This is Episode 4 of the “Divestment Generation” mini series, a five episode series exploring the 9 year campaign to win fossil fuel divestment at the University of Toronto! In Episode 4, creators and co-hosts Amanda Harvey-Sánchez and Julia DaSilva speak with “Fourth Gen” divestment organizers - those who were involved in the campaign from 2019 until the big win in October 2021 and its immediate aftermath. Our “Fourth Gen” guests are Rivka Goetz, James Slaven, Leila Tjiang, and Léo Jourdan.
This is Episode 4 of the “Divestment Generation” mini series, a five episode series exploring the 9 year campaign to win fossil fuel divestment at the University of Toronto! In Episode 4, creators and co-hosts Amanda Harvey-Sánchez and Julia DaSilva speak with “Fourth Gen” divestment organizers - those who were involved in the campaign from 2019 until the big win in October 2021 and its immediate aftermath. Our “Fourth Gen” guests are Rivka Goetz, James Slaven, Leila Tjiang, and Léo Jourdan.
Episode 4 Transcript
This is Climate Justice Radio
Amanda: Hello and welcome back to Climate Justice Radio, a podcast by Climate Justice Toronto. Climate Justice Radio is a podcast that covers a wide range of issues connected to climate justice. My name is Amanda and I use she and her pronouns.
Julia: My name is Julia I use she and her pronouns as well.
Amanda: And we'll be your hosts for the episode.
Julia: You're listening to our divestment generation miniseries, a five-episode series exploring the nine-year campaign to win fossil fuel divestment at the University of Toronto. Be sure to check out the intro to the series, our three prior divestment generation episodes. And linked resources in the show notes for more information on the campaign.
Amanda: Stick around for the end of each episode, where we'll lead you in a new verse to a climate justice organizing song, an important community building exercise in CJTO organizing meetings.
Julia: So in episode four of the series, we're speaking to divestment organizers who were active during the campaign from around 2019 until U of T's announcement that it would divest its endowment from fossil fuels in 2021, and into the future. Our guests are Rivka Goetz, James Slaven, Leila Tjiang, and Léo Jourdan. Let's have our guests introduce themselves. Rivka do you want to start us off?
Rivka: Absolutely. Hi, my name is Rivka. My pronouns are she/her. I'm a recent graduate of the University of Toronto, where I majored in critical studies in equity and solidarity with minors in Spanish and diaspora and transnational studies. I was a member of LEAP U of T during all four years of my undergrad. And since graduating I've actually gotten involved with Climate Justice Toronto, so I'm really excited to be here.
Julia: Amazing. I'll pass it to James.
James: Hi I’m James, I use he/him pronouns. I'm a new member of LEAP having been around for only about a year now. I’m also an activist who's blind and I've been doing activism with various other justice groups for some time now. This is the first time though that I've been involved with a divestment focused group, and I'll be graduating in a couple of weeks from U of T with an MA in environmental history.
Julia: Awesome. Thank you so much for being here. And Leila.
Leila: Hi, I'm Leila. I use she/her pronouns as well. And I recently graduated from U of T with a double major in Environmental Geography and Environmental Biology. My experience with student organizing has mostly been with LEAP over the past few years. But I've also served in a couple of sustainability and student government related roles throughout my time at U of T. So yeah, super excited to be here. Thanks for having us.
Julia: Yeah, so excited to have you on and we'll pass it finally to Léo.
Léo: Hi, my name is Leo, my pronouns are he/him. I'm an undergraduate student at U of T. I'm entering my fifth year. I studied Computer Science and Mathematics, and I'm now changing paths to hopefully do a master's in ecological forestry. I've been involved with LEAP UofT since summer 2020. And I'm really happy to be here.
Amanda: Great, thank you so much, all of you. So we'll jump right in and to get us started. October 2021, President Meric Gertler announced the decision to divest U of T's fossil fuel holdings. What was your first reaction when you heard the news?
Léo: I went back to the messages that we sent at the time. And the best way I can describe my first reaction is skeptical optimism. So I'll quote myself. “I need another set of eyes on this to know if I'm reading this correctly, and so shouldn't be excited. Or if there's some weird Meric style phrasing that makes this not as good as I thought”. And Meric is Meric Gertler the president, so I think we were all infuriating by the wording, but in the end, we were super happy to finally have a victory for the campaign.
Leila: Yeah, I used the word skeptical or sort of cautious optimism in the past. And I think when we heard the news, and we had clarified the language of the actual statement, we knew that it was a step forward. But we weren't fully satisfied with every element of the statement. Namely, we knew that it was a relatively slow timeline, at least compared to what some other universities had promised. There wasn't really any clear commitment to increased transparency or working with students and faculty and staff and that there was really a complete absence of acknowledging the role of the fossil fuel industry in racism, ethnic violations, colonialism, etc. And so that was a disappointment. But nonetheless, we knew that it was a step forward, and it was more than anything UofT had ever done in the past.
Rivka: I think my reaction to this announcement has gotten much more positive over time. Léo, I'm really glad you went back to those messages, because it's a good reminder that when we first saw it, and I think most of us who were organizing with these in October 2021 saw the announcement in an email that was sort of accidentally forwarded from some faculty the same day, but a couple of hours prior to the actual release from President Gertler of his letter announcing this divestment. We weren't sure what to believe I remember reading over it and then going on slack and then hopping in a group chat and trying to figure out if anyone could tell if this was actually real, and then seeing the email that went out to basically everyone with a mail.utoronto.ca email address, and being like, “Oh, wow, this is actually happening”. So there was definitely that surprise at first. And also I felt a lot of frustration. By the wording of it. A lot of the things Leila talked about the lack of a climate justice framework in this divestment decision. It was framed as solely an economic and maybe environmental decision, but completely divorced from any political implications or social implications of divesting from the fossil fuel industry. Since then, I mean, I also started to feel a lot of relief. We did try and take the opportunity to celebrate a rare win and this over a decade long fight for fossil fuel divestment, and find the joy in that moment, even though our contributions were not acknowledged in the way they should have been throughout the fight.
