Green for All Initiates Environmental Change in DMV Community

Jasmine Davenport speaks about Green For All. (Video by Misha Bernard-Lucien)

This year in July, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order inaugurating “a golden age” for a data center boom. These large-scale industrial facilities are raising concerns for green policy advocates like Dream.Org: Green For All. 

Green For All at Dream.Org provides programs that work towards creating environmental and economic benefits for the underrepresented public. Historically, low-income populations have been disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards, and in conversations surrounding clean energy funding, these communities are often overlooked.

The Senior Director of Green For All, Jasmine Davenport, said, “This goes back to redlining…they did not want us [Black people] in the neighborhoods where we could breathe easily, so we were destined to be put into neighborhoods where it was known that…[there] was bad environmental air quality.”

Jasmine Davenport

Senior Director for Dream.Org’s “Green For All”

Photo by Misha Bernard-Lucien

She continues, “Black women are predestined to early labor in birth…low birth rates, and premature babies.” Among many reasons, one “is because we’ve been breathing in air—bad air—for years.”