Adrian Huq is a Connecticut-based climate justice organizer, educator, and reporter. This spring, they earned a Master of Environmental Management from Yale School of the Environment and received a 2026 Environmental Humanities grant to organize a reception celebrating 10 years of New Haven Climate Movement (NHCM), an inter-generational grassroots organization of New Haven area residents pushing for strong action on climate change through city-level policies and investments. Huq co-founded the organization’s Youth Action Team and remains as a Lead Organizer. In this interview with Yale Environmental Humanities, Huq discusses their work at NHCM, the place of the humanities in climate justice activism, and more.
Adrian Huq addressing the audience at the “New Haven Climate Movement Turns 10” reception at the New Haven Museum, April 21, 2026.
Yale Environmental Humanities (YEH): New Haven Climate Movement is an explicitly youth-led organization, and I know that you first got involved as a public high school student in New Haven. Could you share a little bit about how and why you got involved?
Adrian: I first started working in fall 2018 under our parent organization, the New Haven/Leon Sister City Project (NHLSCP). As a binational nonprofit, it focuses on social justice and sustainable development work in Leon, Nicaragua, and other rural communities, alongside environmental activism in New Haven. In my internship, I educated my school community in New Haven about home energy efficiency and energy-saving strategies.
My supervisor, Chris Schweitzer, introduced me to New Haven Climate Movement, which at the time was more of a loose coalition with volunteers from other organizations, pretty much all adults. Recognizing the disproportionate impact of climate change on Nicaragua and the need for the Global North to take action, The New Haven/Leon Sister City Project NHLSCP founded the New Haven Climate Movement back in late 2015, early 2016. Chris asked me to organize a youth-led climate rally downtown in May 2019. It was in the midst of the whole Fridays for Future/ School Strikes for Climate international movement, led by Greta Thunberg, so that was a space that I was really inspired by and interested in engaging in.
I had no former community organizing experience, but after a successful first climate rally, I co-founded our Youth Action Team along with Kiana Flores, another New Haven Public Schools student, who went on to attendYale College. That first successful rally changed the whole organizational structure of New Haven Climate Movement. We became our own independent entity instead of a coalition. The youth team is still at the forefront of the work, and it continues to be led by high school students and college students.
I’ve served in many different leadership roles within the organization over the years, including being a supervisor to our high school interns. We’re really proud to be youth-led, and one of the few environmental community-based organizations that are structured in that way in Connecticut.
YEH: Thank you. And I’m curious, now that you and other early youth organizers have aged out of that cohort, how do you and New Haven Climate Movement approach cultivating young people to be leaders and educators in the movement?
Adrian: It’s a three-pronged approach. We’re thankful to have built a pretty large social media following over the years, so combined with Instagram and Facebook, we have almost 4,000 followers, and then we also have a pretty large and active newsletter audience as well. So there’s that casual outreach through our social media, newsletter, and also putting up flyers in and around New Haven and inside schools.
And then we also have that interpersonal reach. So, for example, some of our youth leaders, whether they have been interns or volunteers, sometimes will loop in their classmates and friends and tell them to join them in NHCM. That’s been a really good pipeline to have friends of volunteers, or even their siblings, come step in. We’ve also benefited from having a couple interns that have served with us for all four years of high school, and now are off to college.
And then lastly, our in-school relationships. We have not only the public education arm, where we’re doing community-facing education, but are also able to carry out in-school education at the local schools we have interns at. Historically, we have had our interns disseminate climate change-focused lessons and activities and get their peers energized about climate change within their school. We have built relationships with teachers, whom we could still email if at any time we needed them to share a flyer or news about something with their students.
YEH: Yale Environmental Humanities is helping organize the New Haven Environmental History Project, which is partly about developing curricular materials about New Haven’s built environment—so not necessarily about climate specifically—but it’s been interesting seeing how the team has built relationships directly with teachers in different schools, both public and private. And I was curious what your point of entry has been when working with K-12 schools at NHCM. Like has it mostly been with teachers? Does New Haven Climate Movement work with the Board of Ed?
Adrian: Honestly, we have a very youth-forward entryway, but we’ve tried both ways. Most of our internship programs go about hiring by having youth apply upon seeing a flier or hearing about it from a teacher or friend. Or, current volunteers and interns express their interest in continuing for another term. . We as supervisors are meeting with them directly; there’s no parental or teacher or admin input. We have worked with students from more than a dozen, primarily public, schools in the area.
And then we have another program which I run called Climate Justice Schools, which is an official partnership between New Haven Climate Movement and the New Haven Board of Education. It’s funded by the city. But honestly, I feel like we’ve had less success with that, because in that model, we’re going through teachers to identify who their two interns are going to be for this school year and supporting them as they’re leading initiatives. But then when I’m convening meetings to get all our schools together, I’m seeing that it’s mostly the teachers that are coming to the meetings when I want to have that more direct link to students. We prefer the angle of youth self-selecting if they want to be involved, then having them on board, and meeting with them in team settings across schools for shared learning and cohort-building. But we have had some pretty good teacher allies over the years.