James: Yeah, I'll just add on, mainly to, to what Leo mentioned, about cautious optimism. I,
I think my version of that cautious optimism was curiosity in two forms one, I was curious being a new member of LEAP, how the members with much more experience in the campaign and much more knowledge of UofT’s reluctance, unwillingness to divest, how they would react, how they would take the news. And secondly, I was curious what the divestment announcement meant because, like Léo mentioned the language that was used left room for interpretation. And again, you know, being new that hasn't been seen. I hopped on to our group Slack, looking for someone that had hopefully translated the divestment announcement and you know, put it in more accessible language.
Julia: Yeah, thank you all so much. I love this term, cautious optimism. I feel like it could be like a book title about like student organizing. And yeah, like this feeling of like, we're just really not used to winning anything and like not knowing how to deal with even the smallest win and like know how to kind of maintain our broader critiques of the institutions like within that. So yeah, this is really this is really insightful already on question one.
So I'm gonna get us to step back a little bit. Just tell us a bit about how you first got involved in divestment organizing. Was this your first experience organizing, if not, what else have you been doing before? And then what drew you to the divestment campaign?
Rivka: LEAP UofT was my first experience with climate organizing, which is not something I expected to find myself involved in prior to university, but I was actually really lucky to grow up in a very politically active family. So I was taken to my first demonstration when I was 11 days old. Can't really take credit for that one. But as I grew up, I also went to a lot of anti war demonstrations, Pride marches, Black Lives Matter protests when I was in high school, and I did a lot of social justice theater in high school with a company in Chicago where I grew up that made plays that traveled around the city of Chicago, talking about social and racial and economic justice. So I had sort of a social justice background. And it had never really occurred to me that the climate crisis and climate justice - I'm not sure I had even heard that term before getting to U of T. It had never occurred to me that that would be a space of radical organizing. And then I got to U of T and at the Victoria College, which is my residential college, their orientation. I met Julia and Cricket, who was another former LEAP organizer, and they informed me that U of T and also Victoria College had investments in the fossil fuel industry, and that this was a long ongoing fight. And I showed up to a LEAP meeting and I heard all of this awesome, radical strategizing. I saw that there was a real political movement underway, and of the various clubs and groups that I tried to get involved with at the start of my first year LEAP was just the most inclusive and welcoming and radical organizing that was actually committed to reaching their goal. And you know, it took all four years of my undergrad but we got there and I'm very glad we did.
Léo: I had never done any organizing before. And I actually didn't really join LEAP for their divestment campaign. I just joined LEAP because that's where the cool kids were. [laughter]. And I was kind of in search of a space with people that share my political beliefs. And I'd kind of looked for that in my first two years at university but the spaces I encountered, I didn't find super appealing. I don't know the LEAP people were very cool and friendly. And so I joined and, that's what got me hooked to the divestment campaign.
Rivka: LEAP is absolutely where the cool kids are. [laughter] It was in 2018, it was 2020 and it's very much what's got us in there.
Amanda: and what does that mean, the cool kids [laughter] can you tell me more?
Léo: Sure, I mean, the kids that have radical leftist political beliefs and that believe in inclusion and community building and you know, I don't think divestment necessarily needs to have those components, but I think it makes sense that it does.
Rivka: I think it's worth noting, and I hope people in previous episodes have talked about it, that although divestment itself is a very unsexy issue to organize around, the people organizing around it have always made it fun. And also, I think this is really important, made a very intentional choice to draw those connections between divestment and the really boring, nitty gritty financial decisions getting made at an institution like U of T and the big issues of anti-capitalism and anti-racism, fighting for Indigenous sovereignty. Those things don't, on the surface level seem to be embedded in the divestment movement, but they absolutely are. And that's what drew me to LEAP is that people were talking about that.
Amanda: That's so cool. And yeah, thank you for making that really important point, Rivka. Was it similar for the two of you, James and Leila?
James: It was kind of similar compared to Leo's experience because I was also looking for the cool kids club in the sense that this wasn't my first time organizing, and it was my first time going back to school in a few years. And in my undergrad, I had a friend who, much more knowledgeable and radical than I was, who was involved in a divestment campaign out at Dalhousie University. I had spoken to them about that and learned about it since my undergraduate time there. And coming to U of T I thought, if I'm here for one year at university, and there's one avenue of climate justice that I'd like to focus on I think it'd be divestment because I hadn't done it before. Sure enough, it turned out to be the cool kids club and met a lot of fantastic folks.
