Leaders We Admire: Simone Lightfoot

Simone Lightfoot, Associate Vice President of Environmental Justice and Climate Justice at the National Wildlife Federation, gets to the heart of environmental justice, explains how her team is working to connect Black students to green careers and shares her secret recipe to success as a Black woman and cancer survivor.

Simone Lightfoot doesn’t rest until the job is done. She wakes up to 300 emails every morning and hits the ground running, tracking news from Capitol Hill about environmental legislation. Simone is the Associate Vice President of Environmental Justice and Climate Justice at the National Wildlife Federation (NWF). Her team addresses conservation and wildlife issues that impact frontline communities, from access to clean and affordable water to urban impacts of climate change to the transition of post-industrial urban centers.

Simone has vast expertise in advocating for communities of color — from her 20 years at the NAACP to her work at the Environmental Protection Agency and as deputy chief of staff in the Michigan House of Representatives. At NWF, she draws on her experience working with state and federal policymakers, agencies and nonprofits to represent the needs of Black and Brown communities at the highest levels of government, fighting to ensure that funding goes to frontline and urban communities where environmental impacts are often the greatest.

Planet Women has gotten to know Simone through our partnership on the National Wildlife Federation’s program to connect Black students and students of color to green careers. Their next event is for HBCU students, faculty and alumni on Wed. Sept 22 at 5PM Eastern Time. Register here!

(This interview has been edited for length.)

Pictured: Simone Lightfoot

Planet Women: What does environmental justice mean to you?

Simone Lightfoot: I love to keep it simple. It’s where people put things that people don’t want, period. Whether it’s the housing, whether it’s the infrastructure that doesn’t get addressed, whether it’s the parks or lack of parks, the schools, you name it, the floods, the coal-fired power plants. Where people put those things that they don’t want to think about, see, or deal with in their own places and spaces.

And when you talk about climate justice, it’s really just a manifestation of environmental justice because we see where the floods happen and then how the recovery occurs. How are we planning to deal with flood zones and who is benefiting? Who is in the “sacrifice zones,” as we like to say? Who is in those communities like Cancer Alley [in Louisiana] and Flint, Michigan with the water crisis?

PW: Those communities are not well represented in the larger conservation NGOs. Since it’s primarily communities of color that are in those sacrifice zones, as you said. And 88% of staff at green NGOs are white. Green NGOs spend a lot of time talking about recruiting for diversity, but your work is also focused on engaging BIPOC students and recent graduates earlier in the career pipeline, as they are pursuing science and conservation education. Talk a little bit about that.

SL: Well definitely earlier in the pipeline, I mean even at elementary school would be great! And we also are very big on focusing on business opportunities, not just jobs. Oftentimes when you talk about students of color, particularly Black students, the notion is blah blah blah — and jobs. They get promised jobs with almost every infrastructure project. We see new stadiums go up in urban centers, but not those jobs that were narrated to accompany the tax breaks for that stadium. The manifestation of those jobs doesn’t come as promised. So people’s eyes glaze over when you come again, talking about promising all these jobs.

Dr. Mustafa Ali [Vice President of Environmental Justice, Climate, and Community Revitalization at NWF] is also big on business opportunities, economic opportunity, so that Black and Brown people are owning solar and owning battery — owning, not just working in. We want jobs but we have to have economic inclusion as well. And with this large pot of money coming, the largest we’ve ever seen actually, moving through the government. If we don’t make it happen now, when? So that’s why NWF has our Clean Economy Coalition of Color. All Black and Brown folks come together and we talk solar and we talk wind. We connect policy to people and public health. We make sure that folks know about opportunities, whether it’s jobs or a hearing that is coming up. We tell them, “We need you on the Hill, we’ll get you zoomed in and get you on the agenda.” Leveraging those types of opportunities so that those folks in the streets can be in the suite sharing their perspective and helping shape this policy that’s coming out.

PW: Tell us about the HBCU program and the Green Careers Roundtable that you’re hosting.

SL: We’re excited! The HBCU Green Careers Roundtable is designed by HBCU students. Our summer interns [and Thurgood Marshall Fellows] designed it. They made it a speed dating-style of professional development, so the speakers each have three to seven minutes to present a crash course. We have some grad students and seniors who are going to talk to younger students about things like, “what I wish I had known.” And then we’ll have folks who are working in the green space now who can talk about what a day in their life is like, what their challenges were, how they made it into a green career and how non-traditional that path was or was not, how they navigated race, and in some cases, gender. And the last section is on networking — tricks of the trade.

We have great representation. We had a call with the Obama Foundation last week and they’re going to participate, so we’re really excited to have them. Amnesty International is on board. We also have a young artist out of Watts, California [Warren Dickson of 3rd Rock Hip Hop]. He’s a rapper in the green conservation space. He has some words for the young people about how you know, basically, they owe it to the community to do well. You know, he was making different choices early on in life. He’s come into conservation later, but they have the opportunity to start early. He’s doing a performance piece to open for us, but he also just wants to speak from the heart.

