Our story

In late 2018, Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Dr. Katharine Wilkinson met, first on Twitter (that feminist bastion!) and then by phone. Right away, they recognized a shared commitment to building community, especially among women in climate, and decided to collaborate. Dr. Wilkinson had an unusual invitation to curate a retreat at a Montana ranch, and true to form, Dr. Johnson was all in. They fired up their first shared spreadsheet and got to work. 

A few months after that first conversation, the two found themselves at a climate conference in Colorado where, as usual, the conversation was dominated by older White male voices. Exhausted and frustrated, Drs. Wilkinson and Johnson skipped a session and went for a hike through an aspen grove. 

They were enraged by how many brilliant, innovative, committed people—especially women, most especially women of color—too rarely got the microphone and too often got passed over for resources. As they walked, they arrived at two central questions:

• How can we help ensure women leading on climate have the resources and public platforms they need?

• And given burnout and isolation, how can we build care and community to support one another?

That day in the glorious Rocky Mountains, Drs. Johnson and Wilkinson converged on two initial answers to those questions:

• Create an organization to support leaders doing transformational work, and

• Curate an anthology to spotlight the work of dozens of women leading on climate (what became All We Can Save). 

Looking back on that “rage hike,” the aspen trees may have offered subconscious inspiration, for aspens are all connected, interwoven underground, supporting each other, nourishing each other, holding each other up. They are not individual trees but a single organism that must thrive as one. And that collective spirit fueled and focused the work to come.

The first step was crafting a book proposal for the anthology and beginning to pitch it. The next was to host that retreat in Montana in the summer of 2019, gathering 30 women climate leaders under the banner of a “feminist climate renaissance” to connect, reflect, and seed collaborations. Then, rounding the bend to 2020, Drs. Wilkinson and Johnson began to solicit contributions for the anthology, and almost exactly nine months later, All We Can Save was born.

Today, these various threads of work are woven together in The All We Can Save Project, an organization to support transformational climate leadership, especially among Black, Indigenous, and other women of color, and to help nurture the feminist climate renaissance that is unfurling.