Leila: Yeah. So I suppose I approached divestment organizing from from the other end where I had been involved in a lot of various sustainability initiatives and clubs starting as early as high school. And, not that those clubs were centered on highly individualized actions, but they weren't very critical in their approach to what sustainability meant, you know, like I was I was part of a zero waste group for a really long time. And then, in my first two years of university, I was involved pretty heavily with the sustainability commission at Victoria College, which is also the college that Rivka was at and that commission was sort of a mixture like they would do some stuff that was like, oh, let's sell metal straws, but they also did some sort of events that were focused on Indigenous sovereignty. And so that was kind of maybe where those realms started to mix for me. And then I think, because a lot of the classes that I was taking, because my majors were heavily focused on the environment. And obviously, climate change and climate action was a central part of the discussions that we had in a lot of classes. I think I started to become more radicalized? Like, I guess my coursework planted the seed that kind of grew into me deciding that I needed to kind of pivot to joining a group that was doing more radical work on campus. And that meant joining LEAP because LEAP was kind of the most obvious one for me to join. And also, once I went to a meeting, everybody was super nice and cool, and that made me want to stay.
So, one of the other things I’ll mention was that the climate strikes in 2019 definitely had a big impact on me. I have done some organizing before joining LEAP, but nothing where I was particularly involved in the actual like planning and organizing, like I had gone to some strikes for example, and that sort of thing throughout high school. I think I remember like the one that is very prominent to me is the March for Our Lives, because I'm also - I'm from the US and so that was like a big issue in my last year of high school. And I had even ran like a little social justice magazine with a couple of my friends. But in that sense, I was more interested in the journalism side of it and really getting into the nitty gritty details of what social justice organizing meant. And so I had kind of dabbled in these areas and in kind of areas adjacent to divestment organizing, before really getting into it, and I think that push was really school, but also just the people around me in sustainability spaces that led me to become more interested in climate justice work.
Amanda: Amazing that that kind of leads us really nicely into another question we wanted to ask, which is, how do each of you understand the role of the divestment campaign in the broader U of T or Toronto organizing world and what is or was your niche in that organizing ecosystem?
Rivka: I think often, especially I will say during the pandemic, LEAP U of T did stay very insular to the University of Toronto's campus. I think by virtue of being a student group and also having a primary goal that was so focused on the university's administration. We did make some connections to I mean Climate Justice Toronto for one, but also other other local groups in Toronto, but most of the collaborating and outreach that we did was pretty exclusive to U of T groups and students. I will say that in terms of our niche in the U of T organizing space, I think LEAP filled a really important role of being an explicitly environmental group that was showing up to things like the Environmental Working Group meetings and Governing Council meetings that talked about, you know, sustainability measures and investment plans and things like that, that were targeted towards anyone who cared about the climate crisis. While LEAP was also being a very explicitly political and leftist group. I think we did a lot of or at least tried to do a lot of radicalizing work in environmental spaces on campus, raising awareness, not just about the impact of the fossil fuel industry, on the climate, but also on the political implications of divestment, or of U of T's existing investments in fossil fuel companies. Because a lot of the tactics that the university has used not just in this divestment fight, but also in the anti-apartheid divestment fight back in the 1980s. A lot of those tactics have been about de-politicizing the university's role as an investor. So I think that LEAP and members of LEAP showing up to student and faculty and staff and admin spaces that were meant more generally for environmentalist groups and bringing that political history to the table has been really important.
Leila: Yeah, I'll echo everything that Rivka said. But I will say that kind of on a more personal level. My impression when I entered university was that U of T was not particularly known for its student activism. And so I think when I realized that LEAP existed, I was excited because it really felt like one of the most prominent radical and political student movements on campus. And so on a personal level I think LEAP has really been an example for me on how to structure a successful movement, all while being non-hierarchical and staying true to its core values and mission.
James: Yeah, I'll just quickly add, I think, to echo what Rivka was saying, I think the role for LEAP as a divestment group has been that of radicalization and also to bridge the gap that might exist between the climate justice activism that's happening on U of T’s campus more broadly and that that's happening out in Toronto, because I think, like some people here have have hinted at, especially during COVID, it's more difficult to communicate just with students on U of T’s campus much less make the connections beyond U of T into the community. And so I think that role became even more important during COVID to continue doing coalition building, not just on campus, but between whether it was LEAP and/or other campus groups, and the broader Toronto climate justice scene.
Julia: Thank you so much for like, just all of those kind of like, there's this like theme of kind of like, bridging all of these disparate spaces, and I always thought it was this interesting thing where it's like, “Hi, we're like a ragtag group of socialists and anarchists.” And then people would come and we’d be like, “Okay, let me tell you everything about how like how U of T’s asset management works.” [laughter] And somehow we’re like holding all of that.
Rivka, right at the start of your last comment you were talking about this insularity, or like this, like possible like kind of tendency towards like insularity, that got like, heightened by the pandemic. So I'm gonna pivot us a little bit away from this like really fun discussion. In previous episodes, we talked about what the broader political contexts were like at the time that folks started organizing and so like, for the last generation, we were talking about 2016 election and kind of all the hope that had existed around that. When when the LEAP first got started. Of course, for the last couple of years, that context has been defined by the COVID-19 pandemic. What has divestment organizing, or student organizing more broadly, looked and felt like for you during this this period?
Léo: So I joined right at the start of the pandemic, so I got to see the whole evolution without seeing the pre pandemic scene. But I would say that after the first fall semester of the pandemic, I think zoom calls became increasingly hard for everyone. And there was a lot of zoom burnout, and it felt like organizing on campus stalled pretty drastically. It felt like a lot of our labor was directed towards keeping the group alive rather than doing actual organizing, which was quite sad to see. I think, truthfully, it was pretty tough.
