Meaning Makers of HDS: Inspiring Hopeful Climate Action
In this episode of Meaning Makers of HDS, airing in Earth Month, Aliyah Collins, MDiv '23, speaks about her impactful work in environmental advocacy and how she helps communities take hopeful action and find meaning in the wake of severe weather events.
Produced by the Harvard Divinity School Office of Communications, Meaning Makers of HDS explores the many dimensions of human meaning making. In interviews with HDS alumni, faculty, and others, this podcast showcases how members of the HDS community create meaningful lives—through religion, spirituality, faith, and beyond. Each episode features conversations that highlight the deeply personal and diverse ways people wrestle with life’s biggest questions.
In the second episode of Meaning Makers of HDS, airing in Earth Month, we spoke with Aliyah Collins, MDiv '23, an environmental activist and founder of the Eco-Healing Project. Throughout the conversation, Collins shared how her time at HDS inspired her to develop the Eco-Healing Project, how she finds meaning in her pursuit of climate justice, and how she helps HBCUs and their communities find hopeful paths forward after extreme weather events.
Aliyah Collins, MDiv '23
Aliyah Collins, MDiv '23, is an environmental justice advocate and consultant who specializes in climate justice education. She is the founder of the Eco-Healing Project, an initiative that supports HBCU students most impacted by climate emergencies, food insecurity, and environmental injustice to design and implement community-driven climate solutions. She has designed learning experiences centered on Afrofuturistic approaches to urban farming, waste repurposing, and sustainability. She has worked on climate justice projects in cities across the country, including Boston, Massachusetts; Greensboro, North Carolina; and Chicago, Illinois. She was an inaugural winner of the Toms of Maine Climate Justice Incubator and a fellow with the Aspen Institute's Future Climate Leaders fellowship. She is a recipient of the Young Black Climate Leaders Fund and the Young Climate Leaders of Color Fund.
"A lot of this work helps put the power back in people's hands and inspires them to be the change that they want to see in their communities."
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TYLER SPROUSE: Welcome to Meaning Makers of HDS, a podcast by Harvard Divinity School exploring meaning making through religion, spirituality, vocation, and beyond. Each episode of this podcast features HDS alumni and other community members discussing how they cultivate meaningful lives working across an array of fields and how they help others do the same. In this episode, I spoke with Aliyah Collins, MDiv '23, about her impactful work in environmental advocacy and how she helps communities take hopeful action and find meaning in the wake of severe weather events.
I'm Tyler Sprouse, and this is Meaning Makers of HDS. Aliyah, thank you so much for joining us for our second episode of the Meaning Makers of HDS. The episode won't air on Earth Day, but we are having this conversation on Earth Day, which is fitting, given the things that we're going to be speaking about today. So just to begin, I wanted to invite you to introduce yourself and share a little bit about how you found yourself in environmental activism. And just describe a little bit about your work.
ALIYAH COLLINS: Yeah. Thank you, Tyler, for having me. And this podcast space is so unique. And I love it. And I'm happy to see this happening at HDS. So my name is Aliyah Collins. I am born and raised from Jackson, Tennessee, which is a really small town outside of Memphis, Tennessee, so from the West Tennessee area. What got me into, I guess, climate justice work, it wasn't something that I always grew up wanting to do. I didn't necessarily know what climate justice was.
I just started to see a lot of gaps within my community. And there's things in my experience that I didn't know was a problem until obviously you get older and you learn. I think it really started at HDS when I started to learn about the environment and different connections to the environment, different ways of making meaning, especially different ways that faith traditions make meaning of the environment and our connection to the environment. Just learning about that really propelled me.
But when I started the project, it was there at HDS, my last year at HDS. I wanted to do a project around supporting historically Black colleges and universities, learn more about urban gardening, urban farming, and just have more access to green space for the mental health. So I started that because when I was in undergrad at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, we had a horrible natural disaster.
It was a really bad tornado that came through and devastated the North Nashville area, which was very predominantly Black, a very low-income area. So that experience of being in college and having to navigate the impact of that disaster, it was just that experience of how vulnerable we were in the face of a climate emergency. And so I started the project to be in some way a solution to that experience and just training HBCU students to be climate leaders.
