Our Core Team

Tim DeChristopher, as Bidder 70, disrupted an illegitimate Bureau of Land Management oil and gas auction in December of 2008, by outbidding oil companies for parcels around Arches and Canyonlands National Parks in Utah. His actions and 21 month imprisonment earned him a national and international media presence, which he has used as a platform to spread the urgency of the climate crisis and the need for bold, confrontational action in order to create a just and healthy world. Tim used his prosecution as an opportunity to organize the climate justice organization Peaceful Uprising in Salt Lake City. Tim is a Co-Founder of the Climate Disobedience Center, and after graduating from Harvard Divinity School, continues the work to defend a livable future. Read More.

Marla Marcum (she/her) is a seminary-trained United Methodist committed to supporting people of all faiths and no particular faith to act boldly for justice. An experienced campaigner, trainer, pastor and lay leader, she brings two decades of social justice organizing experience with faith-based, youth, and grassroots groups.  She supported the launch of Climate Summer, serving as its Director for five years, and is a Co-Founder of both Better Future Project and 350 Massachusetts.  Marla has supported, organized, and participated in many direct action and civil disobedience efforts, including the Lobster Boat Blockade and the campaign of sustained nonviolent resistance to Spectra Energy's West Roxbury Lateral pipeline project with Resist The Pipeline. Marla is a Co-Founder of the Climate Disobedience Center and serves as its Director. She is passionate about leadership development and building supportive communities of resistance among unlikely allies. After 18 years in the Boston area, Marla moved to Knoxville, Tennessee in November 2018 where she and her spouse and kittens tend a garden on Cherokee lands. She will always also call the Missouri Ozarks “home.”

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Leif Taranta (they/them) is an organizer, de-escalation/NVDA trainer, and rock climbing instructor. They began causing mischief as an elementary schooler in Philadelphia, and later joined local fossil fuel resistance struggles. They’ve been active in the fight for trans bathroom access, and serve as a mentor to trans youth. As a student Environmental Justice major, they were a core organizer in the Divest Middlebury campaign and other student movements, and spent 4 months in Mexico studying Zapatismo and indigenous anti-capitalist resistance. Leif first got involved in No Coal No Gas in 2019, and has served as a campaign coordinator, internal organizer, and action planner. Over the past few years, they’ve been active in the Line 3 struggle as well as several consent-based community defense projects. Leif currently lives in Burlington VT with their partner, guinea pigs, gecko, and many plants. When they aren’t scheming with the No Coal No Gas campaign, they can be found rock climbing, gardening, and participating in local mutual aid, eviction resistance, police abolition, and anti-fascist work. They remain committed to direct action, bottom-up autonomy building, and the power of transformative movements.

Fellows

Fellows join the Center to pursue their own projects that further our shared Principles, using the resources of the Center to strengthen their work.

Nastasia Lawton-Sticklor (she/they) is an educator, activist, nonviolent direct action practitioner and trainer, photographer, and parent to two youngsters, aged 6 and 9. Nastasia became involved with Climate Disobedience Center as a member of a praxis group and began organizing with the No Coal No Gas campaign in 2019. Her fellowship work focuses on contributing to CDC organizational resilience, building cultures of critical care within campaign and movement spaces, research, and writing. Her research interests include exploring abolitionist approaches to jury nullification and legal strategies for activists, as well as models of relational community support and culture building within movements. She approaches this work with the belief that climate justice can only be reached through decolonizing and dismantling white supremacist capitalist and patriarchal systems and that our resistance to these systems lies in our solidarity and interconnectedness. Nastasia’s previous work at the Hiatt Center for Urban Education at Clark University involved cultivating spaces that uplift youth voices through qualitative research using storytelling, multimedia arts, and photography to explore social injustices and create pathways for change. Her teaching practice both in classroom and community spaces focuses on interrogating traditional pedagogies and exploring ways to build antiracist and liberatory teaching practices that are grounded in multigenerational collaboration and relationship building. She has co-authored multiple articles with educators and youth exploring and advocating for learning spaces that prioritize social justice and multigenerational knowledge. She is a national convenor for the Council for an Uncertain Human Future. Nastasia holds a Masters’ in Teaching and a Doctorate in Educational Leadership. She is currently pursuing a degree in Restorative Justice at Vermont Law School. 