Rivka: It was. My first note that I made for this question is just a sad face that I wrote. It was hard to do organizing during the pandemic. There was so much energy during that first summer of 2020 to be organizing online events. LEAP put on a ton of stuff. We had a book club that read I think seven or eight books, we had teach-ins, we had panels and webinars. There was something happening basically every week, and some of that continued into the fall semester of 2020. And exactly like Léo said, after that, it just got harder and harder for us not just to get people to show up but also ourselves because all of our meetings had to be online and that's just not fun. And also you can't do direct action in a pandemic. You can hold zoom rallies, but the only people who notice a zoom rally are the people showing up to support it. You're not disrupting anything. You're not making any kind of statement to the decision makers that you're trying to make a statement to, because they're not going to come to your zoom rally. So we did try to make a shift in our tactics to really focus on education, holding trainings and workshops. That's what we could do online is we could start conversations about divestment, and try to empower mostly other student groups and student unions with knowledge about how U of T’s investments work and why divestment was important.
Leila: Yeah, so I joined LEAP, I'm pretty sure at the exact same time that Léo joined to leave like I think maybe our first meeting was the same meeting. So yeah, I had the experience of everything during the pandemic, but nothing before it. All I'll add on to what Rivka and Léo have already said is that the one thing that I do think helped draw me in was the energy that LEAP had that for summer. Because even though I wasn't really intimately involved in a lot of the planning of those events, because I was a very new member, I was really excited at all of the work that LEAP was doing, even if it wasn't related to, directly to divestment at U of T, and it wasn't direct actions, but it was just exciting to see a group that was so involved and on top of things and just generally had a lot of energy to put into, you know, alternative forms of organizing. Whereas a lot of other groups that I was a part of, at the time like as soon as the pandemic began, they lost energy and motivation almost immediately. If anything that was motivating to me to join LEAP because I saw that there was so much energy already there. I didn't know that it would die out a little bit and a lot of people would be soon graduating and that the context of the pandemic would change quite a bit. But I still appreciated I think that initial energy at least brought.
James: I'm a baby LEAP member. We're coming up on my one year birthday present, I think. So I had a very different experience I guess in that from the outset. I was really excited because LEAP answered their emails, which is is [laughter] you know a big accomplishment for any kind of activism group during COVID. And then joining the group, I think it was clear some of the difficulties that again, these other three have have described, but I think I was nonetheless impressed with the fact that this student group where you experience high turnover rates where once student members graduate, you know, it can be difficult sometimes to maintain those relationships. So I remember being impressed by you know, how many people [chuckles] were either kind of still considered themselves, members of LEAP or had joined other activists groups in Toronto or elsewhere, but still, you know, would show up to meetings from time to time or still be active on Slack or whatever it was, they were still maintaining a relationship with other people in the group. And so I think that that impressed me.
Amanda: Wow, that's yeah, that's so like, lovely to hear how even an email in the void can can be all it takes.
Rivka: Thank you for having such an optimistic, such an optimistic answer to that, James. It makes me feel much better.
Amanda: Yeah, I mean, I think it's it's so fascinating hearing this as someone who who started organizing before the pandemic and like I was just so curious to hear how you have managed to like, continue on and this is - it's really uplifting to hear how you have been able to create that excitement. And something Julia and I were both a bit curious about was the the sense of like, how do you create that feeling of a social movement, that it's not just this ragtag team that you're part of something bigger than yourselves and in some previous generations, part of how part of it was having the support of a bigger NGO like 350.org or LEAP. Of course, LEAP U of T initially started as a chapter of the LEAP. I'm not sure how much that context was still relevant in your case. So we're curious a bit about that broader. Did you feel that you were part of a broader organization or a part of a broader social movement for divestment or something bigger than that? Were there other partner groups that you could turn to to support or for support, either on campus or off like the Divestment and Beyond or Divest Canada? Or was that really something you had to create for yourselves in the way you've kind of gestured towards a little bit in your answers already?
Rivka: By the time I think any of us were around in LEAP U of T, we weren't actively affiliated. With the LEAP, the national organization, they actually closed in summer of 2021. And we kept the name anyway because we hadn't been that affiliated with them for a while, sort of keeping it more as an homage to the inspiration for the group's inception. You know, rather than being an actual chapter now that they sadly don't exist anymore. But there was very much a sense of movement around divestment, and I mean, definitely around climate justice more broadly. Leila mentioned earlier, the 2019 climate strikes and I think that was a really key factor in that sense of a broader movement towards this just future that we're all trying to build here. Because so many people turned out to the climate strike in Toronto, and we had a smaller one the week before on campus that a lot of students turned out to from groups like Fridays for Future and like other climate groups that had been more sustainability focused before, and also just random students who weren't part of any group yet and wanted to get involved. And several people joined LEAP directly after that. So I think having big city-wide rallies like that, things that were happening internationally globally, as well was really important. And then also groups like OPIRG. LEAP was an OPIRG Action Group and got a lot of support from them in terms of learning different skills and getting funding and organizing events. And then coalitions like Divestment and Beyond that was a group of faculty staff and students working together on divestment and other climate justice initiatives. Unfortunately, Divestment and Beyond sort of like LEAP got got cut off by that in 2020 sadly. So we have kept up that connection in that coalition since then, but in a more low-key way.
