For young people, climate change isn’t just a looming threat of the future; it’s all they’ve ever known. They’re experiencing the climate crisis in real time, and they can clearly see the impacts of extractive industries like dirty energy and factory farms on their communities. 

The environmental movement is growing and getting younger every day. Youth activists bring their lived experiences, passion, and curiosity to organizations like Food & Water Watch, and we are very thankful to work with them. Over the past 20 years, we have connected with so many student interns who have gone on to continue this important work in various ways, building our livable future. 

One such intern and youth activist is Allie Park, a filmmaker and recent high school graduate from Bergen County, New Jersey. Since September of last year, Allie has interned with the Food & Water New Jersey team. 

This spring, she planned the state’s first Youth Climate Action Gathering at Rutgers University with a cohort of fellow interns. She helped organize a film screening, speakers, and workshops on state environmental justice issues and organizing. The event connected students from middle school to recent college grads. 

“Helping young people find pathways into activism and showing that there’s a place for everyone in this movement has been one of the most rewarding parts of my experience,” she said at our recent 20th Anniversary Benefit Virtual Conference.

At the Virtual Conference in May, Allie moderated a panel of former Food & Water Watch interns to discuss the skills they gained interning here and their lessons and hopes for the climate movement going forward. 

“As a filmmaker, I’m passionate about storytelling,” Allie said. “Firsthand experiences help us stay connected to the heart of this work. They remind us why building a livable future matters and how each of us at every stage plays a role in carrying the movement forward.”

In this panel, these incredible young activists remind us how each of us can do our part to build a more livable future for all.

The panelists were:

• Mei Brunson, a recent graduate of Lewis & Clark Law School. Mei has worked with Animal Partisan, Center for Animal Law Studies, Earthjustice, Farm Sanctuary, Animal Legal Defense Fund, and the Humane Society as well as Food & Water Watch.
• Juliana Toloza Serna, a Colombian-American award-winning film director and graduate of Florida State University’s Motion Picture Arts Program. She has also worked as National Coordinator for Fridays for Future.
• Mark Sanchez-Potter, a teacher, activist, and long-time resident of Newburgh, New York. Mark has advocated to stop fracked gas pipelines and transition New York to public, clean energy. He was key in the fight against the Danskammer gas power plant. 

This transcript was edited for clarity and length. Please watch the intern panel and our full Virtual Conference here. 

Allie: What made you want to intern at Food & Water Watch?

Mei: I interned with Food & Water Watch’s legal team in fall 2024 during my final year of law school. I first learned about the org’s vital work combating factory farms via environmental laws in 2024 after moving to Portland.

The efforts of the organization’s legal team showed me how I might blend my interests in animal, food, and environmental justice as a future attorney. I was particularly drawn to Food & Water Watch’s unapologetic commitment to people over profit and to holding industry accountable for its untold harm against humans, animals, and the planet. 

I also appreciated the org’s recognition that litigation is only one piece of the advocacy puzzle, with a particular emphasis on grassroots organizing. 

Mark: I first got involved in 2019 because there was a fracked gas plant literally three miles from my town that the fossil fuel industry wanted to repower. So I discovered through a few rallies that this organization called Food & Water Watch was leading the charge.

I went to meetings, I went to rallies, I testified at City Hall against this really dangerous power plant. And eventually, some organizers asked me if I wanted to be an intern. 

I’ve been connected with Food & Water Watch ever since, and it has allowed me to really see the type of power the climate movement, the environmental movement, has when we all come together. 

Juliana: I was originally interested in climate organizing in the youth grassroots space, and I organized with Fridays for Future, a youth organization mostly made up of students. We collaborated a lot with the New York chapter of Food & Water Watch. They were the first people who ever taught me how to lobby. 

Throughout my many meetings with them, I realized that I’m actually interested in how change happens. But I was a little stressed wondering What are the right tactics? Should we put more pressure, more accountability? Or should we stay by the books? Have closed-door meetings? And something I really like about Food & Water Watch is that they do everything.

Allie: What were some of the biggest lessons you learned while interning with Food & Water Watch?

Mei: One of the most rewarding parts of my internship was seeing how organizations like Food & Water Watch prioritize building broad coalitions to generate momentum for their efforts, both grassroots and legal. 

Cultivating this collective resistance and people power is essential when confronting entities that wield immense power, privilege, and profit. This was made obvious when I led a standing interview for an upcoming lawsuit with a small farmer in rural South Dakota. 

