We're delighted to welcome new committee members whose expertise and experience will guide our grant-making.
Zarina Ahmad, John Barry and Lena Mohamed will join the Sustainable Future committee which funds imaginative and inclusive approaches to tackling the climate crisis and building a just and equitable economy.
Zarina, who was recognised in the Woman’s Hour Power List 2020 for making a significant positive contribution to the environment or the sustainability of our planet, previously worked at the Council for Ethnic Minority Voluntary Organisations leading the charge for increasing participation in environmentalism in Scotland. Since being told that "ethnic minorities aren’t interested in climate change", Zarina, pictured below left, has dedicated herself to creating pathways for under-represented groups to work in environmental organisations. She is researching sustainable behaviours within BAME communities in the UK for a PhD at the University of Manchester and is also a researcher on a Food Justice project, Just FACT in London and an advisor for Women’s Environmental Network.
John, pictured below right, is Professor of Green Political Economy at Queens University Belfast and co-chair of the Belfast Climate Commission. What keeps him awake at night is the life opportunities and future wellbeing of his and other children in this age of the planetary crisis, and why it is easier for most people to believe in the end of the world than the end of capitalism and economic growth. His areas of academic research include post-growth and heterodox political economy; the politics, policy and political economy of climate breakdown and climate resilience; socio-technical analyses of low carbon just energy and sustainability transitions; and the overlap between conflict transformation and these sustainability and energy transitions. His last book was The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability: Human Flourishing in a Climate-Changed, Carbon-Constrained World (2012, Oxford University Press).
Lena has a background working within racial justice movements, especially in their focus on state violence and surveillance. Over the years she has also worked with a variety of organisations including the Inclusive Mosque Initiative, Migrants' Rights Network, and National Survivor User Network. Lena is interested in queer and disability justice and liberation theologies as frameworks for liberation, and supports grassroots groups as they work towards the same. Lena is delighted to work with the Sustainable Future committee in framing an understanding of displacement and migration, disability and public health, and state violence as profoundly connected to climate injustice.
Grant-making committees at JRCT are made up of trustees, staff and co-optees. JRCT currently has 25 co-optees.