Leila: The only organization outside of LEAP that I really can speak to maybe is the Divestment and Beyond collaboration. In my last year at LEAP, I did a little, I met a little bit with Divestment and Beyond and that was a really eye-opening experience because it was really great to see how faculty were backing the divestment movement at U of T. I think as a student at U of T. The university can feel so big sometimes. And when your classes are really big, sometimes you feel a bit disconnected from the faculty and from your professors. And so seeing professors that were actually saying the exact same things as what students were saying in LEAP meetings was affirming, in a sense, it made me feel like there was an actual movement happening on campus, and it wasn't just, you know, like you said, a ragtag team of students
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Rivka: James, would you want to speak to the mapping project that you did? I think in the fall semester of 2021
James: Yeah, it's a project that Rivka and I worked on because Rivka had previously put together a yeah mind map of LEAP’s campaigns, if you want to call them that, as well as the groups that LEAP had relationships with whether they were groups that was trying to pressure to divest or groups that received funding from whatever it was. And so yeah, Rivka and I put together a series of maps, I guess, mind maps that laid out quite nicely for me whose a visual learner and a new member to LEAP, how LEAP fit into that larger social movement and what exactly the relationships it had with those other groups were and so yeah, I think that's, that's a great like physical-visual representation of what exactly being a part of a larger social
movement looks like.
Rivka: Yeah, and I just really appreciated the opportunity to do that. It was really easy for me and I'm guessing for a lot of other LEAP members, especially during the pandemic, to feel just isolated and cut off and we were constantly being ignored by the U of T administration. So it was actually really nice and helpful to put down on paper, digital paper, this visual physical representation of all these connections that we had and this sort of tangible proof that there is a broader climate movement and that we're not the only ones out here calling out U of T.
Leila: I'll quickly add on, I think during the pandemic, because there was no opportunity to have any in person direct actions. There were a handful of ways in which LEAP tried to have direct actions online that were a bit more visible than just doing something like holding a zoom rally.
There were a handful of times where U of T would post on its Facebook or Instagram. Like oh, U of T named like, top university in Canada or this ranked university in the world. And you know, just like things that were really just like, propping up its own ego. And we just randomly I think a few people just decided to comment underneath those posts. “Oh, sure. You're ranked first in Canada, but you're the worst at fossil fuel investments” or you know, something derogatory about its approach to fossil fuel divestment, and then it just started to catch on like more people started doing it and then random U of T students just started adding comments. Even though those actions ultimately like I think, are a lot less valuable than face to face interactions with other students that aren't a part of the support divestment movement. I think that was all that was very valuable ultimately, especially for someone who hadn't been part of the pre-pandemic because I actually saw students supporting LEAP and just small everyday actions. I think there was one other instance in which someone on LEAP made some memes about divestment and posted them on the U of T Facebook meme page and people really loved them and there were a lot of likes and people put a lot of great snarky comments underneath and so I think there's this sort of digital activism element that helps demonstrate, especially during the pandemic that students in general supported divestment at U of T. And while everyone wasn't coming out to LEAP meetings specifically and everyone didn't have the time to dedicate to organizing with LEAP itself, they would throw their support behind the small actions when they could and I think that contributed to at least my understanding of divestment as a broader social movement at U of T.
Amanda: I'm so happy you both mentioned the memes, because as some of you know, I was an undergraduate student at U of T so I'm part of that meme group, even though I'm now a graduate student, and I remember seeing them and like feeling like both, like very surprised, but also just like so. Like it was so heartening to see I was like, “Oh, wow, the kids they’re, they're still talking about divestment. This is truly wonderful.” So I saw that and it made me very happy.
Julia: So speaking of like, making fun of President Gertler and U of T online, that actually leads very well into our next question, which is about U of T and university greenwashing. So as divestment became more popular, and as the memes proliferated, universities have, you know, we've seen them kind of increasingly respond with things that are supposed to be like divestment or respond to divestment, but aren't. They're kind of their own green carbon investment solutions. So at U of T we saw that after the kind of initial rejection of that that first divestment petition in 2016 when they published the Beyond Divestment report, and the turn to environmental, social and governance factors and investment portfolios that we see a lot of institutions touting. So for all of you, you're working already a few years in the aftermath of that 2016 announcement. And many university administrators may have wanted to consider the issue of divestment closed until what for many felt, and then you know in 2021, we have what for many felt like this very sudden kind of about faith on the part of the institution. So how did you respond either before or after that - the 2021 decision - to the university's messaging, what was LEAP’s messaging and tactics? Specifically in response to that kind of greenwashing?
Léo: Weirdly enough, I want to say that, that greenwashing gave us a bit of ammo, because they started releasing these sustainability investment reports. And they were these beautiful PDFs with a lot of pictures of forests and plants and little green stuff everywhere. With a bit of digging in, and with some technical knowledge that we had to learn. We managed to extract information about their investment in fossil fuels, which was completely hidden to us previously. And I don't think they did this on purpose. But they gave us the information in the end that they had at least $350 million invested specifically in the fossil fuel industry.
I feel like at that point, it's hard to justify that your ESG policy is not flawed if four years after implementing it, you still had that much money, really specifically in oil-extracting industry.
Rivka: And that's the whole issue with ESG policies. I don't think this podcast is the space for my or anyone else’s greenwashing anti ESG spiel because if you're listening to this podcast, you probably already know why that's all bullshit [laughter] and allows and actually encourages for increased investment in the fossil fuel industry. So suffice it to say, with that ammo from the sustainable investing reports from UTAM, we were able to at least estimate how much money was actually going into fossil fuel companies every year. In addition to calling out greenwashing via meme via divestment training workshop, I think there's a lot of I don't know if media literacy is the right term, but, you know, institutional administrative bullshit literacy, maybe? There's a lot that I've learned and hopefully passed on to some other people as well about how to sort of see through all of them, nice. What are some examples? The University Network for Investor Engagement, the Investing to Address Climate Change Charter, all these things with really snappy names, and pretty green covers that actually don't mean anything. Learning how to see through that and passing that on to other students was one of LEAP’s really important tactics. And another one was just pointing out the difference in scope between what U of T was doing starting in 2016, which mostly addressed the carbon emissions from on campus infrastructure, and the sort of self reported goals of the companies they were investigating in rather than their actual impact. So comparing the scope of that to the much more massive scope of what divestment is calling for which is going after an entire industry, reframing the way our society and our economy works. Yeah. That 350 million number really gave us a, an extra leg to stand on.
