Today’s blog post features an interview with Sarah Wilfred, Director of Policy at AFT Massachusetts and former teacher in the Boston Public Schools system. This interview aims to highlight why experienced educators like Sarah stand in support of a climate superfund in Massachusetts and the role AFT plays in the Make Polluters Pay campaign.

– Olivier Bradley, Communications Fellow

Name: Sarah Wilfred

Town: Dorchester

Node / Working Group(s) / Other Civic Involvements: MEJA (Massachusetts Education Justice Alliance), Common Start, Community Schools, Mass-Care, Make Polluters Pay Children’s Trust – Workforce Working Group, One Commonwealth

About how long have you been involved? Since beginning my role in November 2024!

Olivier: Who are you and what is your story? Why and how did you get involved in this work?

Sarah: My name is Sarah and I'm the Director of Policy at AFT Massachusetts. I believe AFT Massachusetts has been directly involved in the different climate coalitions and I know climate work is a huge priority for Jessica Tang, who's our president. On more of a personal side too, I myself am very interested in curtailing the effects of climate change and its impacts—not only on us in our generation, but also our future generations—and really being able to stop certain things in their tracks before things become a lot worse. So, both professionally involved and then personally, I think too, it aligns with many of my core values.

Olivier: Totally. What does your work involve now? What is AFT’s story?

Sarah: AFT Massachusetts is one of the statewide teacher unions in Massachusetts; the other one is the MTA [Massachusetts Teachers’ Association]. And, you know, as a union, I would say we are a formidable force in really ensuring that teachers and laborers are guaranteed a safe, strong, friendly workplace—a workplace with resources, that is staffed well, and that really supports not only their professional but also personal development. We focus mostly on teachers, but we are a part of the larger labor movement as well. My job in particular, as Director of Policy, is really strategizing, overseeing the policy direction of the organization to benefit our most important stakeholders, which are teachers and students, and working to ensure and pass legislation and policy that really support these effective workplaces I just spoke about. Climate change is one of the bigger priorities for us—my background is in Boston Public Schools, and . . . buildings that are crumbling are just not places where students should or would want to learn. Climate change is just one of many areas—mold is growing in buildings; there’s asbestos; there are air quality issues. We were appreciative of the work that BPS [Boston Public Schools] did at one point to ensure air quality by providing every classroom with air filters when COVID-19 was going around. But even so, I think the impacts of climate change are right on our doorstep. We see it every day, whether it's through snow in May or living in a food desert in the middle of the city. It's really a pertinent issue that many of our students and teachers recognize and deal with every day, and we should do something about it.

Olivier: I remember back in 2011 there was that huge Halloween Nor’easter. I'm sure all the kids were happy about having a snow day . . . I remember there was so much snow. Then during Halloween weekend in 2024, there was nothing . . . it was like 70 degrees. And I remember being like, “oh my gosh.” I compared a picture of then versus now and the difference was really noticeable.

Sarah: Yes! I remember that. I was teaching then.

Olivier: Next, I would love to hear why this bill, the climate change superfund, matters to you and why you think it is important to labor more broadly.

Sarah: It's pretty clear that, for decades, fossil fuel companies and companies have profited while their activities have really contributed to the climate crisis. Their emissions and their work have contributed to intensified storms, floods, heat waves, and other disasters that really threaten infrastructure and people, whether it's in our schools or in our buildings or in other places. The climate superfund is just a really strong forward-thinking solution that requires some of the largest greenhouse gas emitters to pay to curtail the climate crisis as we're sort of seeing it now. It would also help benefit the marginalized communities that are suffering the most and the worst from it.

Olivier: It's also how the products they're selling are being used, right? Cars are a huge source of mobile source pollutants and that kind of goes with where a lot of institutional racism and policy has, you know, led transportation systems to be—so even those local air quality harms are caused by the products that fossil fuel companies are selling, and those should be paid for.

Sarah: It is all interconnected, for sure. Yes, 100%. I think this sort of dovetails into the healthcare crisis that we're dealing with too, and the effects of climate-related illnesses. It really does become a space of change that affects so many different sectors and different spaces.

Olivier: In your experience, what would you say has been effective in sort of engaging people on this issue? That could include your students, or other people in AFT, or just people outside of AFT.

Sarah: Yeah. One of the bills that we have endorsed and mobilized around and really worked to create awareness around was establishing a climate literacy bill that embeds climate literacy into the curriculum in an interdisciplinary way in different schools. So whether you're learning about the climate crisis through history or math or English or another class, I think it really provides students with the opportunity to educate themselves and with awareness about the climate crisis so that students can feel empowered and have agency to do something about it. That's one particular way that we're trying to embolden and empower students in the next generation to really be aware and stand up to the crisis and find ways to find solutions for it.

Olivier: I really like that answer. I totally agree with you because I think that I found in my own education, especially thinking back to my high school education, I definitely I learned about climate change, but in a very siloed, intradisciplinary way where it was talked about in my science classes as being caused by fossil fuel combustion, which of course I appreciated. But I think it's so crucial that we approach this from a historical and social sciences perspective as well, because it's not strictly a scientific problem. The problem is not just that we're burning fossil fuels. It's that fossil fuels and their proxies have, you know, captured regulatory systems and tried to intentionally obfuscate the harms caused by their business operations, and all of that. So I totally agree. Right, because if we don't characterize the nature of the problem correctly as something not only scientific and political and economic, then our solutions will be misdirected.

Sarah: Yeah, 100%.

Olivier: To what degree would you say the work that you and AFT are doing is coalitional, would you say? And if so, what does that look like? 

Sarah: Because we are a teachers union, and because we definitely have expertise in the education space, we definitely try to look for I think spaces that speak to that. But, that doesn't deter us from being involved in other spaces, especially if we believe and see a connection to our work. So, you know, I think the climate space is a perfect example—there are definitely so many interconnected ways that the climate crisis is definitely so interconnected with us in so many different ways. And it's easy to find those interconnected ways that interact with education and sort of our work as teachers. It has also become like a personal priority for many of us as well. So although our focus is definitely in coalitions that we see a strong connection or a connection with the expertise of education that we work in, we also try to align ourselves with different spaces that interact with our beliefs as well.

Olivier: Totally. There are so many interconnections . . . going back to that engagement piece, I think that a lot of engaging people on the issue of climate is not just framing it as this isolated environmental issue, you know? Because the environment, economy, and people are all interconnected. Climate change is affecting kids in classrooms and teachers. Teachers are educating students who will hopefully go on to be contributing to the solutions to the climate crisis, and they have a lot of expertise to share around that. It's so important to have concrete ties between them.

Sarah: Yeah. We're stronger together than we are, you know, individually. So I appreciate that about the different coalition spaces that not only we operate in, but I think any organization operates in.

Olivier: Yeah, absolutely. The more coalitional we are and the more we acknowledge the interconnectedness of root causes and also like solutions, in terms of strengthening communities and having more robust education and learning spaces, I think that that's all so conducive to the same goals of people having healthy equitable lives.

Sarah: Yep, and living full lives. 

Olivier: You are doing really important work, so thank you for doing it. Is there anything else that you want to leave our blog post readers with?

Sarah: No, this is really great! I really appreciate the work that you are doing Olivier, in terms of getting the messaging and the narratives out there that need to be put out there. And I think the more we're able to do that, I think the better we are in terms of educating the public and generating awareness around this incredibly important issue.

Olivier: Thank you!

Sarah: Thank you!

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity.