
Hi, everyone! Thank you. Warren, Kathleen, it’s such a pleasure to be here today! I have learned so much about Intertwine from you both and am bowled away by your vision for Portland metro and for your own coalitions. Thank you for inviting me. It’s an honor to be speaking with you all this afternoon—I appreciate your commitment to the work of integrating nature, and equitable access to its benefits, into your cities. I also appreciate that that commitment has brought you indoors on this extraordinarily beautiful day.
As Warren mentioned, I work at The Nature Conservancy (TNC) alongside Kathleen. We are an international organization that was originally founded here in the United States as a land trust, back in the 1950s. Now we work in all 50 states and over 70 countries on the most significant environmental challenges of our time: protecting land and water, providing food and water sustainably, tackling climate change and building healthy cities.

I lead our cities work in our North America region, which includes Canada and the Caribbean, as well as the U.S. where most of our urban work resides. We have 45 full-time staff working in 24 cities across 22 states, where our vision is to change the relationship between cities and nature so that natural solutions and conservation are recognized as essential components of a healthy, just and climate-resilient city.
TNC’s journey into cities started somewhere around 2012-2013. At the time, I was working in New York City at Columbia University in public health infectious disease research. I was a scientific program manager, and my one big claim to fame was that I co-led a project with a dear friend of mine—we were looking to see which diseases the rats of New York City were carrying, and so to do that we had to find creative ways to catch them in subways, parks and housing.
While in my professional life I was busy impersonating subway workers and learning the art of collaborating with one particular invasive species, outside of work I was pretty active in New York City’s urban agriculture, vacant land and open space community. I was an enthusiastic community gardener and eventually joined the board of the Brooklyn Queens Land Trust, a community garden land trust which holds title to about five acres, all active gardens, mostly in black and immigrant neighborhoods. These plots of land had been loved, tended and farmed by neighbors through the 80s and 90s when urban divestment was at its peak and, through some significant activism, an environmental coalition was able to save these community gardens and create a land trust to steward them. It was a powerful and transformative experience for me being a part of this community—so much so that I set my sights on urban conservation for a career path. I had never actually set my sights on anything before in that way, but I was a scientist, an urban planning student and now an activist, and so a place like TNC sounded perfect.
I had been a little slow on the uptake ... My actual job was to serve as the embodiment of a culture shift and even identity crisis in a hallowed, 60-year-old institution.
I applied to a couple of jobs—I did not get those—before finding one that sounded so perfect I couldn’t believe it: launching a brand-new network of urban conservation programs across the country, with two years of guaranteed funding. It was a national job posting and I had no real connections, but I knew I had to try. Within about six weeks I was the finalist for the position, somehow. I had never had this kind of clarity of desire for anything, ever, in my life. When they were checking my references I was so nervous! I did yoga twice a day, I MEDITATED (friends, I am not a meditator), I ironed every dinner napkin I owned (friends, neither am I an ironer.) In September of 2014, babies, I got the job. I knew my life had changed.
In my first six months on the job, I spent more time traveling than I did at home. I helped interview candidates in 10 cities, looking to find the right person for each place—Miami’s needs are so different than Phoenix’s—while also building a complementary cohort across the country. We were all going to be the frontline for TNC to learn how to work in cities, and across communities and neighborhoods. I got to meet dedicated TNC staff in so many different geographies and learn more about their vision for their own natural places. And as I was doing this, something began to dawn on me: I had been a little slow on the uptake, this entire time.
You see, I thought the job was what was in the job description—lead the build-out of a brand-new program, help everyone learn together, set a strategy and a vision for the organization’s work in cities. It turns out, though, that wasn’t really the job at all.
My actual job was to serve as the embodiment of a culture shift and even identity crisis in a hallowed, 60-year-old institution, with over 3,000 staff just in the U.S. Big Green knew it was long past time to be in the urban space, just like in Brooklyn and Queens cities were once again the place to be. That’s where the cultural capitals and financial capitals live, with 80 percent of the U.S. population living in urban areas. How can you broaden the base for conservation if you are not relevant in cities? How will people understand the importance of our work, and continue to value and support it, if they can’t even see it? Conservation, they knew, must be made visible, and relevant, in cities and to city dwellers.
When you feel afraid to give up your privileges, or decenter your own needs and experiences, remember how much solidarity will join you on the other side.
Now, to me, something about that framing never quite sat right. Part of it was the positing of “nature” and “people” as these completely separate entities. Part of it was the conflation of “people” with “cities,” and “urban” as a qualifier of “conservation.” Some of it was the odd timing of us not investing in cities during the 60s through 90s, and then treating them like some brave new empty world that we could enter, maybe sort of colonize. OH! Was this some sort of environmental colonialism? Oh no. Well, hmm…
At that point I had two compartments in my head. One where I gave talks or wrote blogs about the importance of nature in cities, where I made sure to emphasize the importance of community autonomy in their own decision-making and TNC’s desire to support that. Let’s call this “Compartment A.” Over here, the work is complex, and the actors are all well-meaning and we get to work together to find transformative, long-lasting solutions, especially at the places where we agree. We want everyone to have a seat at the table and think all voices should be heard.