We have built relationships with several Board of Education members and the Superintendent and occasionally testify at their public meetings to advocate for our school district-facing campaigns. I have also been in touch with several of their curriculum supervisors about integrating climate-themed lessons into their subject material to ensure interdisciplinary climate education in high schools, as required by the Climate Justice Schools proposal we passed in 2021.
We have some educator resources available that we’ve curated. From 2020-2024, we ran an internship program under the name Climate Health Education Project, or CHEP, and so we have our own website where we had been crowdsourcing different climate education lessons and activities organized by grade or by subject level, and that website is climateeducationNH.org.
And then we also have so many different banners we’ve designed, some that are more educational, like how carbon emissions affect the oceans and marine life and others that more artistically speak to the climate crisis. We have several sets of “did you know?” climate factposters, for example; that’s a year-round resource we can offer to teachers to put up in schools.
YEH: Circling back to some of what you were saying at the beginning about the origins and the relationship with the New Haven/Leon Sister City Project, I am curious — the New Haven Climate Movement is place-based and looking locally– but I know you are also thinking at different scales of action and analysis. What are some ways that you’ve found of integrating these different scales into your messaging, or how you design your campaigns? Whether it’s global, or state, or international.
Adrian: We tend to keep our messaging and focus fairly local. Our main targets tend to be the same folks, like the New Haven Board of Alders, New Haven’s mayor, New Haven Board of Education. More recently, we also got involved on the state legislature level, in passing a bill that’s now law [Public Act 26-21], for free bus passes for high school students and for veterans that’s about to roll out. So we’ve done a little bit of state-level advocacy since transportation issues go beyond city boundaries, but mostly keep it local.
It’s helpful to tie in that coastal city identity that we have, and try to connect and educate people a bit more about Long Island Sound. Part of our recent public education has been around letting people know that we have the Sound in our backyard, and there are, for example, marine species right now that are being impacted by climate change, and the lifestyle decisions we make on a daily basis contribute to this.
We talk a lot about personal transportation choices as well, tying that to carbon emissions, tying that into climate change. It’s a conscious decision that folks are making every day in terms of what transportation mode they’re choosing out of the great amount of options in New Haven. And of course, we have environmental justice issues present in our city with, like, the Yale Central Power Plant, and English Station. We strive to help people see that climate change is happening, and that, especially with that coastal identity, that sea level rise and extreme weather and flooding is gonna increase.
YEH: While you were a student at Yale, you completed the Public Humanities Certificate, and you were an Environmental Humanities grantee, and you have a really cool background in journalism and the arts. Where do you see the humanities fitting into the climate justice movement?
Adrian: I think there’s a natural sort of collaboration between the arts and activism that also we as New Haven Climate Movement keep at really the heart of our mission. We do a lot of participatory public art, and make a lot of banners that we use in political contexts, but also in educational contexts. So public art has been huge for us.
In my own roles outside of New Haven Climate Movement, including my freelance journalism with the New Haven Arts Paper, I lean towards covering environmental stories, stories of organizers, environmental organizing types of stories. And I think it’s important that that is represented in an arts and culture paper, because activism is arts and culture, and it’s part of our city’s political ecosystem. There are outlets that are not okay with their authors taking political angles or that kind of thing, or having these, sort of, conflicts of interest, but I’m thankful that our local paper is okay with me being an activist and a writer, so that’s been great.
But also just thinking about the importance of telling activist stories and having that publicly documented, I’m thankful that as we celebrate our 10-year history of New Haven Climate Movement, we have a strong public record, since we do a lot of press releases and are able to get in the news. We have that digital footprint of our work over the last 10 years, which I think is super important from an archival aspect, and just anyone casually who wants to do research on climate action in New Haven as well. We maintain running documents of times we were mentioned in the media, and so that was also really helpful as I was preparing the slideshow for our 10-year anniversary event in April. I was able to use our news archive to just take screenshots of headlines and pull from our own personal photo galleries.
I think the preservation of activist history is so, so important. And also, oral histories of organizers are great. I think it’s Brown University that has a really good oral histories of community organizers publicly-available database [the Community Organizer Genealogy Project]. Activist stories are important, but also just being able to put into the public record their successesand their campaigns, because if it doesn’t get into the news, then you don’t really have a public record of it. It’s critical to have multiple channels in which you’re telling the stories of your work, and to whoever is digesting that information, hopefully it also has that impact of inspiring them or educating them. Like, for example, some people don’t know that New Haven passed a Climate Emergency Resolution back in 2019, so really just putting these efforts into the public consciousness, because if you’re not reading the local news, or if you’re not attending public meetings with the city, you might not hear about these sort of important policies that are put in place.
YEH: Yeah, definitely. It was really helpful reading some of the coverage in the New Haven Independent and the Arts Paper of some of the work that you and NHCM have done over the years while doing some research for this. Excellent. Okay, last couple of questions. I was just curious, what are some of the current campaigns or projects, or really anything that you’d want to plug about what New Haven Climate Movement’s up to, or ways for folks to get involved?
