Our Story

Theodore (Ted) Carrington, former VP of NJ NAACP, is a long-time civil rights and environmental activist and former director of GreenFaith’s Environmental Justice Program.  Ted is particularly skilled at speaking with African American and Latino congregations about environmental concerns. In his role at GreenFaith, he engaged faith-based and environmental groups about issues of environmental racism and injustice.

For the past four years, Cynthia has served as Co-Chair of the City of Newark Environmental Commission. She previously served as Policy Coordinator for the Climate Justice Alliance–a national organization that links over 70 frontline communities–and as Environmental Justice Organizer for the Ironbound Community Corporation. She holds a Masters in Sociology of Law from the Instituto Internacional de Sociología Jurídica of Spain and a certificate in Urban Agriculture from Farm School NYC. She serves on the Steering Committee of the NJ Latino Action Network, where she chairs the Environmental Justice Committee.

Ingrid has a JD from Vermont Law School, where she concentrated her studies on water law and property law. She has experience working with environmental legislation and lands preservation. Ingrid received her MA in International Relations at The New School. Ingrid also brings a decade of experience in wealth management. Originally from Brooklyn, NY, Ingrid has lived in Europe and South America. She speaks German, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Mia White, PhD is a critical urbanist who works to grow the seeds of democracy at the intersection of racial, environmental, climate, and housing justice. Mia is part-time faculty at Columbia University’s Climate School, where she teaches Climate Justice related courses, and she is the Belle T. Walker and Rose Johnson Chair for Restoration Urbanism at the People’s Free School, University of Orange, NJ. Mia leads the Urban Sustainability Committee of the Philadelphia Reparations Taskforce, and is a member of the NJ Reparations Council’s Environmental Justice Committee. She is co-author of the  244-page report titled For Such a Time as This: The Nowness of Reparations for Black People in New Jersey.

Mia recently transitioned from a decade as an award-winning faculty member at The New School where she taught courses like Black Geographies; Reparative Planning; The Land Lab; An Environmental History of Slavery; and, The Future will be Cooperative: Coops, Community Land Trusts and the Commons. Mia writes and presents on community land trusts and municipal reparations projects as examples of community-based blues epistemologies and modes of reparative planning. She is the founder of Blue Woods Research Initiative, a new consultancy focused on helping partners build storytelling that links public land, public goods, public memory, and public repair. She is a Visiting Scholar at the Tishman Environment & Design Center; a Faculty Fellow at the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy; an Affiliate Faculty at The Urban Space Lab at The New School. Her most recent writing includes “Beyond Public or Private: Reconsidering Property towards Reparative Climate Futures”, in the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Urban Planning – Planning for the Worlds Between(L. Sotomayor, N. Phelps, and S. Balakrishnan, eds, Routledge Press, Summer 2026), and “A Blues Epistemology for Climate Futures”, in Progressive Planning Practice: Transforming Communities of Color (Sean Robbin, ed., Routledge Press, March 2026). Mia is from both Queens and Tarrytown, NY and she identifies as a Black woman of African American and Korean descent. She and her husband are the proud parents of two children, and they have lived in Maplewood, NJ since 2016.