(Plain Press February 2024) Fifty people walked out of Greater Cleveland Partnership’s Sustainability Summit on January 24, 2024, to protest the organization’s choice of a keynote speaker from a global investment firm called BlackRock. A company, which the protesters said, invests in firms that harm the environment. Groups involved in organizing the walk-out included Cleveland Owns, the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless (NEOCH), the InterReligious Task Force on Central America (IRTF), and the Greater Cleveland Housing Justice Coalition.

                  During the keynote address those who walked out of the event held an alternative Just Transition Teach In outside of the Summit where they learned sustainable solutions to the climate crisis and about BlackRock’s investments in industries that harm the environment.

                  Craig Ickler, Energy Democracy Organizer at Cleveland Owns, pointed out that BlackRock is a major investor “in FirstEnergy and AEP, two investor-owned utilities in Ohio that have stymied progress on sustainability at every turn.”

                  In an appeal to the public in August of last year, a group called Friends of the Earth urged action to stop BlackRock from investing in firms that are destroying rainforests in the Amazon and in Indonesia and violently expelling indigenous people from their lands.

     Following the keynote speech, those who walked out, returned to the summit to share what they had discussed in the Just Transition Teach-In. Ideas discussed included: establishing community-owned solar co-ops, improving and expanding public transit, growing more local food, building affordable and healthy housing, expanding accessible parks and bikeways, and developing businesses that are locally controlled and rooted in the community.