Tyler Massias
Tyler Massias, MS
“Much of my journey has been about cooperation and collaboration... using these two elements to provide a pathway towards a better future, not just for myself, but for those around me.”
Tyler Massias is our Director of the Speakers Bureau, Strategic Development, & Public Policy. He has worked extensively to help build out the infrastructure of Earth Guardians. He currently leads our novel Earth Voices program, housed in the Speakers Bureau, where we send our speakers to schools across the country to provide supplemental climate-based education. He is responsible for founding and overseeing the Science, policy, and Traditional Knowledge Series, which focuses on analyzing and conveying information pertaining to the confluence of those three distinct topics. He also leads the Earth Voices podcast, which serves as another methodology EG deploys to promote and leverage the youth voice.
Tyler initially joined the movement for climate and environmental justice by meeting and working with diverse groups of people in his local community from varying backgrounds to accomplish similar goals, while acknowledging and reconciling differences and disagreements, and subsequently working past them. He started an organization called Youth Ambassadors of Change when he was in high school, focused on activating youth on social and environmental issues. His group quickly turned into the Shelton contingent for March for Our Lives, where he successfully helped lead that demonstration. Upon entering his undergraduate studies, he founded the American University Sunrise chapter, and went on to support the DC Sunrise contingent in lobbying for a Green New Deal. During these experiences, he quickly realized that perspectives relating to justice for marginalized communities were often absent from the complex discourse of the broader movement. He then went on to form the Unity Coalition Movement with community members at the start of the Pandemic. UCM is tasked with promoting the Black Agrarian tradition, Black and Indigenous food sovereignty, and the importance of heirloom seeds. Through this work he was able to form a coalition of farmers in the DMV, which he utilized to build out a food pantry for food insecure community members on and near his campus. Tyler now enjoys doing farmwork with the Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance, showcasing how regenerative agriculture could be a significant solution to the climate and ecological crises we face. Tyler works to build authentic partnerships between community partners and fellow activists/organizers built on respect, integrity, and compassion.
His work is also largely informed by his personal experiences. He is descended from Jamaican immigrants who taught him the importance of developing a respectful and reciprocal relationship with our planet and the beings that inhabit it. His values of love, liberation, integrity are derivative of his upbringing. Tyler is also a graduate of American and Johns Hopkins Universities, with scholarship focused on environmental sciences, history, agroecology, and international and domestic policy. He is a visionary thinker, and his tenacity is born out of the pursuit of justice. He has experience working in corporate conservation, the nonprofit sector, and for local government.
Tyler wishes to simply live authentically and as close to what he feels can be deemed as purposeful, aligning his work with continuing to contribute to a process of planetary and community healing. Tyler explains that, “while many may not agree with these perspectives or even the work that we do at Earth Guardians. Even in instances where hope seems dim - we must keep faith in ourselves and one another with our eyes towards the long goal that our efforts will not be in vain.” He goes on to explain, “our efforts will be recorded, if not in this material world alongside change-makers who have and are doing the work, then perhaps in a more metaphysical or spiritual sense.” This touches on the essence of courage required to continue leading in the climate and environmental justice movement. In spite of the very real obstacles Tyler and others in the movement face and recognize. Tyler is committed to push the needle towards change, in the benefit of healthy communities.
Tyler is inspired by the young folks he is surrounded by, doing phenomenal things, and the even minute possibility that the future can be something totally different from what we know the world to be today. And that, at every moment, there is a possibility of creating lasting change.
Tyler has provided the keynote for the Black Agrarians event at American University, spoken at the Children & Nature Network International Conference twice, given a talk with Jane Fonda at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, has been featured in the media, and has provided a keynote for March for Our Lives Shelton. He has represented Earth Guardians in panel conversations, and spoken at various schools as part of the Earth Voices program at EG. He has facilitated many spaces for conversation for AU NAACP, assisted in Sunrise leadership, and has served as a co-director for a nonprofit.