Ready for 100 Hartford Campaign
Alycia Jenkins
Hartford is consistently ranked among the poorest cities in America. It is a very diverse city with significant ADOS (American Descendants of Slavery), Black American, Black Caribbean, and Puerto Rican populations. The city is also overburdened with pollution and high energy burdens. These are all issues that Sierra Club Connecticut’s Ready for 100 campaign aims to address.
My name is Alycia Jenkins. I am a native from the Westside of Chicago, and am working at the Connecticut Chapter on Ready for 100 Hartford. Ready for 100 is a national Sierra Club campaign for communities to achieve an equitable and affordable energy system powered by 100% clean, renewable energy by the year 2050.
I am focusing on food justice and environmental racism. The work that I’m doing with Ready for 100 in Hartford is started through food justice because that is the issue that Hartford residents know and feel that they need in order to begin work on green energy. I have been living in Hartford for the past eleven years and have experienced environmental racism by way of food insecurities. Hartford has a lot of corner stores that sell plenty of junk food and not enough of (if any) healthy food choices. Hartford is a 'health' food desert. This has led me to work with the Grow Youth Hartford's program to develop a storytelling curriculum. I am helping the youth of Grow Youth Hartford tell their stories about food insecurities and environmental racism.
Additionally, over the past few months through virtual meetings, I have connected with organizations including Grow Youth Hartford, Ebony Horsewomen, Keney Park Association, Park Watershed, Everyday Democracy, and Hartford Food System to hear what is important.
Based on that outreach, I will be conducting a series of community dialogues to hear from city residents about environmental racism that they experience and to build a campaign to address these issues to make Hartford a safer, greener, and healthier city.
If you live in Hartford and want to participate in Ready for 100, community dialogues, or storytelling, please email me.
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Alycia Jenkins is an organizer for Sierra Club Connecticut focusing on our Ready for 100 Campaign in Hartford.