Mentorship Transforms Potential Into Leadership: Dionna’s Environmental Justice Story
By Dionna Brown
Dionna L. Brown is a public health scholar, sociologist, and environmental justice advocate from Flint, Michigan. Her career path shifted during her senior year at Howard University, when a transformative course and professor introduced her to environmental justice and shaped her commitment to linking climate, health, and equity. Since then, she has completed her M.A. in Sociology at Wayne State University, become a Yale Environmental Fellow, and is now pursuing her Master of Public Health at Michigan State University.
In this blog, Dionna discusses the impact mentorship had on her environmental justice movement journey, and how those experiences have driven her passion to ensure she supports and advocates for others in the sector.
When people think about environmental justice, they often picture protests, policy briefings, or community organizing. What is less visible, but just as essential, is the mentorship that fuels this work. In a field where underrepresentation and inequities remain major challenges, mentorship is the bridge that helps emerging leaders step into their power and ensures the movement continues to grow stronger with each generation.
For me, mentorship has been nothing short of transformative. My journey into the environmental justice movement began in a moment of deep personal loss. In 2020, my grandmother passed away on the very day I was supposed to pick my classes for the fall semester. The elective I originally wanted to take was unavailable, so a friend signed me up for a course called Environmental Inequalities. I read the description and decided to stick with it, not realizing at the time how profoundly it would alter the course of my life.
During that class, we had an advocacy unit where the guest speaker was Michelle Mabson, one of the co-founders of Young, Gifted & Green. My professor spoke highly of me to Michelle, encouraging her to connect with me. After class, Michelle told me to send her an email. That one email turned into an interview with her and LaTricea Adams, the CEO, Founder, and President of YGG. Before long, I became the organization’s first intern—the Legislative Policy Intern.
That internship grew into so much more than a line on a résumé. LaTricea took me under her wing and taught me the ins and outs of the environmental justice movement. She showed me how to be an advocate for my community, how to navigate complex policy landscapes, and how to carry myself in rooms where decisions were being made about our lives. She said my name in rooms I didn’t even know existed and opened doors I never could have entered on my own. While she had the connections, she reminded me that I had the knowledge, talent, and lived experience to belong there.
That’s the power of mentorship, it transforms potential into leadership. In a sector that often feels dominated by established voices, overwhelmingly White leaders, and those with privilege, mentorship makes the difference between young leaders being overlooked and young leaders being heard. It creates pathways for those who might not otherwise have access, ensuring that the people most impacted by environmental injustice aren’t just subjects of reports or policy debates, but active participants in shaping solutions.
Because of what LaTricea and Michelle poured into me, I now feel a responsibility to pour into others. Through my work with the Youth Environmental Justice Council and the Flint Youth EJ Summer Camp, I’ve had the opportunity to mentor young people just beginning to find their voices as advocates. Whether it’s helping them prepare to speak at a city council meeting, encouraging them to submit an abstract for a national conference, or simply reminding them that their perspective matters, I see them in the same spark my mentors saw in me.
The environmental sector cannot thrive without mentorship. It is the thread that weaves together generations of advocates, ensuring knowledge, access, and opportunity don’t stay locked in silos but spread outward to build a stronger, more just movement. Every opportunity I have had was because someone believes in me enough to open a door. That is the essence of mentorship: it is not about walking the path for someone else, but making sure they know they have the strength, and the right, to walk it themselves.
If we want the environmental movement to survive and thrive, we must commit to mentorship. Seek it. Offer it. Because when we lift one another up, we don’t just build careers, we build a movement that lasts.