In Conversation with Sharona Shnayder
The Tuesdays For Trash Founder on her Nigerian-Israeli background, movement-building, and navigating the environmental space as a Black woman
Sharona Shnayder is unequivocally a non-capital-driven girlboss — before the word got co-opted as a way to equate profit and workaholism with feminism, a girlboss in its purest stripped-down definition: a woman with drive and passion.
The 21-year-old climate activist is the founder of Tuesdays For Trash, a global grassroots environmental movement that began during the pandemic — May 5, 2020 — as a way for people to give back to their communities and help maintain the natural environment via collecting trash, while simultaneously creating a safe space for people to spend time in nature with loved ones.
Since its inception, Tuesdays For Trash has also become a gateway into activism that crosses all spectrums of climate justice. Through its platform, Tuesdays for Trash not only raises awareness about waste management issues around the world, but also proposes solutions. Though she stresses that corporations and businesses are the main culprits responsible for our planets’ dire waste situation, it can’t be denied that Tuesdays For Trash is incredibly powerful in demonstrating the power of individual action, as Shnayder notes that “what started as two people spending a Tuesday every week picking up trash has turned into people in 29 countries [with] over 17,000 pounds of trash collected. People are turning it into an actual movement.”
It is evening in Israel, where Shnayder is currently based. She is tired from a long day at work, but lights up with energy and passion when we start talking about the climate crisis. Before moving to Israel, Shnayder lived in Portland, and before then, Lagos, Nigeria. She credits her Nigerian-Israeli background, and the global perspective that arose from living in so many different corners of the world, as being highly influential in her journey into climate activism.
“I was born and raised in Lagos, where resources were very limited. We lived a comfortable life, but compared to life in America, it was very different. We survived off of a lot less than people in America often do. There were things that we had to preserve and sustain because there simply wasn’t a way to get anything in a speedy sense that it happens in America, so I learned sustainability at a very young age. It was a culture of “we amend and repair until we need to buy something else.” I pride myself on being able to keep things for a very long time, [so it was] very strange coming into America. Even before it becomes something unusable [Americans] just toss it into the trash.
[As for] my Israeli side: One very big value that Israeli and Jewish people have is preservation and taking care of the land. It’s really something that we feel connected to. Our land is our home and home [is not] just somewhere you live, it’s somewhere you belong and for me that really shows up in my activism because I feel like I belong on this planet. I belong on Earth. This is the only home that I’ve ever known and probably will ever have and whenever I see people who are taking it for granted and using all its resources without being regenerative, it makes me really angry. I’ve luckily been able to channel that into positive energy and actions that are constructive, as opposed to feeling shitty all the time. Both of my heritages are minority backgrounds and they’re both from communities that are affected the most by the climate crisis: We’re at the frontline; we don’t have as many resources as more developed countries; we’re facing a lot more than just the climate crisis, there are conflicts, a lack of education. It’s not easy coming from these backgrounds, but it’s also powerful, because I get a very wide perspective of what’s going on.”
From Nigeria, Shnayder moved to Portland, notoriously known as the whitest major city in America, an experience she recalls quite unfavorably:
“I honestly was really white washed for a very long time. I went to a pretty much all white high school, there were maybe four other Black kids in the school and they were all mixed. No one was fully Black. I straightened my hair for eleven years. I got rid of my accent within a year. I did everything I could not to stand out and I think it really hurt me. I started losing a lot of my identity. It wasn’t until I went to college [at Portland state] and I met a few other Black people, [albeit, not many] where I finally started realizing that my unique cultural background is an advantage. It’s really sad that being in that space in my high school, I thought that [my cultural background] was something I needed to be ashamed of, something I needed to hide.”
Portland is not a welcoming place for people of color, despite how prevalent the whole “liberal Black Lives Matter narrative” is there. It’s completely superficial. There are more Black Lives Matter signs than there are actual Black people in Portland.”
