Climate Solutions Annual Dinner

Wanjiku "Wawa" Gatheru, Event Featured Speaker
Environmental Justice Warrior, Rhodes Scholar & Founder of Black Girl Environmentalist

For Wanjiku "Wawa" Gatheru, caring about the environment started early. While gardening with her mom and grandmother as a child, the conversations would often turn to saving the earth. The first-generation American of Kenyan descent became even more invested when taking an environmental science class in high school when she learned that social justice and climate issues were deeply intertwined. Everything suddenly became personal. “It was in this call I learned that the environment had everything to do with me,” she says. Her passion soon turned into activism.

Today, Wawa is a climate justice storyteller motivated to uplift the voices of those most adversely impacted by climate crisis. She has become a prominent voice of her generation, using the power of social media to share how communities of color and women have been adversely affected by climate change and the racist roots of the environmental movement.

Harnessing her academic background as a Rhodes Scholar and her work as a youth climate activist, Wawa’s life goal is to help create a climate movement made in the image of all of us. Wawa is the founder and executive director of Black Girl Environmentalist (BGE)—the only national organization dedicated to addressing the pipeline and pathway issues for Black girls, women and gender-expansive individuals in the climate sector. With 1,500 members and a digital community of over 60,000, BGE is one of the largest Black youth-led organizations in the country, according to Forbes.

Wawa is also an inaugural member of the National Environmental Youth Advisory Council of the EPA, the first federal youth-led advisory board in U.S. History. She is a Public Voices Fellow on the Climate Crisis with The OpEd Project, in partnership with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

Wawa sits on boards and advisory councils for Earthjustice, Climate Power, the Environmental Media Association, the National Parks Conservation Association, Good Energy and Sound Future.

For her work, Wawa has been recognized as Glamour’s College Woman of the Year, a New York Times Changemaker, a L'Oréal Paris Woman of Worth, a Climate Creator to Watch by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and has been named to several notable lists — including Forbes 30 under 30, the Independent’s Climate 100, EBONY Power 100, Grist 50 Fixers, and AFROTECH Future. She is an established public speaker who has presented at Harvard University, The Washington Post Summit and The New York Times Climate Forward. She has also been featured on NPR, The Weather Channel and NBC, and in publications such as The Washington Post, Black Enterprise and more.

Passionate about bringing climate conversations into untraditional spaces, Wawa works collaboratively alongside other creatives, musicians and culture shapers to bring climate justice to the mainstream. In January 2023, Billie Eilish personally invited Wawa to join her on the first-ever digital cover of Vogue, alongside seven other climate activists.

Topics:

• Environmental Justice & Racism
• Food Insecurity & How We Can Help
• Everyone Can Be an Environmentalist
• The Future of Work for Gen Z