About this speaker
Lil Milagro Henriquez, M.A. (detribalized Nahuat Pipil descent), was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana and whose family survived Hurricane Katrina—one of the nation’s most infamous climate-change-related disasters. She is a veteran of social justice organizing with 20+ years of experience working on a myriad of issues, including access to higher education for low-income people and communities of color, food sovereignty, environmental racism, union democracy and labor organizing, among others. She is a mother of two small children who directly inform her work in the world.
She served as a founding Board of Directors member for Planting Justice and The People’s Conservatory and was the founding Director of Organizing for Roses in Concrete Community School, a social justice based K-8 school in East Oakland. In 2014, she won the Jonathan Daniels Memorial Fellowship for Social Justice award. In 2020, she received the Women’s Earth Alliance fellowship and is the 2021 recipient of the Partners Advancing Climate Equity fellowship. She was recently recognized as one of the top 16 Eco-Warriors of 2021 by Marin Magazine and did a TEDx talk with the City of San Francisco illuminating the failures of conventional education to prepare youth for climate change.
In 2017, she founded Mycelium Youth Network, an organization dedicated to preparing and empowering frontline youth for climate change. Mycelium has been named as one of the only organizations actively preparing young people for climate change in the United States by the International Transformational Resilience Coalition.