Alicia White, award-winning entrepreneur, environmental activist, and founder of Project Petals and Blue Sky, has dedicated her career to turning frustration into tangible community impact. White’s journey began in Jamaica, Queens, where a vacant lot in her neighborhood was being used as a dumping ground. “I would pass it every day, and I just got frustrated. And I decided that I wanted to do something about it. Not knowing that fast forward 10 years later that would turn into an organization,” she said. Her determination led to the creation of Gwen Eiffel Park, one of the largest environmental conservation projects in Queens.
Recognizing the value of that experience, White founded the Project Pedals Builders Program, designed to equip young people from under-resourced and BIPOC communities in New York City with the skills, mentorship, and access needed to make a difference in their own neighborhoods. “We’ll take people in the profession of green jobs, architects, engineers, urban planners, designers, environmental scientists, and connect them with young people from frontline communities… to teach them what these professions do in hopes that they come back in the future and they actually are the people in these professions and help make an impact in their communities as well,” White explained.
Her approach emphasizes shared purpose and accessible resources. “It really has to do with working toward a common goal. So in my case, the common goal was improving our environment and really fighting for climate advocacy. Brilliance is equally distributed. Resources are not,” said White. “And so I really provided people with the resources that they needed to make an impact. And when people start to see change and start to see you as a leader making change, it prompts them to want to take action as well.”
White has also confronted the challenges posed by federal policy rollbacks and reduced environmental funding. “The changes and funding and the roll back of the EPA and protections… is impacting frontline and under-resourced communities the most because they’re bearing the brunt of climate change… we have to go back to our grassroots fundraising so that we can continue to provide the services and the resources that we’re providing for the communities that we work in,” she said.
Her leadership during the Environmental Bond Act campaign exemplified her focus on equity. “My objective in that campaign was really to push for legislation but also funding for the under-resourced communities that I work in… one of the main things I did in the coalition was to make sure that we added provisions and funding for communities of color and under-resourced communities so we could change things like infrastructure… a lot of this is due to climate change and a lot of it’s due to a lack of funding to change infrastructure.”
White highlights infrastructure as a core concern, especially in New York City’s vulnerable neighborhoods. “The problem is resources. The problem is funding. And the problem is access… we have a lot of pipes that haven’t been changed in decades,” she said. “That creates flooding…a lot of people lost their lives due to poor infrastructure and climate change. So, one thing that we can address immediately is the poor infrastructure, and I think it’s something that often goes kind of overlooked because there isn’t a concrete person to point the finger at.”
Despite these headwinds, White remains optimistic and emphasizes action over despair. “One thing that we can hold on to now is hope. But we also need to work toward collective action… we have to use our frustrations to prompt change… joining grassroots organizations, writing to politicians, and using our specific talents… definitely thinking about what we can do individually as well as thinking about what we can do as a collective.”
She encourages others to channel frustration into momentum: “The main barrier I’ve seen is people feeling frustrated, people feeling powerless. And I feel like that’s usually when the most changes happen… taking the frustration that we have and channeling it into collective action.”
From her first steps in Queens to influencing citywide policy, Alicia White demonstrates that meaningful environmental change is possible when leadership, resources, and community converge.
