I’ll admit it: I like beef. Like many Americans, I was brought up to believe that beef was a central part of a traditional family meal.
My mom made it. My kids ate it. Marketing campaigns told me it was healthy. Everywhere I went, I saw Americans eating lots of it. And for many years, I didn’t question these choices.
Sharing your personal climate story is a powerful way to shift narratives, rally support, and bring climate change solutions to life.
I joined Teach For America right out of undergraduate and taught 8th-12th grade science at North Central High School in South Louisiana.
When I graduated from college less than a decade ago, there seemed to be only two paths for people interested in fighting climate change full-time: science or policy.
On a sunny fall afternoon, an intergenerational group of dozens of Latine community members descended upon Bregamos Community Theater for Mic at the Mill, a bilingual storytelling event organized by Drawdown’s Neighborhood interviewee and community leader Xóchitl Garcia as part of Save the Sound’s Urban Waters Initiative, in partnership with Women Without Borders, Semilla Collective, and Project Drawdown’s storytelling program.
Aishwarya Venkat , Ph.D., is a geospatial analyst and food systems researcher with interdisciplinary expertise in the climate-food-health nexus. She is particularly interested in climate resilience and food security in coupled human and natural systems. At Project Drawdown her work focuses on climate solutions related to land use change and sustainable diets. Aishwarya recently earned her doctorate from the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University with a dissertation on extreme weather event impacts on food systems. Her prior work focused on contextualizing seasonal trends in acute malnutrition in arid and semi-arid regions, as well as improving global monitoring of diet costs and affordability. She holds a master’s degree in environmental and water resources engineering from Tufts and a bachelor's degree in biosystems engineering from Virginia Tech.
Erika is an interdisciplinary researcher working to create more sustainable and inclusive food systems. She has studied sustainable agricultural systems, sustainability standards, food security, and intersection with gender issues, among others. Erika seeks to understand local environmental problems from a global perspective, how systems are interrelated, and social and economic implications. She has worked as a policy analyst for the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) and in research assistant positions at several universities. In addition, she worked for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Mexico, on developing a farmers' market. She holds a master of science degree in resources, environment, and sustainability from the University of British Columbia and a bachelor of science in earth and environmental sciences from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.