated to climate justice issues.

In 2012, Mark Magaña and his wife took their months old daughter to see his dying mother in Los Angeles. She was able to see her, hold her and promise to always watch over her.

That promise profoundly impacted Magaña. It motivated him to decide to work exclusively on climate justice issues.

"Seeing her promise to watch over her future is when I knew that I had to do environmental climate work full-time, said Magaña, who was born in Chicago but raised in Los Angeles. "I knew that the climate crisis would be the biggest issue that would upend my now two children's lives."

Although he had started Green Latinos in 2008, his lobby firm worked on a multitude of issues.

During his professional life in Washington, D.C., he worked as a congressional staffer, on staffs of U.S. Latino advocacy organizations such as NALEO, and as a special advisor to the Clinton administriation as a point person to galvanize Latino community support on a big climate justice bill the administration was supporting. It ultimately didn't pass.

In 2020, when COVID hit, he and his wife decided it was time to move away from the nation's capital, with two young children in tow. They moved to Boulder, Colo., where Magaña continues his work as head of Green Latinos.

ImpactoAZ had the good fortune to talk with him about Green Latinos' accomplishments, particularly in policy and advocacy work and how it's moved the needle on important climate justice issues such as clean air and water, mitigating the heat island effect or finding consumer protections from sky-high utility bills.

"We want to take Latinos who work in these issue areas, no matter where they work, pull them out of their silos, out of being isolated, and feel that sense of familia that there's a hub to go to where they can get the resources, support, and convening to be much more effective together."

With funding from the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, Green Latinos has resources to deliver on that mission. Although the Trump administration has made it more difficult -- federal funding was frozen for two months when President Trump took office in his second term -- the courts have ruled in favor of releasing those funds.

"We're under the protection of the courts right now, who are saying you can't just unilaterally strip these grants that have been legally funded," noted Magaña.

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