TYLER SPROUSE: That's great. Thank you so much for sharing. And you're talking about the Eco Healing Project. What year did you found that?
ALIYAH COLLINS: I found it in 2023, not because I wanted to start a project in my last year of graduate school, but I won a contest through a brand called Tom's of Maine, which is a toothpaste company, which is also the founder of the company is an HDS alum. But Tom's of Maine is a natural toothpaste company.
They started a contest in 2023, an incubator program that if you are a young climate leader had a climate project that you wanted to do, they would give you funding and a mentor to start your project or to scale a project that you already have. So I just, on a whim, had this idea. And my idea got picked. And that's why I was like, OK, I guess, I'm starting my own project now, my own climate justice project. So that was the start of it in 2023.
TYLER SPROUSE: Wow. That's amazing. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more about that convergence between the things that you saw happening on the ground in the aftermath of that climate catastrophe during your time at Fisk in Nashville and your time at HDS and the things that you were learning about the environment and about how different faith traditions approach the environment and climate justice work. What was the relationship there? And how did you bring what you were learning in the classroom to that experience of undergoing that disaster in Nashville?
ALIYAH COLLINS: Yeah. So I think my HDS experience really did inform a lot of how I would build the project. So while I was at HDS, I did my field education with an organization called Open Spirit in Framingham. And that was a multi-faith community that had various different initiatives that they would take on throughout the year. That year when I was a intern, the theme was spiritual perspectives to climate change.
So we spent the whole year planning these different initiatives and these events around each faith tradition's response to the climate crisis and how our traditions activated us to take action. And so just learning about that and the different ways that we responded to things, like industrial pollution, to environmental racism, to just lack of green access, green space, and just the ability to heal as a community with the environment, just some of those things that I saw, and then looking back at my experience in the aftermath of this climate emergency.
I also talked with a lot of my friends, and even my siblings, who also went to historically Black colleges, and had some kind of experience with the environment. My sister went to Jackson State University, which is in Jackson, Mississippi. And they are really known for the water infrastructure issues happening down there. So there's so many times where students didn't have water. Students and the community-- because the issues that happen on campus are also a direct reflection of the problems that the neighborhood in itself is dealing with.
So water issues, lack of water, lack of clean water was a huge issue there. There weren't really a lot of folks mobilizing students or trying to help students take action around that. My brother also went to Morehouse College and was like, no, we didn't really have real initiatives or ways that we could take action around environmental issues. So seeing that kind of correlation and talking with other friends who also navigated different-- have friends who went to HBCUs in New Orleans and talking about navigating some of the hurricanes.
So I think that yeah, just learning those different perspectives to environmental issues really informed around how I wanted to develop the Eco Healing Project. It's not something that was just awareness, but something that can help students take action and just see these issues in different ways.
TYLER SPROUSE: Thank you so much for sharing that. That's really powerful, those connections, and even drawing on the experiences of your family members as well, along with the community members. So that was back in 2023 when you founded the Eco Healing Project. And fast forward to today during-- this is Earth Month 2026 in April. What is the Eco Healing Project doing now? And how has the work continued?
ALIYAH COLLINS: It is a work in progress. It's still building up. So in 2024, we worked with an all-women's HBCU called Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina. It's a small school of about 200 students. They lost a lot of their student population during COVID because they had financial issues that caused them to lose their accreditation. They lost it. And then they got it back in court.
But after they got their accreditation back, the students started a Green Team and wanted to learn more about climate justice sustainability approaches. The Eco Healing Project, we brought them to Chicago for free. And they spent a weekend in Chicago learning about all these different climate justice projects throughout the city that are all Black and Brown led. So they learned about urban farming techniques. They learned about local economies and how people were addressing food apartheid.
They learned about design and how you can use design and art in ways to promote sustainability. So they learned about waste repurposing, how plastic is being turned into resources, public resources like benches and chairs and just different things that people are using waste to make wealth. So that's an experiential learning initiative that we did in 2024. So now what we're trying to do is build an incubator-- or we are building an incubator, a natural incubator for HBCU students across the country who have a climate project idea or something that they're already doing.
