Dineen attributes her love for the world and her motivation to act to the Northeast: the Atlantic shores of Eastern Long Island, pine tree forests and lakes of Midcoast Maine, and the green hills and valleys of Western Massachusetts. She is a community organizer, mobilizer, educator, musician, and a friend. Dineen is a recent graduate of Hampshire College, having just completed a thesis on youth engagement in the UNFCCC following her participation in the SustainUS COP22 Delegation. Throughout college, she feels her most valuable learning came from outside of the classroom and spent all of her four years actively engaged in the local and regional resistance against fracked gas pipelines: Kinder Morgan’s Northeast Energy Direct (completely defeated!) and the Connecticut Expansion (still fighting today). She co-founded the Sugar Shack Alliance, a nonviolent direct action organization that’s since trained hundreds of activists in the Western Massachusetts region and built an ever-growing strategic and passionate movement in the process. Her work in defeating a multi-billion dollar pipeline has forever instilled a deeply-rooted sense of hope in her heart, knowing that grassroots movements will bring about the level of change our planet and society so desperately require.
As one of the two leaders for the COP23 Delegation, as well as this year’s Delegations Coordinator for SustainUS, Dineen is humbly eager to continue SustainUS’s legacy of providing a powerful international platform for young people to advocate for justice and strengthen cross-national youth movements, all while bringing skills and deeply-bonded relationships back home.
