Climate Justice Plan Series: Radical Hospitality Meets Climate Justice with Desiree Eden Ocampo

This is part of an ongoing series about Multnomah County’s Climate Justice Plan. Breach Collective will be featuring the voices and perspectives of important figures who have helped shape and advance this groundbreaking climate policy. 

By bringing Rahab’s Sisters practice of radical hospitality to Multnomah County’s Climate Justice Plan steering committee, Executive Director Desiree Eden Ocampo helped ground the drafting process in dignity, possibility, and inclusivity. 

Rahab’s Sisters is a Portland-based nonprofit organization dedicated to building a resilient community where women, trans, and nonbinary individuals are welcomed and safe. Their mission is to build community through radical hospitality with women and gender-diverse individuals marginalized by poverty, homelessness, sex work, violence, and substance use. 

For Rahab’s Sisters, radical hospitality is a practice that shapes how they show up for the community they serve. Whether someone is living outside, struggling to afford rent, or managing chronic illness, Desiree Eden explains how radical hospitality says every person deserves joy, comfort, and care.

Climate justice is personal

In working so intimately with frontline communities, Desiree Eden sees how the impacts of climate change show up in everyday life: people who lose power for medical devices during heat waves; families who are housed but still unable to stay cool because their shelter is not insulated; residents along highway corridors who face chronic respiratory illness because of automobile pollution. 

Radical hospitality emphasizes that everyone should have unconditional access to health and safety protections from climate impacts. But the connection between radical hospitality and climate justice goes even deeper than that, because when the systems designed to protect us do fail – or when systems are designed without certain communities in mind in the first place – organizations like Rahab’s Sisters fill the gaps. 

From the start, the Climate Justice Plan was shaped by a steering committee that was meant to represent the communities who are typically snubbed by the system and left out of policy conversations. These groups tend to be the same communities facing the most intense climate impacts, and facing them first. 

Steering committee members like Desiree Eden were able to share the perspectives and experiences of those who are unhoused or unstably housed. Members like Nakisha Nathan from Neighbors for Clean Air, who we featured in our first piece in this series, represented people who are living with the impacts of disproportionate air pollution exposure. The steering committee also included Indigenous leaders, community elders, frontline activists, energy sector experts, and others. Desiree Eden explains that this felt in sharp contrast to most policy-steering spaces she’s in, which often feature only institutionally recognized voices. 

More than just a seat at the table

People talk a lot about inclusion these days, but what’s practiced doesn’t always live up to what’s preached. Often, frontline or marginalized communities are only included performatively – or tokenized, meaning they are present, but not meaningfully included in the process by being valued and heard. Desiree Eden talks about how the Office of Sustainability truly listened to and deferred unequivocally to the steering committee. She says that was crucial in building trust and an authentic, productive, collaborative working relationship between frontline community members and government entities. 

Multnomah County staff’s willingness to go back to the drawing board based on feedback from the steering committee is a testament to their dedication to getting this process right. And Desiree Eden thinks they did. The next draft was built around universal goals instead of sector metrics. Choosing to center universal goals meant that the Climate Justice Plan prioritizes benefit for everyone, not just benefit for any given group of people – that it would be good for an entire community, not just certain community members. 

Shifting the plan to take a more holistic approach to climate justice also means that it’s more accessible to the very people it’s meant to serve. Government policies can be difficult to understand for a layperson not deep in policy work, even though they dictate what the experience of day-to-day life is like for all of us. By moving away from technical policy traditions and toward the framework of universal goals, the Climate Justice Plan has become more about lived experience rather than solely data and metrics.

The Climate Justice Plan draft goes deeper than technical methods for achieving climate justice for all. It uses richer storytelling and the universal goals approach to build an understanding of what climate justice actually looks like and who actually has a right to it (everyone!). Climate justice doesn’t just mean electrification, it means “every community member can breathe clean and healthy air.” It doesn’t just mean that ratepayers shouldn’t pay for fossil fuel infrastructure expansion, it means that “every community member has access to affordable clean energy.” It doesn’t just mean weatherizing or retrofitting homes, it means that “every community member is resilient to extreme weather events and other climate threats.”

Radical hospitality and belonging 

The Climate Justice Plan is still being fine tuned by community feedback. But having framed it in this universal way, and having drafted it through such an intentionally inclusive process, allows frontline and traditionally marginalized groups to feel seen, heard, valued, and engaged. This is critical groundwork for a policy to be truly just. Through radical hospitality, all members of a community get to feel like they belong, and in turn the policy that shapes the lives of the community belongs to them. 

Climate policy doesn’t have to be just a government document. The Climate Justice Plan imagines a way to govern differently with policy as a living practice of radical hospitality and belonging. By moving at the speed of trust, centering frontline voices, and practicing radical hospitality, the drafting process was grounded in relationship. Steering committee members like Desiree Eden demonstrated that justice isn’t just a bonus from climate action, it is the foundation.