Leila: While I agree with Léo, that it gave us ammo, In a sense, it was incredibly frustrating as well. And I'll kind of speak from my experience with doing divestment work at Victoria College specifically, because I guess for context, there are three federated colleges at U of T and all that's really important about their designation as federated is that they have their own endowments, and therefore have their own investments, and those endowments and investments are not subject to the same standards as U of T’s. And so all three of those endowments have yet to be divested from fossil fuels. And there have been no explicit commitments to divestment from fossil fuels. So there had to be kind of separate efforts at each of those colleges to push the the governance of that college specifically because they also have separate governance from U of T to divest. So it's basically like a mini version of what we were doing at U of T. In some ways, it was easier because we had like their governance structures are smaller their endowments are also smaller, and there's kind of sometimes more access into their governance structures because they're, they're just smaller and a bit more intimate. But at the same time, it was frustrating because after U of T had divested the fact that all three of these federated colleges hadn't followed suit was just surprising, because ideally, those federated colleges would want to stay aligned with U of T’s messaging. And so in various meetings that I had with administrators and also people who managed the investments at Victoria College specifically, I just remember feeling completely frustrated to the point where I had to just lay on my bed and scream into my pillow at moments. And, and a lot of that was because of the sort of ESG pat on the back greenwashing policies that they had touted in those meetings. And the meetings didn't even feel like a debate. Because sometimes it would just be like they would just repeat all of the things that I knew were incorrect and just complete greenwashing and then I'd repeat back at them, the sort of rebuttals that I had and then there would just be no genuine response to it and no engagement in my rebuttal. And so in that sense, it was really frustrating. But I think once I had learned about all of this ESG stuff and the Beyond Divestment report, and whatnot, I think I had decided that with the sort of strategic advantage that we had at Vic, which was having students that sat on the Board of Regents like the governance structure at Vic it would be helpful to try to adopt an inside out approach, where we tried to use strategic connections with student leaders who already had a voice and a vote in the university's governance structure to push the needle forward. And especially because direct actions were not possible that we had to start from the inside rather than try to break in from the outside, which had been done before. But there was a very lackluster response from a college in that instance. And so I think this sort of veiled messaging, it was ammo, but it was also at times just so frustrating pillow screaming frustrating.
James: I think the main message that LEAP was trying to get out following the announcement was that divestment is not over. And in terms of tactics, we actually, following the announcement, had several meetings that took place over the course of a few months because we were trying to figure out okay, now that some of their investments have become less accessible in terms of pressure points. For instance, the money held in the UPP, you know, what kind of tactics can LEAP use going forward to continue to push for divestment. You know, I won't spoil what's to come just in case, you know, President Gertler’s listening to this podcast, but suffice to say that we have talked a lot about some of our new tactics, and I think there is a lot of excitement for me to hear about those tactics being being put into practice in the following year and the years to come.
Amanda: Interesting. Yes. Shout out to Meric Gertler if he's listening. There's more to come this story has not ended. [laughter]. Okay, so the next question we wanted to ask you is kind of a little more big picture. But Rivka mentioned actually right at the top of the podcast that climate justice was a term she might not have even heard like before joining LEAP and, and that's something we're interested in tracing across these episodes is the emergence of climate justice as this core framework or lens that climate organizers or maybe even specifically youth and students are using. So we're wondering if you could speak a bit about how you see or define climate justice and also speak to the context of when you joined. Was this already an assumed framework in organizing spaces? Did it feel new? Did it feel unique? If it wasn't, do you remember any specific moments like workshops, rallies, readings or conversations, when you and the people you were working with were introduced to the concept of climate justice?
Leila: I think before I joined LEAP, I was aware of what of the term climate justice but I maybe couldn't have given you a definition just off the top of my head. And I think it's LEAP that really solidified my understanding of what climate justice was, in part through some of the events that they hosted in the first summer of the pandemic in the summer of 2020. But I think having spent the last two years organizing with LEAP I would kind of broadly define climate justice as both a movement and a lens, that really centers systemic and critical and radical perspectives on the causes, but more importantly, on the impacts of climate change. It's not just about, you know, plastic waste and driving less. It's about actually dismantling the institutions that contribute to racism, colonialism, ableism, etc. All of which kind of create lines of difference and exclusion that ultimately intersect with and drive the disproportionate effects of the climate crisis. But I think there's so much more nuance to it than that. And I really don't think it can be summarized in just a couple of sentences and I think to really understand what it means it helps a lot to be involved in organizing, even if it's organizing on as small of a scale as organizing at your university or even your high school.
Léo: Yeah, personally, before joining LEAP my vision of what climate justice really entailed was some kind of anti-capitalism. When I joined LEAP, I realized that there was also anti colonialism and anti racism that were really important. And I saw that and I discovered all this through the reading club that we had, and the land stories that we did at the beginning of each meeting, or also the events that we attended as a group, for instance, our actions and solidarity with land defenders. I think that divestment campaigns in general, can’t really get away of this definition of climate justice, like this intersection of anti capitalism, anti racism, anti colonialism and other fights of the sort. Because, at least in Toronto, like the extractive industries like they're not operating here. They're operating on other people's grounds, Indigenous or racialized communities, and they're the ones who are impacted the most. And once you think about what investing in fossil fuel means, what the direct impact of your money is, then you can't not see that.