In the other compartment, I stacked my stories and my observations. Let’s call this “Compartment B.” Compartment B held the weird problem where there were “environmental groups” and “environmental justice groups.” Weirdly, environmental groups were mostly, or historically, white, and environmental justice groups were often led by people of color and had fewer resources. Environmental justice groups were seen as combative, naïve, having an agenda, difficult to work with.

In Compartment B, I spent a lot of off-the-clock time talking to TNC’s on-the-ground staff in cities. They were constantly leveraging their own relational capital to build trust with local organizations. They were building trust despite the TNC brand, not because of it. Whenever I floated this concept to my leadership it was met with disbelief, or the kind of concern where you can see one problem, but not the pattern, let alone the system. I kept stacking.
In this compartment, too, were the weird little insults and injustices. I’ll tell you a story. The secular charitable arm of a Hindu religious organization held walkathons one year across the country to raise money for our forestry work. Our development staff called me and asked that I come accept the check on behalf of TNC. They were interested in urban forestry, I was told, so will you please come and join us and give a little speech. Ok, sure. Plus, I had never accepted a novelty check before, and that seemed like a cool way to spend a Saturday.
I grew up in the Hindu religion, and since this ceremony was at a Hindu temple, I knew to dress appropriately in a salwar kameez and in shoes that would slip off easily. When I got there my hosts gave me a tour of this beautiful temple, all sculpted in Carrera marble, and afterward I easily found my TNC cohort, none of whom I had met before. I smiled and said hello, and the four of them smiled back at me, vaguely and politely. Ohhh, I realized. I’m Indian, and you are all white! And you probably think I’m a temple person, not a TNC person. Ok, well, so I introduce myself, “Hi, I’m Meera! I’m actually with TNC!” One woman looked at me and said, “Oh, hi! Are you from our India program?” I think I just paused for a second and then said, “No, I’m from our America program!” And then, that went in the stack. Every time someone assumed I was an assistant or not a director due to my gender, or age, or race, or who even knows, that went in a stack. Every time I devalued my own perspective because it seemed more relevant to capture the perspectives of others, well, that got stuck in there too.
Back in Compartment A, I’m glad to be asked to come to more and more board meetings, to talk about our work. Sometimes it’s about our cities work in general. Sometimes, it’s about equity, or community engagement, or participatory conservation. Well, equity and community engagement and inclusion are explicit parts of TNC’s North America Cities strategy—work I feel strongly about, so I’m happy to give either a talk and also happy to bring elements of each into the other.
“Partnership” is to “coalition” as “circle” is to “sphere.” There is an entire universe of added complexity, of mission alignment and thoughtfulness to power dynamics.
But then, I asked myself: Does this body of work perpetuate TNC’s, and Big Green’s, dominant cultural narrative? Or does it dismantle this narrative?
So, this continues up until the summer of 2017. There are two different realities, and I’m having an easier and easier time articulating them. I explicitly called out the dichotomy in our field guide, where I wrote these two paragraphs next to each other:
Cities might seem like a new frontier for The Nature Conservancy, but we’ve actually been doing this kind of work all along. Our calling card is our ability to get things done with various partners, and working with urban partners isn’t essentially different than working with their rural counterparts. We are avoiding the ‘paralysis of analysis’ and using our proven strategies. We use our expertise, work in the radical center, and we make sure to keep things moving. We get things done.
I contrasted that with this:
The urban context is incredibly complex and raises issues of systemic neglect by mainstream institutions, including large environmental NGOs such as The Nature Conservancy. The well-being of people in cities should not be fully entrusted to outside experts. Communities must have a voice in their own opportunities. We are biodiversity and connectivity experts. Working in cities in service of human well-being raises many complex issues that will be new to many of us. Working sensitively across differences in privilege, race, class, immigration status and gender requires a fearless investigation of both ourselves and our organization. If we have the hubris to think we know the answers, we are likely to do more harm than good.
So, as I said, my job was to be the embodiment of this identity crisis. Can these both be true? Across millions of dollars, millions of people and dozens of cities, of course, almost everything contradictory can be true at the same time.
But then, I asked myself: Does this body of work perpetuate TNC’s, and Big Green’s, dominant cultural narrative? Or does it dismantle this narrative?
But in the summer of 2017, here’s what started to change: I cared about what was true FOR ME. For almost three years I had been holding TNC’s cities work in a sort of ideological limbo. We unapologetically and enthusiastically lifted up work in frontline and low-income communities, but any time our internal Diversity, Equity and Inclusion team wanted to partner, I’d put up resistance. “Why cities? Why not agriculture?” Yeah, I was a treat. But, I didn’t want to be seen as, “THAT BROWN PEOPLE PROGRAM,” not only led by a Person of Color but also about people of color. I subconsciously knew that’s the best way to be marginalized in a powerful, historically white organization. Maybe if a white man was in charge, maybe he could talk about this stuff and seem brave, maybe, but my job, in this body, was to be avuncular and impeccable. Women and people of color in this room, you will know about this—my parents, and my mom especially, instilled me with that age-old dictum: You’ll have to work twice as much to get half as far, so you better work four times as hard.
