Lil Milagro Henriquez
About
Lil Milagro Henriquez, M.A., is a native New Orleanian whose family survived Hurricane Katrina—one of the nation’s most infamous climate-change-related disasters—and a 17-year veteran of social and environmental justice activism.
Henriquez has worked on a myriad of social justice issues, including access to higher education for low-income people and communities of color, food sovereignty, environmental racism, union democracy and labor organizing, among many others. In 2010, she received a graduate degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology. Her Master’s thesis focused on deforestation and the cultural and ecological survival of Nahuatl peoples in western El Salvador. Her current Doctoral research examines the connection between women’s faith and political activism in immigrant communities.
In March of 2015, Henriquez became a founding staff member of Roses in Concrete Community School, an Oakland, California-based school dedicated to uplifting low-income youth of color. There, she supports and guides social justice-based education that is both culturally relevant and empowering. In this role, Henriquez identified the incontestable failure of conventional schooling to prepare the next generation for the climate-challenged world of the future.
Determined to be a catalyst for change, she resolved to fill this critical gap in education and community development for Oakland youth with her own expertise in disaster preparation and response, youth education, and leadership as well as the expertise of colleagues in complementary fields. In 2018 she founded Mycelium Youth Network, an educational nonprofit designed to integrate place-based indigenous knowledge with hands-on holistic S.T.E.A.M. (Science Technology Engineering Arts and Math) programming in order to prepare her community’s youth for a climate-challenged future.
As Executive Director of Mycelium Youth Network, Henriquez is leading the way in youth climate resilience and mitigation work. Her organization was named one of a handful focusing on youth climate preparedness on the West Coast (International Transformational Resilience Coalition press release) and was recently featured in Estuary Magazine and the We Rise Productions’ upcoming summer edition podcast.
Henriquez currently serves on the NorCal Resilience Network and ITRC steering committees and sits on the founding Board of Directors for The People’s Conservatory. She has been a featured speaker for the California Adaptation Forum, Vision Into Action’s symposium on environmental justice, and the American Society of Adaptation Professionals. She was awarded the Jonathan Daniels Memorial fellowship for Social Justice, the National Women’s Studies award for her leadership and cutting-edge participatory action research, and the Social Justice Research and Community Service award for her Master’s thesis on deforestation and Central American indigenous communities.