Rivka: I really like what Leila said about systemic causes and impacts. I’ve defined climate justice as an organizing framework that connects the climate crisis to its root causes - the exploitative and extractive capitalist system, the history of land theft from Indigenous people and ongoing settler colonialism and the racism, classism and ableism that results in the climate crisis disproportionately impacting low-income communities, communities of color and other marginalized groups. Obviously, that's not a complete definition. There is no complete definition. I just took a stab at it. But what's really interesting to me and has been since joining LEAP about climate justice as a framework is that it is ever evolving. Even when I joined LEAP, it was pretty much already assumed as the framework in which we were planning our actions and our campaigns. That wasn't the case in environmental spaces more broadly. And I think still sometimes when LEAP shows up to other groups meetings or you know, campus-wide events, things like that, we find that this isn't really the the norm in other spaces to be to be working from a place of working towards climate justice. And for me, the moment that most illustrated and informed my understanding of climate justice was the 2019 Divest Fest that we organized, because there were multiple events and speakers invited that week to this event that was very specifically divestment focused, but these speakers and experts’ experience was in other areas that connected to the climate crisis. So we had a nature walk, guided by an Indigenous educator and forest therapy trainer named Carolyn Crawley. And there was also a lecture on the connections between fossil fuel divestment and disability justice by Sue Dalrymple Fraser, and there was a discussion on a Green New Deal with 15 and fairness, a group that we worked with several times that year, that also had a speaker from the Migrant Workers Alliance for change. Syad Hassan, talking about Migrant Justice and how that was implicated in climate policy in the Canadian context. So all of these different people who wanted to show up to an event about divestment and about climate work really helped to inform my own and I think other LEAP members’ idea of climate justice. Léo talked about book club, huge shout out to book club for helping all of us learn more about all of these different intersecting struggles, and place ourselves in the broader context of what climate justice means.
James: The only thing I might add, which is a bit of a thinker, is that climate justice is not, or not just, environmentalism.
Amanda: That's your mic drop? You’re not even going to elaborate a little bit? Wow -
Rivka: I'm snapping into the mic over here.
Amanda: Yeah, think about that when you go to sleep tonight listeners. [laughter]
Julia: And President Gertler if you're listening. [laughter]
Julia: Yeah, thank you all so much for all of these kind of these intricate definitions. And I love this idea of like, climate justice as this kind of framework where we know we, you know, we, we kind of all like know what it means, but also it's this kind of ever evolving thing. This kind of like almost this like container for talking about the kinds of like, just like sustainable worlds that we need. I'm going to pivot a little bit. And let's talk about what happens after U of T’s divestment. What what is LEAP working on going forward? I know we've touched on this a bit in the kind of pandemic question around kind of like education and trainings. And then also, Leila, thank you for clarifying that U of T has not - many entities at U of T have not aren't are not divested, in fact. So yeah, anything that LEAP is either working on right now or has been working on in the recent past.
Léo: I think we'll definitely keep helping with pension divestment, although as students, we have very little impact on that. But we will keep supporting faculty and staff that are pushing towards pension, being divested, which is, by the way, more than half the money that the university has invested. And I find it very convenient that a couple of months before announcing divestment, they suddenly lost control of what happened to their pension fund.
Rivka: voluntarily gave up control of their pension funds to a larger entity.
Léo: Yes.
Rivka: that is more conservative and less accountable to definitely students and also faculty.
Léo: Absolutely, they totally did it on purpose. So basically the UPP is a combination of pension funds from universities across Ontario. And it kind of puts U of T as the head of this conglomerate of universities. So I think it's a great PR move for them to be to have the UPP around. We also talked about federated colleges, which we will continue to work on for sure. We're probably also going to be looking into investments the other way around how the fossil fuel industry invests into the university or the presence of banks on campus. I think our first priority will be rebuilding, first of all rebuilding the group, because our membership numbers are quite low because of the pandemic. And so we're planning on taking advantage of upcoming semester to recruit new members, hopefully. Scoop, since the LEAP manifesto is no longer something that younger students are familiar with, that will probably come with some kind of rebranding, although that's to be determined.
But we don't also want to rebuild our group. I think in general, the pandemic wiped out, almost all climate organizing on campus, and there's a void to fill there and a community to rebuild there. I'm also under the impression that the amount of radical left students is increasing every year. And so we're hopeful that they'll be eager to start organizing themselves. So there's definitely a lot of uncertainty of for what comes next for LEAP, I think, but no matter what, because of these new people coming in the community I'm confident that no matter what happens climate justice, divestment will definitely be part of whatever happens on campus even after I graduate and I'm the only one on this call who is still at the university going forward. So a bit of pressure there.
Julia: Just as a side note to that. So I started doing a bit of organizing with Climate Justice UBC, where I am now this year and I found out that one fall partway through the pandemic, they had gotten down to two people in the group and like, fully rebuilt and are now like a thriving group, as big as LEAP ever was pre-pandemic. So it is possible and it's possible in the pandemic, at a very large alienated campus like U of T. So reasons for, reasons for like hope and joy.
Léo: That is great to hear.