Still, Shnayder found ways to give back to her community. She currently serves as a chairwoman for the Portland-based nonprofit, Our Streets PDX, which like Tuesdays for Trash, also started during the pandemic. Our Streets PDX is dedicated to addressing Portland’s homelessness problem. The city suffers from an extremely high rate of homelessness, while lacking many of the resources necessary to help and rehabilitate its homeless population. Our Streets PDX does its role to aid this undoubtedly systemic problem by feeding over 500 homeless individuals every week and also organizing trash pickups in an effort to uplift these mostly communities of color.
There’s a reason why Portland’s homeless population, as are the homeless populations across the United States, is mostly made up of people of color. “The systems are created to oppress us. It’s very hard to do anything there and be given the same opportunities as more privileged ethnic groups.” In fact, Shnayder recalls that her cross-globe move to Israel stemmed from feeling unwelcome in America:
“I’m a woman; I’m a person of color; I’m an immigrant; I’m Jewish. There were so many things that were stacked against me and even though racism is everywhere in the world, in Israel at least I had a few less obstacles in terms of everyone here is mostly Jewish, everyone here is sort of a person of color, and a lot of us are immigrants, too. That’s three things knocked off my list of obstacles.”
Her move to Israel also allowed Shnayder to be in a country where the climate crisis is being called out for the emergency that it is. She currently works for climate tech start-up, Albo Climate, that uses AI technology and satellite imagery to map, monitor, and verify carbon sequestration in order to fund frontline communities that are actively creating carbon sinks. Culturally, Shnayder notes that Israeli people bandwagon when it comes to supporting causes, that if sustainability and intersectional environmentalism were to become a statewide priority, such an initiative could be modeled by Israel for the rest of the world as a test place for a “utopian sustainable country.”
To be completely honest, as someone who has lived in America for most of my life, it’s hard for me to wrap my mind around an Israel that exists outside of media headlines on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the House approving one billion dollars of funding for Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’. Shnayder notes that American big money influence is definitely something people talk about a lot in Israel — that the media obviously highlight extensively as well.
In fact, Shnayder moved to Israel in early 2021 right after Israeli-Palestinian tensions had escalated into an open conflict. She remembers feeling scared, unaware of what she was walking into, but very aware that the narrative online was overwhelmingly negative.
“I was really terrified that people would see me in Israel and automatically make assumptions about my beliefs and pigeonhole me into a box that wasn’t where I fit. I’m Israeli by ethnicity. That’s my identity, it’s part of who I am. I’m not [going to refuse that] because people make assumptions. [What’s happening in Israel is] very similar to a lot of things that are going on around the world. America has the same issue: America colonized America. The country has not done anything to truly give back land to Indigenous people, it hasn’t successfully nor adequately provided reparations for the damage that caused in the years of genocide to native people.
Not everyone supports the government here and I think it's really important that we use climate as a way to bridge the conflict and the divide, because it's everyone’s land. If we truly care about this land and having it and preserving it, then we should all be taking care of it. We’re all on the same playing field in terms of we need clean air, we need clean water, we need houses that aren’t on fire. If we can achieve that together, it automatically creates an opportunity to find peace. We’re not going to have peace if there isn’t a world to have it on, right?”
I was momentarily stunned by the thoughtfulness in the connection Shnayder drew between zionism’s nationalist manifestations, and a commitment to caring for desired land — it’s clear that the environment is the throughline to Shnayder’s passions and her ability to center the human's effect on climate change is incredibly poignant. Shnayder’s affinity towards the environmental movement began with her sustainable upbringing. However, she credits her journey into environmental activism to Greta Thunberg’s 2018 speech to the United Nations.
“It was the first time I saw someone very angry and passionate and saying facts and information I’d never heard of before and — I was studying accounting at the time — being a numbers person, I was like ‘Woah, these are very scary numbers. Why is no one talking about this? This can’t be real.’ After doing more research, I realized how right she was. I had very big dreams and it was crushing to know that I would most likely never see those dreams come true because there wouldn't be a planet. I don’t want to ever look back and see that I didn’t do as much as I could.”