Well, working four times as hard was taking its toll, but, also, I was experiencing a privilege. A privilege of leadership, and of funding and of…not caring any more. Of finding my community inside TNC, and, most gratifyingly, inside the network I helped to launch. As I started to decenter the dominant power structure for myself, as I started to value a countercultural power narrative, racial equity in all its dimensions and intersections really charged to the forefront for me. It was clear, like a bell.
This whole time, I had been straddling a fence because my own organization, and our partners too, were trying to understand the North America Cities Network and put it in a box. It’s normal to put things in boxes, but I had been trying to resist categorization. Especially because these boxes, I realized, were about race.
The history of conservation in this country is inextricably linked to white supremacy. Protectionism, manifest destiny, the assumptions behind which land is “wild” and which land is “settled,” the big gray areas in our conservation mapping where cities are. Our heroes, like Teddy Roosevelt. Yikes. How somehow environmental justice is “niche.” How for 60 years environmental issues in cities were outside the purview. You can stretch yourself to the limit, finding alternative narratives that are race-blind or race-neutral. Or, you can build yourself a couple of compartments, and tell yourself both stories at the same time, the way I did.

But then, I asked myself: Does this body of work perpetuate TNC’s, and Big Green’s, dominant cultural narrative? Or does it dismantle this narrative?
I used my privilege to decide—this is a brown program, in a white organization. This program decenters the default narrative of TNC as a great force in conservation and for cities. We don’t start with the assumption that we are doing good, or that doing something is better than doing nothing.
Undoing that framing has been such hard work. It’s hard to value followership the way I value leadership, to tell powerful stories without being the hero of them. Even inside myself this is difficult, though I have so many allies and trusted partners.
Structurally undoing this framing is orders of magnitude more work.
In our communications, we are training ourselves to use asset-based instead of deficit-based framing of our communities and partners. It’s shocking how embedded deficit-based framing is when talking about communities of color, especially Black, Latinx, Indigenous and immigrant communities.
In our programs, how can we center racially equitable partnerships? How can we develop internal skills to form meaningful partnerships across such vast differences in power and resources? How can we see and value the tremendous power and resources that communities of color have and bring to the table? How can we show ourselves to be worthy of trust? And, how can we balance the time it takes to build this trust with the urgency we all feel, as climate change intensifies the magnitude and unequal distribution of environmental consequences?
In our funding, how do we dismantle the systems that privilege such large amounts of funding to TNC and other organizations like us, when that funding is what keeps me able to do this work and talk about it, like this, to audiences like you? How do we participate in equitable philanthropy with our outsized footprint?
Ok. I wanted to share with you this history and these stories, because I think they have led me to the same conclusion that you’ve all drawn. Partnership is vital, and partnering across power, privilege, funding, race, class, gender, is one of the hardest things to actually support and fundraise for. We end up “invisibilizing” this most important work, to focus on tangible outcomes that funders and constituents love to see. And deserve to see.
We don’t start with the assumption that we are doing good, or that doing something is better than doing nothing.
So my goal over the last couple of years has been to make visible the importance of these types of equitable partnerships. To invest in them, and to make sure TNC and the philanthropic and environmental communities really see their value. And as we continue on in this work, I believe what you believe—the next stage will be practicing equitable coalition. And “partnership” is to “coalition” as “circle” is to “sphere.” There is an entire universe of added complexity, of mission alignment and thoughtfulness to power dynamics.
As you continue to deepen your alliance, I invite you to embed yourself in the concepts of collaborative, coalition-based leadership and followership. I invite you to move between one-on-one partnerships into many-on-many coalitions, and back and forth, and see how these partnerships inform your coalition, and vice versa. We will be learning from you, and many others will too.
I invite you to be brave, to tell your own stories, as I am learning to tell mine. I wanted to share with you a quote from Arundhati Roy, “There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”
If your voice is one that is heard loud and clear, it is not that you need to speak for others. Your skill will be to listen, and to value silence. I promise there are people who are already speaking, even if you can’t hear them yet. When you feel afraid to give up your privileges, or decenter your own needs and experiences, remember how much solidarity will join you on the other side. Remember, if your power is recognized, your journey will be seen as brave.
And for those of you who are the deliberately silenced and preferably unheard, I want you to know that you can claim the center from an experience that others see as marginal. You have a gift, though it was hard won—you know how to move across and between, from dominant to countercultural, across power and privilege. Use that intentionally, and with less trepidation than I feel giving you this advice.
As someone who is both heard and unheard, seen and unseen, the margin and the center, I appreciate your attention today. You have my deep respect and gratitude. Our futures are intertwined. Thank you.