Amelia is a vegan, queer, feminist, musician and artist, and most recently a farmer, hailing from the Great Lakes region. Born in Chicago, she grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan and spent most summers on Lake Huron. This grounding in place and water has inspired her to explore the complex meanings of what it means to wade through and reflect on the water we are living in now, to confront and live the unprecedented challenges and opportunities of climatic change.
She recently graduated from Beloit College in Wisconsin with a dual degree in Literary Arts and Environmental Communication and Arts, determined to keep learning outside of formal contexts and committed to building climate justice. In spring 2016, she was fortunate to have the opportunity to study the role of community art in disaster recovery in Christchurch, New Zealand. While in college, Amelia wrote and edited for her campus newspaper and has worked as Communications Coordinator for the Unitarian Universalist Young Adults for Climate Justice Network. As someone with white and middle-class privilege, she believes in deep listening as an act of love, and the power of storytelling to bear witness and lift accountability to ourselves and our surroundings.
Raised Quaker, Amelia became Unitarian Universalist in high school and found an urgency in interfaith organizing. While leading an interfaith community task force fighting for incarceration justice, she was inspired her to find connections between climate justice and other social justice movements, such as fossil fuel (and prison) abolition. She is a recipient of the Beloit College Weissberg Human Rights Grant and is trained as a dialogue facilitator. She is also passionate about intentional communities, informal anti-capitalist economies, and biking.
Holding that questions are often more important than answers, she greets the despair and uncertainty of her personal and our collective future by walking and listening. In October, she will be walking from Paris to Bonn as a symbolic, literal and spiritual act of moving towards progress at COP23, embodying her role as witness to the planet’s precarity and possibility.
