eva
Eva Malis is a community organizer from Los Angeles, CA and was a former Uplift coordinator in 2018. Eva is a friend and member of the wider Uplift community.
Lyrica: What is in your opinion the role of young people with-in the climate justice movement?
Eva: Ohh hahah I feel like that - I feel like I've answered this question a lot of times. Uhm ok. The role of young people in the climate justice movement -The role of young people in every social movement, like historically, as a pattern is that young people are always the visionaries and the ones pushing movements to be most radically like devoted to our values. And young people bring a lot of energy to movements- yeah - in many intergenerational organizing spaces, young people are the one-the ones bringing new energy and excitement, new ideas and yeah, I think are the ones most down to I guess envision organizing differently, envision what our movements look like differently and keep like pushing and thinking creatively about how to push our movements to be stronger and more effective
Lyrica: Yeah I feel like that makes sense and it kind of feels like it's almost young people's responsibility to be more radical and sort of push the like boundaries of what we think is possible. A follow-up question that might be really similar and if you don’t have anything else to say that's totally fine...
...Why is it necessary for movements to be led by young people?
Eva: Mmm. Uhm similarly to how we like look to leadership of like BIPOC, queer folks, disabled folks and other identities that are oppressed, like young people, because of ageism which is a system of oppresion, like young people don't - are disempowered by societal structures yet are so impacted by -like in the context of climate justice movement but by other issues and so like, not only to young people bring a lot of like skills, visions, energy, and like other benefits to movements, but also like their input and leadership is like-like there's no option but to follow that if we're really committed to counteracting ageism in our movements.
Lyrica: Yeah, thank you. I think this question is a good like kind of-you kind of flowed into it really well
...How are young people treated within the larger environmental movement?
Eva: Ah a juicy one, in the environmental movement, young people literally like are either tokenized or exploited. Right like they're exploited by being forced to do like unpaid internships to like do work their really passionate about within the movement, or like really low uhm paid internships, or even if they are decently paid it's still like young folks in environmental movement-and I'm thinking non profits because like, lets be honest the environmental movement like 100% nonprofits pretty much or maybe like 95% nonprofit led which is a problem uhm. But uh like even in paid positions, young people's opinions and visions are very much undervalued and like experience is more valued. Uhm, so there's a lot of exploitation that happens in like environmental movement spaces. And then like when environmental nonprofits or organizations try to follow youth leadership it's almost always in a very tokenizing way. Uhm, like I feel like youth climate strike is the biggest example where It's just like all these adults behind the scenes with little puppet strings you know like, just like hovering and trying to take credit for like youth to like speak up about climate change and there's so many other examples - pretty much like every youth program within an environmental nonprofit, and maybe I'm dissing some people who are doing good work, but in most cases it's just like actually about tokenizing youth and being able to get the nonprofit more funding, more grant foundation funding uhm to like- by saying oh, "we're doing- we're supporting youth, you know we're working with youth" uh so i think within the environmental movement like although there's like so much attention on youth because there's-especially with climate change there's so much emphasis on doing this work for the sake of future generations and for youth and uhm, there's still like so much ageism that gets in the way of like following youth leadership.
Lyrica: cool thank you
...As a former Uplift coordinator, this kind of speaks to what you were just saying, what is your opinion of the role of like youth- led, like youth-powered autonomous organizations in like the climate movement, in the climate justice movement?
Eva: mm ok. Ok. This will be a longer one. Let me think uhm so I guess more generally, in my opinion like youth led-like actually youth led groups uhm often autonomous or like volunteer led or you know like not completely engrossed in the nonprofit sector are the only ones actually organizing, you know, at the grassroots level and actually doing movement work and in this way, they're able to - it's such a huge role to play, but they're carrying so much of the weight of the rest of the movement in terms of pushing other environmental organizations to do better, in all kinds of regards, and then simultaneously like actually doing the work which is already in itself so much. Could you ask the question again?
Lyrica: Yeah of course. As a former Uplift coordinator, what is your opinion of the role of the autonomous youth-led organizations in the movement? And in your opinion what makes youth led groups feel the need to be autonomous or separate from the mainstream environmental movement?
Eva: So I guess where I was going with that is like that the role of these autonomous youth-led organizations is uhm simultaneously to push the rest of the movement or bring the rest of the movement along with us and also do the actual work that the rest of the movement isn't doing which like can specifically look like taking greater risks in direct actions, or having actual authentic relationships with frontline communities that aren't extractive or exploitative, uhm being in solidarity with other movements...all these things like - it's almost always the youth taking the lead on that. Uhm, and sometimes non-youth organizations will follow, but a lot of the times the youth-led organizations have to drag them along.
I think that uhm my experience working in nonprofits was really eye opening to me in terms of what organizing work can actually be -in a nonprofit and what the many limitations are,
But like it was just really eye opening that like anything-any direction that I wanted to take that would actually have an impact and be most useful to the climate justice movement in the Southwest was like always shut down by some- by like bureaucratic policies, or straight up power tripping, or like a lot of alarmism over radical ideas which ultimately just like yeah led us to be pretty ineffective or like have our effectiveness limited a lot and I was simultaneously educating like the nonprofit.
Yeah, which is really eye opening for me in terms of this pattern of nonprofits like holding power uhm and like through resource distribution in our movements, and being able to like actually be obstacles to collective liberation. And so that kind of- that experience really turned me away from nonprofits in general like at least non profit organizing, like I don’t know if I'll ever want to be a paid organizer again - I, ever since the have been doing all volunteer organizing.
Lyrica: Yeah, this has been great, Eva. How are you careful to not implement the systems you’re fighting against in your work?