“I don’t want to ever look back and see that I didn’t do as much as I could” — these words drew concern from me. It isn’t uncommon for young people, especially young people of color, to truly feel the burden of the climate crisis on their shoulders that they must scramble to mitigate as much as possible. But because it’s nearly impossible to objectively measure and “maximize” the extent of one’s individual actions — unreasonable expectations can leave many feeling empty and burnout.
Shnayder knows this and recognizes her tendencies towards workaholism, tendencies that she is actively trying to dismantle. Although she is pessimistic in the sense that as we are right now, the world will inevitably experience some effects of climate change, she grounds herself in community and optimistic in the sense that she thinks people are inherently good — if one shows them how climate change is affecting them and tangible actions they can take, people will change.
Shnayder’s passion is what I find the most compelling about her personhood. In our conversation, I could feel it through every sentence spoken. But Shnayder’s passion is unfortunately often overlooked within the context of the overwhelmingly white environmental movement. As a Black woman, Shnayder has no shortage of experiences with tokenism, a phenomenon she finds ironic considering how little Black voices are actually centered.
In fact Green 2.0, an independent advocacy campaign that tracks racial and gender diversity within the environmental movement, has found that — though there has been some improvement — the environmental movement remains overwhelmingly white. Data from around forty of America's largest nonprofit environmental organizations and the top forty grant providers and foundations, demonstrate that on average, between 2017 and 2020, six people of color and eight women were added to their full-time staff and one person of color and one woman to their board of directors.
“We’re always used when it's valuable to people, [not when] it’s critical. COP26 was a perfect example: They made the conference the least accessible for BIPOC communities, especially African nations because of COVID restrictions and the immense cost to get there and afford to stay there. [I don’t really understand why] it is so purposeful, because we’re the ones who are directly affected. You would think that our voice would be the most requested, and yet we only see this happen during Black History Month. My inbox is flooded during that month alone and I never hear back from those companies afterwards. [Black people] need support all-year round. We aren’t asking to be saved, we’re asking you to work with us and to provide us with the resources to be at the same level as you to fight the things that you have created. Africa has huge forests that are being deforested currently and we’re facing so many issues of our own like acute hunger, ineffective governmental systems that are literally all caused by white people. [It is truly] colonialism at its finest.”
This exclusion was on blatant display at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), which was held in the U.K. — one of the wealthiest nations in the world, which as Shnayder says ensures that “of course there’s going to be classism, of course there’s going to be white washing, of course there’s going to be everything under the sun except for what's actually needed. COP26 was extremely ineffective. I wonder why? The people who matter the most weren’t there.”
There is an unspoken condition that only white people can be “centered” and “powerful,” for the world we live in is very uncomfortable with the idea of seeing a person of color lead. This is a notion that Shnayder emphasizes must be deconstructed — people of color do climate work so selflessly. But regardless of whether or not she is recognized and prioritized in the climate movement, she knows that she is still going to be putting in work because the climate crisis is an issue that is very important to her.
“I’m not motivated by the media; I’m not motivated by how much praise or attention I get; I’m motivated by having a future and making sure that people don’t die.”
Despite being looked over by white spaces that refused her a seat at the table, Shnayder has remained passionate. But this fact of her perseverance — a testament to the grit all Black women are forced to embody — is not something that should be celebrated: She should not have had to overcome what should not have been an obstacle to begin with.
Shnayder’s journey into the climate movement, from her time in Portland to now living in Israel, speaks to the fact that white and non-Black people need to do a lot better when it comes to supporting the passions of Black people, especially Black women, around them.
The climate crisis often feels like an insurmountable issue, and as she continues to grapple with feelings of inadequacy that drive workaholism, Shnayder stresses it is uplifting and joining communities of outspoken and passionate women of color, like her, that will help us out of its worst effects.
“What’s really gonna determine if we survive or not is if we change now. That gives me hope because we're seeing more people rise up, especially the youth. I know there are people like me all around the world that care and are doing something and soon it’s going to become everyone. I really believe that.”
Image: Kseniia Poliak @poliak_photography