Amanda: Okay, I think we'll close it out with one last question, which is, I think you've told us so much already about this, but what did you learn through working on divestment if you had to sum it up? And also what is next for you personally? Are you working in other organizing spaces? And what are you bringing from what you learned in divestment to those to those new spaces?
Rivka: I'm gonna actually start this off on kind of a negative note, but I promise it'll get better. One of the big things that I learned from doing four years of fossil fuel divestment organizing specifically at the University of Toronto, which is such a massive school with so much bureaucracy, and…let's just leave it at that. Um, one of the main things I learned is that systemic change is hard and goes really slowly and does not always feel as fulfilling as one might hope that political, social justice work would. Institutions rely a lot on activist turnover, especially in a place like a campus where for undergraduate most students are leaving in four or five years. Even in any other campus, the institutions also rely on burnout in order to maintain the status quo of what has already been established and sort of curb the movements that might be trying to change that. But the flip side of that is that if we can build really strong communities and care for each other, and value each other, not just for what we can do, but also for who we are and the friendships we can build, and pass on the knowledge that we've gained and the passion that we all have. If we're showing up to groups like LEAP to be pushing for change. Then we have a lot more power than we realize and a lot more power than these institutions want us to have. U of T did eventually have to divest. We can't take all the credit for that, but we can definitely take some of it. And that's what I'm taking with me now that I've graduated. I have recently joined Climate Justice Toronto and I am really excited about how much of a community space that is and also about how many more kind of day to day impacts and goals Climate Justice Toronto is working towards, things like public transit, housing, things that are working towards a broader vision of climate justice, but not solely relying on the very, very slow paced, systemic institutional change that you have to be fighting for when you're fighting for divestment. I think being able to take tangible steps to the future that we want is really important in a movement like this one.
Léo: I learned way too much about investments. [laughter] I learned way too much about the administrative structure of U of T and all that it includes. I have my brain filled with acronyms that have no meaning to anyone outside LEAP, and a couple of people in the administration. I just want to forget it all. But I won’t. But I would like to focus on community-building instead. I feel like with these very complicated issues, especially I think, since the university pushed ESGs which get pretty complicated pretty quick. I kind of want to stop focusing on that and let other people who are better at it focus on that. And I'll focus on community building instead.
Leila: I feel like LEAP instilled a lot of the core values that I hold now even though I was only part of LEAP for the second half of my time in university and so I am thankful for - for that not only in terms of the political values that I hold but also values related to community. I think that's kind of the theme here community and that as hard as organizing can be, and especially with something that can be as dry as divestment, it's the community and the people that make it worth it. And so, I guess the one thing that I do have to add is that I've also joined CJTO and I'm glad that it is a very like similarly welcoming and social space in the way that LEAP was when I first encountered it. So I'm very excited to see what that will be like. And I'm also excited to move past divestment, and focus on climate justice more broadly, because just like Léo, I am sick of having all of this financial information stuck in my brain, and I would like to focus on other cool issues.
Julia: The LEAP to CJTO pipeline.
Rivka: The one pipeline we support. [laughter]
Amanda: James, do you want to close us out here?
James: Yeah, sure. I'll put a spin on what's already been said and that's that, all of that financial jargon that might dissuade someone from getting involved in divestment is not activist proof. And it really helps to organize with other people who bring their own skills and knowledge and experience to the campaign. Because then it becomes a lot easier to start to memorize all of those acronyms and you know, explore that rabbit hole.
I think the other thing that I'm taking away from the past year is a reinforcement of my view that to a degree there is some turnover with student activist groups, more so or in a different way than you might see with climate justice groups, you know, based in the community at-large, but it's not like the door is closed forever once you graduate and you're no longer a member of LEAP for instance, period. You know, there is always the chance to stay involved to get re involved. And if you're lucky, you'll have people like the other people in LEAP to kind of welcome you back into the fold.
Amanda: Wow, what a beautifully uplifting note to end on. For all those listening join join LEAP or join CJTO, or join LEAP and then join CJTO [laughter] after you graduate.
Thank you so much Rivka, Leo, James, Leila, and Julia my co host here. I think we've all learned so much from this conversation and yeah, thank you.
Rebecca: Welcome back to the song segment of Climate Justice Radio. It's Rebecca again and I'm here to teach you the last two verses of the song Which Side are You On? So by now you've actually heard the whole melody the last two verses are ones that we've already done before. So this is basically just practice. Okay, let's play the recording.
So the next part goes:
Does it weigh on you at all?
Does it weigh on you at all?
(x 2)
Which side are you on now?
Which side are you on?
(x 4)
Incredible! So that last section we actually sing four times at the very end of the song, and we're gonna put it all together, but we're gonna wait one more episode before you play the whole song. So stay tuned for the final episode of this mini series. And we'll sing it all together.
Julia: Stay tuned for the fifth and final episode of the divestment generation miniseries, an intergenerational conversation where we invite guests from each of the prior episodes to meet one another and chat about key themes from the podcast, where they are now and next steps for the climate justice movement.
Climate Justice Radio is brought to you by Climate Justice Toronto. This miniseries features original music by Stephen Hegerat and editing by Stefan, Amanda, and Julia. The creators and co-hosts of the series are Amanda and Julia. The sing along was led by Rebecca and included participants at CJTO’s September new member orientation. Special thanks to CJRU Radio and 2185 Art Collective for use of the recording space and equipmentand to the Discovering University World's research team for funding to support editing. You can find all our socials and a link to sign up to join CJTO at our website, climatejusticeto.com the transcript for this episode, as well as other information and links mentioned in the podcast will be in our episode description.
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