Eva: Hmm, another good question. It's one of those things where like, I don't ever think I'll be ever able to say that I'm fully there. Like I'm never going to not fuck up and replicate like the literal culture that I'm swimming in which is a culture of many intersecting opressions. But I think that embodying our values is one of the biggest ways that society transforms and that social change happens is when I'm able to have anti-oppressive interactions with my family, my housemates, my coworkers, strangers I meet on the street, like if I'm able to show up-and with myself, when I'm alone. If I'm able to show up with the same values of love, passion for justice, commitment to like care, uhm then that is like -that is the change, you know. Like being able to exist in those ways. Uh I guess the like, whatchamacallit, the jargon term is like living prefigurately. Yeah so I guess going back to the questions, it's one of those things that Im never going to be like, 'i don't do that,' 'I don’t replicate the systems of oppression,' I'm never going to be able to say that fully, but uhm i'm committed to it and I always will be so, mm because I think that that is how we build this world together is by committing ourselves to embodying those values, our shared collective values of what liberation looks like, and our shared commitment to liberation I guess. Yeah, that's it.
Lyrica: Yeah, that's all beautiful. And, lastly, what advice or like words do you have to young people who are just now becoming politically engaged, or politically self aware or like politically active?
Eva: Mhmm. Ok. A couple-I have a lot of things, feel free to just choose from them. But my-one thing-my first thing is really understanding that self care equals collective care and that we don't need to, as individuals, take on all of the world's problems, and prioritize those over our own health and well being. So like my biggest organizing lesson, I think, is realizing if I'm not taking care of myself well like I'm not taking care of my community, and so if I'm stretching myself so hard to get all of this organizing done for the sake of a community that I care about or a movement I care about, that's actually harming the movement. So like self care is collective care- self harm is harming the community too. If we can see those things as inseparable, me not taking good care of myself isn't going to allow me to show up in the way my community needs me to show up. And like the people who care about me are going to be impacted if they see that I'm not doing well. So taking responsibility for our own healing is going to allow us to just be better contributors to our communities and is going to prevent us from causing more harm to our communities. So I really really think that taking an approach to our personal healing is like the biggest priority in organizing and especially in this pandemic where it's like, it's enough to just survive this. It can be so easy with everything else going on that you don’t take care of yourself, it's like so hard to actually take good care of ourselves. So that's my first thing
And related to that- Uplift was a huge lesson in this for me in understanding that we-we can take breaks from organizing, because after Uplift I took like a six month break from any organizing and then I jumped back in, and not only did everyone welcome me back in without any resentment for me disappearing, but like I was able to see how the work just carried on without me and that was really humbling and reassuring that so much could happen-like I came back and y'all were like basically already a non-profit. All these committees, working committees just enacted the dream we'd been dreaming of. So it just proved to me, like, we can all step away- or like move away for a few months, just focus on ourselves, come back. The movements will still be thriving and building and creating and our comrades will hold it down. And then when we take breaks, then like in that example, I showed up and it was the middle of the year, and I was just so energized whereas everyone else was like- in Uplift and in other organizing spaces- I noticed this pattern that like everyone else was already burning out. And so me, like taking that break helped-like I was able to contribute so much more capacity than other people had. So I really recommend like taking breaks and staggering them with like our like community like organizers in our-in our collectives like so that we can like all balance have capacity and be nourished while organizing
That's my first biggest thing. My second biggest thing is about ego. When I was a baby organizer, I literally thought I was going to single-handedly stop climate change by the time I graduated college. I was just like, 'It's gonna be me. I'm gonna save the world.' And like, I think that I've grown a lot since that point and have had to really check myself on my motivations. Like when I first participated in underground actions and couldn't post on social media about them, that was a big ego check for me because it was just so natural of a reflex that I wanted to like share with people that I had done this cool thing and so, it made me come to terms with like wait, why am I doing this? Am I doing this just to feel good about myself? So and I see that pattern happening a lot across our movements, and I think that it's actually at the root of the problems that we're seeing with like cancel culture where canceling and calling out problems or mistakes or problematic behavior or language is a way for people to build clout and feed their egos and also staying angry publicly becomes a way to like feed anger and build clout on social media at least. So that's something I think about. I have a lot of these so really you know just cut out what you need to
But the other thing I've been thinking about lately which I think is also related is like so called "factualization" or just like the divisiveness of the so-called "left" and of movements for justice cutting each other down. Like horizontal oppression and shit. Mmm people who are like inherently aligned around a lot of values, maybe not all values and maybe not aligned on specifically how to show up or show those values, but people who are generally aligned completely cutting each other off or cutting each other down because we don't- because of a lot of reasons, either we don't know how to get through conflict together or we don't value maintaining a challenging relationship over the clout we can gain by cutting people off especially publicly. Yeah, so that relates to ego also. Or we don't even know what it looks like to live in a society without punishment, and without outcasting people for doing something wrong, so yeah i've just been thinking a lot about how to hold all the like righteous anger and hold like some thread of togetherness between all of the different divisiveness in movements, and for young people who are new, I think that one of the first energies people encounter is this intensity about being like really militantly radical-or else you're cancelled. You know there's this big social energy around - maybe this is just in youth spaces, I don't know- being the most radical in the room, or just asserting and demonstrating that you're pushing boundaries which also feeds people's egos, or sometimes is driven by ego. So, feel free to paraphrase and make what I said sound better, but I think those are my biggest things that I want young people who are new to organizing to hear.
Lyrica: Well thank you so much, Eva. I feel like there is so much wisdom that I feel really like amazed by
Eva: Y'all too, don't even.