When Hurricane Sandy hit Vic Barrett’s home, he was 12. It was the first time the weather had genuinely scared him — all his running water stopped working, and his mother also seemed scared as she bought jugs of water from a grocery store with nearly emptied-out shelves.
It wasn’t just his community. Watching the news, he remembers seeing the New York City subway flooding and damage across New York state and New Jersey. He says it felt almost apocalyptic.
“I was just a young, scared person wondering what was happening,” he says.
Only later did he connect the experience to the issues of climate change and climate injustice. After moving to Westchester from New York’s Hudson Valley, he started going to high school in Manhattan. Barrett, who is Black, first-generation Honduran-American, and transgender, says the area he grew up in was very white and conservative, and he often felt out of place. He wanted to learn more about social justice issues that affected people like him. His freshman year, he joined Global Kids, an after-school program which helps students build activism campaigns around human rights-related issues. Read more…
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