Having personally grown up and lived in cities most of my life, I rarely had the chance to connect with allies from such different lived experiences. Yet that conversation reminded me that despite our contrasting experiences, our shared values ran deep, and harnessing solidarity is essential in the face of corporate consolidation and regulatory capture. 

Too often, my legal work and legal studies have felt pretty abstracted from the real-world reasons that motivate them, but my internship at Food & Water Watch helped me rekindle that connection. 

Juliana: I came from a background where I was already around a lot of coalition building, and I thought it was really awesome and inspiring. But when I came to Food & Water Watch, I noticed the flipside of that, which is that it just takes one person to do so much. 

It really just takes connecting with one person who will hop on a Zoom call with you and say, “Yes, I will testify in this hearing,” or “I will call my representative.” 

So I agree, coalition building and solidarity are key to our work, but so is just having someone say, “We’re going to have four people in a Zoom meeting, and we’re gonna take over the world!” — and none of them have an educated climate background, but they’re just meeting and they say, “We want to protect our communities.” So much will get done that way. 

Mark: Most people understand that the climate is changing. They might not understand the science behind it, but they understand that it doesn’t snow as much anymore, or we’re having more forest fires now. 

I think it’s important you meet with people to listen to them and to understand where they’re coming from, because each community is coming at this from a different perspective. But they know that there’s basic human rights and basic human decency that they want. They want clean air, they want clean water. 

But also, it’s really important to just get people involved. They want to do something. And I think that we’re not meant to be saviors; we’re meant to be allies and to co-create. People are aware of what’s going on — they just maybe need help or to learn a skill in order to push this forward. 

Allie: What’s next for you, and what do you think is next for the future of our movement?

Mei: I recently wrapped up law school, and for the next two years, I’ll be clerking here in Portland on the Oregon Court of Appeals. After that, I’m hoping to seek a litigation position at a nonprofit. In the future, I hope to see the movement continue to build the bridges, deepen coalitions, and encourage broad citizen political engagement. 

I’m especially interested in how we can continue to use environmental laws to rein in factory farms and prevent the erosion of these environmental laws in the first place, particularly given the current political climate. 

Juliana: I think that we have to balance our optimism with our very real circumstances at the moment. At the same time, I’ve learned so much from Food & Water Watch and other organizations about how we’re fighting the good fight, and people power is winning. 

If they feel that they have to utilize all of these strategies against us, it’s because they know that we are effective and the people are effective. Ultimately, no one person, no government, will take away our ability to protect each other. 

We’re kind of like, as my mom said — and I think in Spanish it makes more sense — but we’re like drops of water where we’re always hitting that rock. You have to be a drop of water, but ultimately that dent becomes a hole, becomes a river, and that’s what we are. You cannot stop us. 

So I’m pretty excited about the future of the climate movement, knowing that we have a big fight ahead of us, but that these are the people that I want to be with under these circumstances. 

Mark: Change takes time, and I know that slow sucks. We’ve all experienced that, right? We want our wins to be really, really big and really, really impactful. And we have had wins. So I think that that’s also important to realize — but also, it’s going to take getting to critical mass. 

We’re getting there. We have more people that every day are joining the climate movement. Eventually, we tip the scale in our favor, in favor of people power, and not these multi-trillion-dollar corporations that are killing our earth. 

It’s going to take all of us. It’s going to be slow, but there’s always movement going forward. By showing up where I can, I can really see those small ripples and those changes really start to take place. And I’m really blessed and really hopeful for all that.

Watch Our Full Benefit Virtual Conference!

Allie’s incredible panel was far from the only fantastic session at our Benefit Virtual Conference. Check out the full recording to:

• Hear about the history and impact of corporate capture from Zephyr Teachout, professor of law at Fordham University
• Learn about the current science on bird flu and what we can do to respond to the current outbreak from Megan Davis, DVM, PhD, MPH, professor at Johns Hopkins.
• Learn more about how we organize and the current food and water policy landscape from Food & Water Watch’s Thomas Meyer, Rebecca Wolf, and Mary Grant.
• Hear from special guests Sen. Cory Booker and Rep. Ro Khanna, long-time Food & Water Watch allies.
• Learn more about our honorees: award-winning photographer and long-time volunteer activist Ken Schles and Jackie Kendall and Steve Max, lifelong activists and co-authors of Organizing for Social Change: The Midwest Academy Training Manual.