Sarra Tekola

Biography: Dr. Yeshaq Sarra Tekola is the founder & executive director of Addis Alem Consulting. They have over a decade of experience as an activist, organizer and policy strategist. They have a PhD in Sustainability from Arizona State University. Their dissertation research focused on the connections between climate change, colonialism, and Western society’s inability to address the climate crisis which they termed “the pathology of modernity.” Tekola is both an academic and decolonial climate activist; a Black Lives Matter & resource organizer. They were on the design team and are on board of Hive Fund for Climate & Gender Justice. They are on the Wisdom Council to build a Black & Indigenous fund for organizers in Arizona with the Wend Collective. They are also on the board of the Reclaiming STEM institute, which works to support BIPOC in the STEM field. They are a co-founder, co-director, development director and policy strategist for Black Lives Matter Phoenix Metro. They are also a co-founder and facilitator for the Phoenix Environmental Justice Coalition, and have been engaged in solidarity work since 2018 with an Indigenous group of land defenders on contested land in the Navajo/Hopi Nations. They were a lead organizer in Divest University of Washington, where—after a 3-year struggle—they divested from coal. They helped to start a “Block the Bunker” campaign in Seattle that blocked another police station from being built in a community of color. Their activism has been featured in Democracy Now, CNN, Rolling Stone and was named by Outside Magazine as one of the “30 under 30” in 2016. They were a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow from 2018-2021.