SOUTH HADLEY — While the federal government pulls back resources and regulations around climate science, Mount Holyoke College is pushing climate initiatives to the forefront with a new Climate Justice Lab.
The aim of the new privately-funded lab, which launched this winter and is housed in the Miller Worley Center for the Environment on campus, is to work with faculty, staff and students to connect climate justice with existing curriculum and campus activities. Vanessa Rosa, associate professor of Latinx Studies and Critical Race and Political Economy, will serve as faculty director, coaching other staff and community members.
“Being at a private institution, small liberal arts, it feels like we now have a responsibility to really be the ones to push the needle and to move things forward as other people are having to stall,” said Olivia Aguilar, director of the Miller Worley Center for the Environment.
While the Climate Justice Lab officially launched on Feb. 16, its mission was first established at the Community Commitment to Climate Justice in 2022. Students met with faculty and administration to discuss meeting carbon neutrality while considering all people involved in the process.
Staff at the Miller Worley Center built on this momentum with different programs, from a low-stakes student research and art exhibit to a weekend-long Summit on Feminist Leadership in Climate Justice. The Climate Justice Lab will be the umbrella for all these events.
“We’ve been working on this for a number of years, and it felt like the right time to really bring everything together,” Aguilar said.
Climate justice, Aguilar said, seeks to bring all people to the table to make environmental decisions, including communities historically left out of these conversations. Just climate solutions consider the cultural knowledge of different groups, such as Indigenous stewardship. Taking this history into account, both the benefits and burdens of climate resilience would be allocated fairly across the community, and the solutions would center around future sustainability over short-term fixes.
“We are pointing everyone in our community towards all the plethora of resources across campus, because not everybody is affected equally by the consequences of climate change,” said Mary Allison Kane, assistant director of the Miller Worley Center for the Environment.
Mount Holyoke is not the only higher-education institution in the Five College Consortium integrating climate justice. The University of Massachusetts Energy Transition Institute brings different disciplines together to study an equitable transition to renewable energy. Smith College, Mount Holyoke College and Amherst College have all undertaken multimillion-dollar geothermal projects to lower their carbon emissions.
However, as the Trump administration rolls back environmental initiatives, climate work has drastically slowed down. Just last month, the Environmental Protection Agency revoked the endangerment finding, the scientific bedrock that authorized federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.
Last year, The Energy Transition Institute lost a $6 million National Science Foundation grant overnight. The Northeast Climate Adaption Science Center at UMass has run on minimal operations since Oct. 1, 2025 after the Office of Management and Budget froze its funding.
Yet, due to The Leslie Miller and Richard Worley Foundation and Mount Holyoke’s dedicated donors, the liberal arts college has kept on rolling. The college declined to say how much of the Miller Worley Center’s endowment funds were used to launch the program.
“The conversation really nationwide is like, ‘What are we going to do? All of the funding is cut,’ Aguilar said. “I just feel like I’m in such a fortunate place that we’re not experiencing that.”
Students are leading Mount Holyoke’s path toward climate justice.
For example, Manal Fatima and Maria Garcia, community sustainability coordinators, created sewing kits for students to mend clothes rather than throw them away. Fatima has also designed a digital series on mending clothing, which removes the knowledge barrier because without sewing knowledge, a free needle and thread cannot repair a hole. Students can pick these kits up on Pangy Day, Mount Holyoke’s spring festival.
“One of the major ways we’re making it accessible is not having a specific event, but just tabling at an event where everyone’s already going to be to make sure that they know that this is an option that they can avail,” Fatima said.
As word about the Climate Justice Lab circulates, Aguilar has heard from other liberal arts colleges interested in similar proposals. The interest in climate justice and further collaboration signals a beginning, rather than an end, to sustainability.
“I feel really excited about the possibility of a bunch of small liberal arts colleges in Massachusetts being able to come together and really making progress on the climate justice front for the state,” she said.