We want to fund it. We want to give resources, mentorship, project development, support to help students build their own solutions and build their own projects. And we have an emphasis on the projects being something that the campus can benefit from, but also community. So we really are working to make the institutions more accessible to the public. So that's what we're working on now, really trying to put hours through these hands, so that they can start to be the change that they want to see.
TYLER SPROUSE: That sounds like wonderful work and obviously incredibly important. And just to backtrack a little bit, I'm wondering, what would you say in your experience, and in your learning, and as you've continued to develop the Eco Healing Project, what are important things for listeners to know about ecological and climate challenges that HBCUs and other communities in which those schools are located-- what are some of the big challenges that people face when it comes to the climate and the environment?
ALIYAH COLLINS: Yeah, that's a good question. And I think the answer that-- or response that I hear often is that-- and I think a lot of people hear this is that Black and Brown communities are always the first and worst. They get the first and worst impact of climate emergencies and just the whole entire impact of the climate crisis in general. They're hit the hardest.
And that's true because a lot of these communities are disinvested, so the infrastructure is not there to sustain the level of climate impacts that we're seeing from the climate crisis, so much more vulnerable when extreme weather happens. And then it's just also, too, just lack of access to your basic necessities, so food deserts and not having access to healthy and affordable food. So even if there's a grocery store there, it's not affordable for folks who live there.
I feel like climate justice and just the whole climate field is really, really broad. Climate tech. I mean, there's so many different-- climate financing. It gets really, really broad. But I like to keep it at the basic necessities level of air, food, water, and shelter. So yeah, that's air pollution. A lot of underserved communities, Black and Brown communities, suffer from poor air quality because of the location of industrial plants that are placed in Black and Brown communities, water, clean water.
All of these different things, I feel like are just major challenges that HBCUs face, also the communities that they reside in because most HBCUs are in underserved Black communities. So I think those are some of the challenges. There's so many more because the environment is connected to everything that we do.
TYLER SPROUSE: Thank you. I think it's just important for our listeners and for others just to have that context and have that information in mind when listening to this conversation. I want to turn now to the question of meaning making. I wonder both how this work provides your life with meaning and how you make meaning through the work that you're doing in climate justice and environmental advocacy, but also how the work that you do with the communities that you're serving, these HBCUs and the communities in which they're located, how this work helps other people find meaning amidst recovery efforts from climate catastrophes and other disasters.
ALIYAH COLLINS: Yeah, so-- thanks for that. I mean, I like working in climate justice because I think that it's a really good vantage point to connect folks to. I think that the environment is something that everybody can get. Coming from the environment-- I mean, just from that vantage point, from my experience, it's a great way to start to get people on the same page around the issue because of course, everybody has a connection to the environment, and it has to have a connection to the environment for our livelihood.
So how I create meaning is being able to go into communities who don't know about the words climate justice, or climate mitigation, or carbon capture, or greenhouse gases and emissions. They don't know those topics or those words, but they know about the impact of a climate emergency and having to navigate that. They know about not having accessible transportation options.
They know about issues with trying to find healthy food in local grocery stores, and the air quality, and the asthma that's maybe within their family that they necessarily are not connecting with industrial pollution. So that the meaning for my work, is teaching people-- I guess, decoding a lot of the climate justice buzzwords, helping communities really understand how it affects their day-to-day life. So that's how I creating meaning. And then what was your other question?
TYLER SPROUSE: The other question was linked to that. How do you see-- in that work with other folks, and that doing that teaching, and making those connections, how do you see that bringing a renewed sense of meaning to these communities?
ALIYAH COLLINS: Yeah, so I'll start with the HBCU side. So when we worked with the students from Bennett College and they came and they spent the weekend in Chicago learning about the issues-- Chicago is a very segregated city. And I think-- I just went to talk with the MacArthur Foundation around housing insecurity and housing discrimination and how Chicago was the framework for housing discrimination across the country. And that includes redlining and different practices like that.
