kier blake

kier blake is a second-generation Jamaican climate activist, organizer and justice-oriented educator who is dedicated to disrupting the status quo in climate education. At Next100, kier will work to expand access to interdisciplinary, justice-centered climate education in New York’s K–12 schools. While teaching students in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens, suffering climate-related, public health issues such as high rates of asthma and lack of access to nutritious food, kier realized that their own upbringing had been shaped by those same forces.

Based on unceded, occupied Lenape-Munsee Canarsie land (Brooklyn, NY), kier’s goal is to prove the critical need for education on climate change as we work to build just, regenerative futures.

Prior to Next100, kier co-founded the education nonprofit Start:Empowerment, where they implemented justice-oriented climate education in NYC schools: the program served over 3,770 students in just four years. They also serve in their community, East Flatbush, as a core organizer in the No North Brooklyn Pipeline Alliance, helping to resist the racist pipeline forcibly placed there on behalf of nearly 153,000 people, as well as organizing in solidarity with various Earth, Sky, and Water Protectors in support of indigenous sovereignty and anti-extraction projects.

kier counts themself indebted to the Kenyan, Palestinian, Lebanese, and rural and urban American communities that have embraced them and supported their educational leadership. kier is now an MSc candidate at The New School studying environmental policy and sustainability management. They have been recognized by the Tishman Environment and Design Center, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, actress Regina Hall and the Solutions Project, the NYC Department of Education’s Office of Sustainability, EarthJustice, and NYU’s Office of Sustainability.