I have always believed that the idealism and energy of young people, if properly encouraged, has the potential to topple oppression, to change the way the system works, and to end injustice. As an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis, I read and studied about poverty, injustice and the struggle of communities to fight oppression and create change. I chose to do Green Corps because it was an opportunity to turn my theories and beliefs into real-life changes. Over the course of my year with Green Corps, I learned through incredible hands-on experiences.

My first campaign took me to New Orleans, where I worked with a team of Green Corps organizers, Public Citizen, labor unions like the SEIU, and community organizations like ACORN to stop two multinational corporations from taking over the city's water supply. Talk about young people taking on powerful special interests! I couldn't imagine a more insidious example of concentrated power and its attempts to capitalize on the basic human needs of the population. My team of organizers was composed of very recent college graduates. None of us had ever taken on a corporation, let alone two that were vying for a billion-dollar bid.

The companies that were bidding to take over the New Orleans water supply had a horrible environmental track record. In case after case, privatization has been damaging to the environment and consumers. In Atlanta, where a corporation runs the water system, residents have often had brown colored drinking water and had been warned to boil the water. Water is a basic human right, but privatization turns clean and affordable water into a commodity.

Fortunately, our hard work and grassroots organizing paid off, and we won the campaign. As a result of our work with community volunteers, college students, and the decision-makers, the city of New Orleans Water and Sewage Board voted to reject all bids. That decision made clean, safe, and affordable water a part of the future of New Orleans residents.

Green Corps helped me realize the power of organizing, and the potential for young people to shift the balance of power. My other campaigns throughout the rest of the year only served to solidify my conviction. In California, I helped the California Wild Heritage Campaign protect some of California's last remaining wild places. I organized students in Ohio to launch a campaign against Office Depot and Office Max to add more recycled content to their paper-marking a change in the way large corporations do business. During the summer, I organized college students in Philadelphia on a statewide campaign to protect open space, and to stop sprawl. I saw my name in the New York Times that year, but the most impressive part of the year for me was seeing young people realize their limitless potential as activists and organizers.

Since graduating from the program, I have been working with the Sierra Club's media team in San Francisco. As the National Publicist for the Sierra Club, I work to inform the general public about the threats to the environment, and what we can do to stop them.

I chose to be an environmental organizer because I believe that young people can shake things up, and make the world a place where we'd be all happier and healthier. Each environmental battle represents an incremental step in tackling concentrated power and creating that future, with young people in the lead.