PW: That sounds fantastic! Is that session is open to anybody who’s at a historically Black college and university or can any student of color sign up?

SL: Well, honestly, it is open to anyone interested. There’ll be people on there that are not in HBCUs but are in a community college or in high school. The artist asked yesterday, he has some young people he mentors in California, they want to see him perform so can they get on? Like, great! Maybe we’ll inspire them to go to HBCUs, so of course.

PW: You’ve had a really interesting list of jobs, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Air Force. Tell us a little bit about what has driven you throughout your career. Do you see a motivation or a theme?

SL: Yeah, I do. I always say I was born to lead, I was raised to serve and I was trained to fight. What I mean by that is, service is one, but two sets of threads go through there. Leadership, taking charge, that is in there. And fighting, but implementing a level of discernment. Because sometimes you fight, sometimes you need to be diplomatic. Sometimes you need to talk, sometimes you need to be quiet. That’s a thread that I would say.

The other thing is, I take qualities to jobs. I don’t worry about the job. I take qualities. I take tenacity. I take grit. I don’t take no for an answer. I finish the job. You stay till it gets done. Nobody should be able to tell me something about my project or my team or my work that I don’t already know. That’s how you maintain a level of dignity and leadership as a woman. There’s nothing like being a woman going into a setting, particularly of men, they get such pleasure in sharing information that you’re not privy to. And then as a Black woman it’s even worse. I really double down on my team and even my children. You don’t let stuff go without me knowing about it. We’ll figure it out, but don’t leave me ass out like that because it’s double punishment as a Black woman. I’m really big on that.

And I’m big on God. I do what I want to do. All I do is ask him, he will let me know and I will just work my butt off. Between his permission and my work ethic, I’ve been able to get everything I wanted. I even beat cancer. I had breast cancer, and I remember when I was diagnosed, he talked me all the way through it. So now, I always say I’m military trained and I beat cancer! You think I’m scared of you? You’ve got trouble on your hands if you’re dealing with Simone Lightfoot.

PW: It’s a rough time to be graduating college or high school — in the middle of the pandemic when climate change is only getting worse. To somebody who’s thinking about getting into an environmental career, what kind of encouragement would you have for students?

SL: It’s where they are most needed. We need solutions to these floods. We need to solutions to people literally not going to be able to live on the coast of our country. How do we handle that? What are the logistics? I was in logistics in the military. How do we handle the logistics of moving people like we need to move them and what do we do in those spaces?

I would tell them, whatever your passion, use your passion to protect our natural resources. If you’re a rapper, rap about water. If you’re a cartoonist, do cartoons about stewardship, you know? And if you’re a reporter, write about eco stuff. You can still be and do you. Just do it in the name of protecting our natural resources. And you don’t have to do it all the time. You could do it some of the time. But make that a part of your stewardship as a human being.

The other thing is I’d say to them, going into this kind of work, be very clear you’re going to come into very White spaces. And so, you need to be very clear that you need to protect your mental health. Very clear. When you feel like, “I think they were being racist.” Yep! They were. Don’t you doubt yourself. Don’t spend time doubting yourself. Spend time protecting yourself and learning how to navigate those situations. You’re not going to be able to diffuse all of them, especially not overnight. But master navigating them and be prepared for that.

This generation is so blessed they don’t have to stay as long as I did. I talked to a young lady yesterday she’s only one of two [Black] crop-cover engineers out of her whole class and out of the whole region. I think there is only four in the whole country. I was talking to her like, wow, she can literally do a few years, several years and get her network together, and then she can work from home. They will pay her as a consultant to come and check crops. There is more emphasis on justice, equity, Black, Brown. Folks have got more boxes they have to check finding Black staff, Black contractors, Black, Black, Black. And so if you’re one of only a few, you can sit at home and you can send a drone and check out folks’ crops and send a report on how good it was. There are opportunities for them to have a better work-life balance than Mustafa or I did in our day. I never heard of work-life balance if you were doing authentic civil rights, social justice, environmental work, period. And so when I hear people talk about that, I think about that privilege.

When I came to the National Wildlife Federation after leaving the NAACP, going from a very Black organization to a very White organization. I’ve been here [at NWF] for 13 years, I was there [at NAACP] for 20. When I came into NWF, I said, “Well do y’all talk to the NAACP president?” And they said, “Oh, no we don’t have a grant for that.” And I was like, wow, so you only do work you get a grant for. That was so foreign to me. That means that you have to have a grant to just pick up the phone and say, “Hey, how are you doing? I’d love to talk to you about what you were doing. Can we go to lunch?” You don’t naturally know how to do that?

So with those kind of differences, I would tell young, particularly students of color, this is the time to be the dot connector culturally. You have a lot of White folk who want to get it right. You have some that don’t, but a lot of them, they want to get it right, they just don’t know how. And your ability to connect those dots, your brain trust to do that, your network to do that, that’s money.