Zakia Elliott

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT ZAKIA ELLIOTT

Zakia Elliott is the Program Manager of Philadelphia Climate Works, a coalition working to move the City to combat climate change by justly investing in its workforce and its impacted communities. She is a recent graduate of Brown University with a BA in Environmental Studies with a deep commitment to solving environmental and socio-political issues with research, policy-based problem solving, and bottom-up community organizing. Her identities as a woman of color, environmentalist, and feminist drive her desire to work with communities and advocate for improving the quality of life and agency for vulnerable populations, especially low-income and minority communities, and children. Elliott has experience working with legislators and environmental professionals on climate planning and resilience in Providence, RI, where she helped design and plan for the implementation of the state’s first climate change adaptation, mitigation, and resilience legislation. In 2014, she completed an NSF-REU focused on analyzing constraints that policy actors experience while creating, implementing and enforcing environmental regulation in Wisconsin’s Red Cedar Watershed. Before moving into her current position with Sierra Club, Elliott led climate advocacy efforts at PennFuture, a statewide environmental advocacy organization, applied environmental and social justice principles to her work researching for a venture philanthropy firm focused on supporting nonprofits solving poverty, and helped children across the city develop a stronger connection to nature and their environment.