This session reframes climate transition as a question of purpose, power, and place: what public investment is for, who decides how it is designed, who benefits, and what outcomes it is meant to produce. In a Climate Week environment that can lean technocratic, this conversation offers a more political and human-centered frame for climate policy, one that treats people, communities, and ecological systems, not firms or markets, as the primary objects of public investment.
Using an economic rights lens, the session will explore energy as a powerful entry point into broader questions of economic agency, democratic governance, and ecological wellbeing. It will examine how climate transition pathways diverge depending on whether public infrastructure is structured to expand human capability and community wealth, or to create new channels for private extraction and accumulation.
This event features a panel session with special guests plus a reception with music and refreshments after.
Presented by the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy and McKnight Foundation for Climate Week NYC 2026.
Darrick Hamilton is the University Professor and Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy at The New School, where he also founded and directs the Institute on Race, Power & Political Economy. He additionally serves as Chief Economist at the AFL-CIO.
Widely regarded as one of the nation’s foremost public intellectuals, Professor Hamilton reimagines how an economy should work—identifying bold opportunities to invest in our human capacity and fostering collaborations that advance economic inclusion, social equity, and civic engagement in the United States and around the world.
A pioneer in the economics subfield of identity group stratification, Professor Hamilton’s research has been featured in The New York Times, Mother Jones, Bloomberg Businessweek, and The Wall Street Journal. He has developed and advised on transformative policy proposals—such as baby bonds, guaranteed income, and a federal job guarantee—that have inspired legislation and shifted billions of dollars toward building a fair and inclusive economy.
In 2025, Professor Hamilton was named the Katherine Hampson Bessell Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and was recognized as a Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation in its 2020 inaugural class. He has advised national and global leaders on economic policy, including the U.S. Joint Economic Committee and the Senate Banking Committee and also serves on the board of directors of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
Born and raised in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, Professor Hamilton earned his bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College and his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. Diaz is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. She is the author of When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon Press), winner of the American Book Award, and Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf Press), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and finalist for the National Book Award and Forward Prize. Diaz has been awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, Native Arts and Culture Fellowship, and both Princeton University’s Holmes National Poetry Prize and Hodder Fellowship. She is Professor at Arizona State University where she Directs the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry. She is the youngest ever elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, a member of the Board of Trustees for the United States Artists, where she is an alumna of the Ford Fellowship and is currently a Mellon Foundation Presidential Fellow.
Mia Charlene White, PhD is an interdisciplinary critical urbanist whose research focuses on the socio-spatial determinants of public health, with a special interest in building a public and shared understanding of spatial justice. She is part-time faculty at Columbia University’s Climate School where she teaches Climate Justice, and she is the Belle T. Walker and Rose Johnson Chair for Restoration Urbanism at the People’s Free School, University of Orange, NJ. Professor White was recently an award-winning faculty member at The New School, where she taught The Land Lab; Reparative Planning; Black Geographies; An Environmental History of Slavery; and The Future will be Cooperative: Coops, Community Land Trusts and the Commons. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Tishman Environment & Design Center; a Faculty Fellow at the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy; and an Affiliate Faculty at The Urban Space Lab at The New School.
Her service to profession includes appointment as Track Chair for Planning History and Theory, at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP); Member of the NJ Reparations Council’s Environmental Justice Committee; Chair of the Urban Sustainability Committee of the Philadelphia Reparations Taskforce, and Board Member of the NJ Environmental Justice Alliance (NJEJA). She recently completed an appointment as Vice-Chair of the Black Geographies Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG), and appointment as a Zoning official in the state of NJ.
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).
Muneer Karcher-Ramos joined McKnight in March 2024 as Vibrant & Equitable Communities (Communities) program director. The Communities program works to advance a vibrant future for all Minnesotans with shared power, prosperity, and participation.
Muneer brings more than 15 years of experience working in and with communities to create greater opportunity for many residents in our region and beyond. Muneer plays a pivotal role in supporting Minnesota communities, collaborating with diverse stakeholders locally and nationally, and strengthening McKnight’s ability to advance durable, people-centered systems change. As program director, he stewards strong, integrated programming to champion racial and economic justice across Minnesota.
Throughout his career, Muneer secured $100+ million in private, public, and philanthropic investments towards education, housing, and economic justice. He has worked to reimagine financial systems, support grassroots movement organizing, elevate worker- and community ownership, and lead cross-sector programming and policy initiatives.
He joins McKnight from the Office of Financial Empowerment at the City of Saint Paul, where he was the founding director since 2019. Under his guidance, the city introduced transformative and nationally acclaimed initiatives to increase economic opportunity and shared ownership. These included CollegeBound Saint Paul —a children’s asset building program that has enrolled 13,000 babies and accumulated $3 million in college savings and the subsequent nationally-recognized “CollegeBound Boost” income asset demonstration project. Under his leadership, the City launched other innovative efforts including the Medical Debt Reset Initiative that’s poised to relieve $110 million in medical debt, the People’s Prosperity Pilot, and multiple guaranteed income demonstration projects. Additionally, he established the $2.5 million LOCAL Fund, supporting community wealth building by bolstering worker cooperatives and advancing shared ownership of commercial real estate.
Prior to his role with the city, Muneer served as executive director for the Saint Paul Promise Neighborhood, a cross-sector cradle-to-career education initiative focused on culturally responsive approaches. He led a strategy to deploy over $2 million in annual community investments, and designed The People’s Fellowship, a public-private wealth and asset-building initiative focused on Black communities in Saint Paul. He also helped move a housing pilot to a statewide policy focused on housing hundreds of highly mobile and unsheltered families with children across Minnesota.
Muneer is currently a board member for The ARC Minnesota, and previously served on the boards of Headwaters Foundation for Justice and Minnesota Education Equity Partnership. He is a community faculty member in the Social Justice Minor at the University of Minnesota and a fellow at the Cultural Wellness Center and the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The Minneapolis/Saint Paul Business Journal named him as a 40 under 40 honoree and the Saint Paul Foundation selected him as a Facing Race honoree.
Muneer received a master’s degree in sociology from the University of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree in political science, sociology, and social justice from the University of Minnesota.
Dr. Gabriela Sandoval is a nonprofit leader, researcher, and advocate with over two decades of experience advancing economic, racial, and social justice. She brings to TURN a distinctive combination of rigorous policy expertise, equity-centered strategic leadership, and a lifelong commitment to ensuring that all communities — especially those who have been historically underserved — have access to safe, affordable, and reliable utilities.
Gabriela joined TURN as Deputy Director after serving in multiple leadership roles at the organization, most recently as Director of Race & Equity Policy, where she expanded institutional funding, and led successful campaigns that strengthened consumer protections for California utility customers. Prior to returning to TURN, she served as Executive Director of the Excessive Wealth Disorder Institute, where she built a new nonprofit from the ground up, developing its systems, team, and funding base. Earlier in her career, she directed research and policy at the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, where she focused primarily on the Closing the Racial Wealth Gap Initiative and convened influential networks of researchers, advocates, and policymakers.
A skilled facilitator, coalition-builder, and communicator, Gabriela excels at connecting across diverse communities and translating complex policy challenges into actionable strategies. She has built a career at the intersection of consumer advocacy, equity policy, and organizational development.
Gabriela holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and a Master's Degree in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University, and a B.A. from the University of California, San Diego.