Adrian: Yeah, for sure. Well, one of them is sort of—we don’t have, like, a snazzy name for it unfortunately—but one of our campaigns right now is actually working directly with city staff within New Haven around transportation-focused improvements. So last November, we had a policy success of getting the Board of Alders to pass our Transportation Transformation Resolution, committing the city to working towards cutting transportation-focused emissions 25% by 2030 and overall greatly increasing and supporting and promoting alternative transportation within the city.
Also, we were really active during the city budget season on bare-bones things like, improving bus shelters and signage, which are ways that the city can still make transportation improvements though public transportation is overall headed by the state. We’ve been building a relationship with Haley Simpson [New Haven’s Director of Transportation, Traffic & Parking] in the transportation office, working towards tangible ways the city can better promote public transit and also make those infrastructure changes within their jurisdiction.
We also are focused on the implementation work of the free bus pass bill that we passed in collaboration with a few other transportation advocates around the state and also some nonprofits under the coalition name CT Tickets to Opportunity. That was a really big legislative push for us from January through May— dipping our toes into the lobbying space and all of that. So now that the bill has been passed—and it’s technically supposed to have come into effect on July 1st—we have been strategizing about how to get this off the ground. While we are still waiting for the state to launch the program, we are doing some back-end work like making a list of school district transportation staff across the state who might be interested and writing a one-pager on best practices for how to get these bus passes out to students. And yeah, just overall trying to keep the momentum up around free transit, and so we can plan for our next steps once the legislative session kicks off again in 2027.
During the summers, we benefit from having a bit more student energy. Our summer interns pushed a campaign called Shift Gears that is focused around encouraging alternative transportation choices, and did a lot of canvassing to get community responses to a survey about if residents would be willing to pay a few more cents per gallon on a gas tax or parking meter charge if it went towards free bus passes for youth, for example.
People can also attend our upcoming social event at the Broadway Triangle on September 10th, where we’ll be celebrating the ocean’s 3.8 billionth “birthday” with cake, bingo, face painting, an environmental magic show, and remarks about oceans and climate change!
YEH: Thank you so much, and congrats also about the bus passes for high school students and veterans.
Adrian: It’s only funded for a year, though, so we gotta come back next year again.Actually, in 2025, we helped pass a very similar bill, but then the fiscal note wasn’t properly attached by the legislature, and it was never funded. But this year, we’re thankful that it’s funded at $2.5 million, with $1 million going towards the state purchasing 28,000 31-day bus passes to be sent to selected school districts. Since there will be a limited amount available per school, we’re really hoping that gets into the hands of students that need it most and plan to get involved promoting this and offering suggestions for implementation in schools.
YEH: Finally, could you share a bit about the event that was your Environmental Humanities grant project?
Adrian: It was called “New Haven Climate Movement Turns 10: Celebrating a Decade of Climate Policy and Youth Leadership,” and the event was held on April 21st, at the New Haven Museum. It convened different community organizers, other community members who are familiar with our work and or have been engaged, some of our youth leaders and former youth leaders, alongside classmates and friends. We also had a few speakers including Kathy Fay, who works at Neighborhood Housing Services and was involved in the very early days of New Haven Leon’s energy-related work before we even launched NHCM; Doug Hausladen, who is really active in the alternative transportation world as chair of the New Haven Coalition for Active Transportation and Executive Director of Park New Haven. We also had Alder Adam Marchand speak, who is Chair of the Finance Committee, and Ben Scudder, who is a high school teacher at High School in the Community, and is part ofour Climate Justice Schools program.
I was emcee and also delivered a slideshow of the last 10.5 years of NHCM’s campaigns with screenshots of different headlines and legislative successes and events that we’ve hosted. And then around the room, we had some easels up to weave in some of our art and banners. I did a deep dive into our office and pulled out different posters that we’ve created over the years. There were some pretty old ones. Some were educational posters, like the “Did You Know?” sort of posters with climate change-related facts, and others were posters for rallies back in the day.
We had dinner from Edge of the Woods, and a cake, as well, that was marking NHCM’s birthday. We also had a raffle, giving out some environment-themed prizes. And we raised over $600 that night, which I’m really proud of, and we had a little activity at the door where people could sign different cards to the Alders with their message on whythey want them to invest city budget funds in climate work and transportation work, which I later delivered to the Alders. About 60-plus people came and it filled up the room. I’m also really thankful to the New Haven Museum for their close collaboration throughout the whole planning process.
Attendees at the “New Haven Climate Movement Turns 10” reception at the New Haven Museum, April 21, 2026.
And, as a bonus, the New Haven Museum’s New Haven’s Unfinished Revolutions exhibit also features two artifacts from NHCM that I worked with Joanna Steinberg, their Director of Learning and Engagement, to hand-select. There’s a recruitment poster stating “Code Red, wake up New Haven” and then one picture of a bunch of our youth on the steps of City Hall with ocean-themed signs. I was really happy to have some of NHCM’s materials live on in that exhibit. That felt very aligned with the goals of the public humanities and incorporating activist history into our cultural institutions.
YEH: That’s so great. Thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview.
Adrian: Thanks so much for having me and for the support from YEH!
New Haven Climate Movement materials on display at the New Haven Museum’s current “New Haven’s Unfinished Revolutions” exhibition.