Jay O'Hara is a Quaker from Cape Cod. In 2009, he founded Climate Summer, a transformational program for student climate activists. Called to bolder action in 2013 he, along with Ken Ward, blockaded 40,000 tons of coal destined for the Brayton Point power plant with their small white lobster boat named the "Henry David T" - the Lobster Boat Blockade. The ensuing legal proceedings garnered national attention, and the plant closed its doors in 2017. In 2016, he supported the tar sands "valve turners" action across 4 states which shut down 15% of the US daily oil supply. Jay has played a leading role in the No Coal No Gas campaign to shutter the last big coal fired electrical generator in New England. He is a Co-Founder of the Climate Disobedience Center. He currently lives in Belfast, Maine.

Rabbi Shoshana Meira Friedman is the Assistant Rabbi of Temple Sinai of Brookline, MA, a vibrant and progressive Reform congregation. Rabbi Shoshana became a rabbi after realizing that her despair and paralysis about environmental degradation would only be healed through spiritual community and being grounded in Jewish study and practice. Ordained by Hebrew College in 2014, she emerged from six years of intense study to find the global climate movement in a burst of energy and momentum. After a year of speaking and singing in many Boston interfaith climate actions, she co-wrote a new climate anthem, The Tide Is Rising, with her husband, Yotam Schachter, and sang it at the National Cathedral during Pope Francis' visit to the USA. In addition to her new project, Clergy Climate Action. Rabbi Shoshana is an alum of JOIN for Justice, the Wexner Graduate Fellowship, and Oberlin College, where she majored in Environmental Studies. She and Yotam live in Jamaica Plain, MA. For articles, sermons, music and liturgy visit www.rabbishoshana.com.

Our Board

The Climate Disobedience Center is building a volunteer board to provide accountability and oversight. Each of these individuals bring incredible skills and resources to our common work. We will be continuing to announce new board members this fall.

Rev Lennox Yearwood Jr. is a minister, community organizer, and president and CEO of the Hip Hop Caucus. Rev Yearwood has been a national leader in engaging young people in social and political activism since 2003. He leads the Respect My Vote! campaign and is recognized as one of the most effective organizers in Hip Hop political life. As an anti-war and climate justice activist, he has engaged in numerous acts of civil disobedience. While serving as an Air Force Officer in the Chaplain Corps, Rev Yearwood courageously faced a court-martial for his outspoken opposition to the Iraq War and ultimately received an honorable discharge after his case was dismissed.

For at least the past decade, Rev Yearwood has been at the forefront of helping the climate movement develop an intersectional analysis and build relationships across social justice movements. He has brought a spirit of passion and deep reflection that has resonated across the climate justice movement.

Claire Sandberg has been organizing for many years, since first getting involved in the global justice movement in the late 90's. Among other things, she was one of the organizers who launched the campaign to ban fracking in New York State. She also directed the Bernie Sanders campaign's distributed organizing program as national digital organizing director, and was an architect of the campaign’s volunteer-driven strategy. She's currently working on a few different projects helping progressive organizations and candidates build grassroots power. Claire lives in Washington, DC.

Rev. Elizabeth Nguyen roots for the Wisconsin Badgers, lives in Boston, and is learning all the time about courage, singing, cowardice and prayer. She is the Senior Strategist for Standing on the Side of Love at the Unitarian Universalist Association. She pushes faith communities to support frontline organizing. She comes to climate work to reckon with her family’s past of drilling for oil on occupied Seneca land in Western New York and to honor her family’s inheritance as refugees who know the pain of fleeing land that is no longer livable. More at: https://www.standingonthesideoflove.org/ourstories/.

Ted Hamilton is a co-founder of the Climate Defense Project and hails from Boston. Ted’s passions lie at the intersection of environmental and social justice, and in the use of movement politics and legal advocacy to transform society.  Ted has studied comparative literature and philosophy at Cornell and Yale, and written about books, politics, and climate change for a variety of publications. During law school he focused on protest defense and growing the climate movement through involvement in the Harvard divestment campaign and internships with the Civil Liberties Defense Center and Climate Disobedience Center.

Our Allies

Climate Defense Project. The climate movement needs climate lawyers. Climate Defense Project fills a gap in the legal landscape by supporting front-line activists, pursuing climate impact litigation, and connecting attorneys with communities and campaigns. The Climate Disobedience Center has worked with the CDP team since they were students at Harvard Law School, and we continue to collaborate to find legal resources for climate activists and to support those activists who choose to go to trial using novel legal tools like the climate necessity defense.