So they were able to see that and then how that translated into climate justice issues, how certain communities were divested in because of redlining and different things like that. So after seeing a lot of these things and also seeing the hope, seeing communities building things out of nothing, taking contaminated land and soil, regenerating that land and being productive with the land, i think it gave a sense of hope. And it gave a sense of inspiration for them to be able to say, now what can I do?
So after that, a lot of them started podcasts talking about their experience and talking about environmental justice issues from their vantage point. They started sustainability initiatives on the campus, like clothing swaps to try to mitigate a lot of the waste and just be more resourceful around clothing and different things like that. They started newsletters.
So they started all these different initiatives because they were exposed to climate justice, but they were exposed in an on-the-ground way where it was connected to their everyday realities. And they started to just find small things that you could do to make big change on your campus and in your community. So they started a garden bed project. They did a lot of things. So I think that that's a highlight of the work.
And just outside of that, just in my work in Chicago, just doing work with communities here and environmental justice projects here, I mean, it's just ways for us-- I think the main thing is building community around the environment and just really trying to bring that back because a lot of communities that are divested in, there's a sense of lack of hope. There's a sense of-- a lot of people feel like they don't have power to change things. So I think a lot of this work helps really put the power back in people and just inspire them to be the change that they want to see and know that they can.
TYLER SPROUSE: In closing, when you're working with these communities, how do you see that taking shape in your approach to the work? And I'm thinking about maybe the grief or the sorrow of the loss that some of these communities experience in the wake of climate crises, but then also how your work fosters that hope to make some of the transformation that you're describing.
ALIYAH COLLINS: Yes. That's a good question. And actually, when I was at HDS, we did a panel called Climate Justice as Racial Justice. We talked about that with the panel around climate grief-- that definitely came up-- and how our work addresses that, what approaches that we take. So I feel like a project that I did that really touches on that in Chicago was-- so we did a memorial garden-- it's called a forgiveness garden-- in honor of Emmett Till.
Emmett Till was a young 14-year-old boy who was murdered in Mississippi while visiting his family. And his murder was the spark of the civil rights movement. And so his neighborhood, which is predominantly Black, was a prominent neighborhood back during the Great Migration, but since, over time, of course, experienced divestment.
So we worked on a project called the Mamie Till Forgiveness Garden that took up a vacant lot on the block right down the street from his house that was just polluted. There was waste and trash there. And it was just a sore eye in the neighborhood. We took that garden and turned it into a rain garden that is called the Mamie Forgiveness Garden. And that is in honor of his mother. This was an organization called Blacks In Green.
So it was in honor of his mother. And it was a way to promote racial healing from that traumatic experience that happened so many years ago, but still so resonant because of just how severe and traumatizing that murder really was. But it really promoted community healing and took a space that was just a sore eye and then made it this beautiful space that also helps with climate mitigation because the area because divested in. The infrastructure floods a lot. The South Side floods a lot.
So this garden also helps control the flooding and brings beauty and a sense of hope to the neighborhood. And it promotes racial healing at the same time. So just things like that, I think, can help with climate grief and just using that grief to activate solutions and participate in community healing. Yeah, just using the grief for a purpose.
TYLER SPROUSE: I love that. Thank you so much again, Aliyah, for joining us today and for sharing with us so much about this impactful work you're doing with the Eco Healing Project. And just thank you so much for your time. And we can't wait to see where that project continues to go.
ALIYAH COLLINS: Yes. Thank you so much. This was so nice. I love being able to do things for my alma mater. So this is so cool. And please keep up the great work. And please keep up the great conversations around the climate crisis and our way forward.
TYLER SPROUSE: Meaning Makers of HDS is presented by the Office of Communications at Harvard Divinity School. It is produced, hosted, and edited by me, Tyler Sprouse. Thank you for listening. Tune in next time for another episode of Meaning Makers of HDS.
Show notes:
Banner image and logo by Kristie Welsh
Intro/outro music: "Running On Home" by Joel Stewart, courtesy of Universal Production Music