Founding Executive Director
Nairobi, Kenya I Portland, USA
Lauren is a researcher, advocate, and educator committed to advancing environmental and climate mobility justice. Grounded in decolonial, just, and rights-based approaches, her work interrogates how climate-related loss, dispossession, displacement, and (im)mobilities are produced through political economies of racial capitalist coloniality, and seeks to disrupt the systemic, genocidal, and epistemic forms of violence embedded within them. Lauren is the Founding Executive Director of Beyond Climate Collaborative (BCC), and the Founder, Academic Director of Curriculum & Critical Pedagogy, and Lead Instructor of the International School on Climate Mobilities (ISCM). She is Climate Mobility Advisor to the Africa Centre for Sustainable and Inclusive Development (Africa CSID) and sits on advisory committees for the UN Platform on Disaster Displacement and Earth Refuge. She has advocated in international policy spaces including the UNFCCC and the International Migration Review Forum (IMRF), pushing for rights-based responses to climate-induced displacement and loss and damage. Across her career, Lauren has contributed research, advocacy, curriculum development, and leadership to organizations spanning climate mobility, human rights, and gender justice — including the Global Centre for Climate Mobility, SLYCAN Trust, Minority Rights Group, Amnesty International Canada, and the Guatemala Human Rights Commission, among others. Lauren holds an MSc in Violence, Conflict and Development from SOAS University of London, an MA in Human Rights from Central European University, and a postgraduate International Human Rights Defender Certificate in International Law. She completed a BA in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies through studies at the University of British Columbia, Lancaster University, and Oregon State University.
"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any"
- Alice Walker
