Twilley Martin First Black Person Named To Lead Greenpeace USA

Ebony Twilley Martin will take over as co-executive director of Greenpeace USA, the group announced last week. Twilley Martin is the first Black person to serve at the head of the US arm of the international environmental group, and will also be its first co-executive director. “It’s time that we created space for folks like me – folks who have lived experiences, folks who have been on the frontlines of these crises, folks that have solutions … but haven’t always been listened to,” Twilley Martin told Thomson Reuters While her position is new, Twilley Martin’s commitment to the environmental movement is not. After joining the organization in 2013 as its Senior Talent Acquisition Manager and Director of Human Resources, she would soon become Greenpeace USA’s first Black woman Chief Officer of People and Culture before being named Chief Operating Officer in 2018.

Twilley Martin’s work as part of the environmental movement began on the day her family pediatrician identified environmental pollution as a key factor in her son’s asthma. “The science shows Black and brown communities are placed in those regions specifically where climate destruction is the worst,” she told Thomson Reuters. (NBC, Sister2Sister, Thomson Reuters Foundation)