Lisa Abbott ’88
As a young girl, Lisa Abbott ’88 accompanied her father on a trip to Manhattan to march outside the UN at a protest against nuclear proliferation. She remembers the banner they carried, which read, “Fund Human Needs.” It puzzled her; what was the connection, she wondered, between stopping nuclear proliferation and funding human needs?
At Groton, Lisa began in earnest to make these connections and launch a career, and life, dedicated to community advocacy and social justice. As a student, she was an active member of Groton Community Service and a leader in social issues as well as in sports. When she went to University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill as a Morehead Scholar, her vision crystallized after attending her first meeting of the Student Environmental Action Coalition. Dynamic students were not only protesting the development of nuclear-waste sites in the state—they were teaching one another to negotiate, strategize, disagree democratically, and set tangible goals.
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At Groton, Lisa began in earnest to make these connections and launch a career, and life, dedicated to community advocacy and social justice. As a student, she was an active member of Groton Community Service and a leader in social issues as well as in sports. When she went to University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill as a Morehead Scholar, her vision crystallized after attending her first meeting of the Student Environmental Action Coalition. Dynamic students were not only protesting the development of nuclear-waste sites in the state—they were teaching one another to negotiate, strategize, disagree democratically, and set tangible goals.
In pragmatic terms, those goals meant fighting efforts to locate nuclear-waste sites in lower-income communities. “Environmental issues, at their core, are human rights issues,” she said. “The two are not separate matters.”
After college, she found her calling in community organizing at Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC), helping the people of Kentucky mobilize against harmful environmental practices to harvest cheap energy—namely, strip mining, which literally knocks off the top of a mountain or ridge to access the coal underneath.
Today, much of her work is focused on renewable energy and energy efficiency, building a healthier and more diverse economy in eastern Kentucky as coal employment decreases, and restoring rights to former felons who have served their sentences. (Kentucky is one of only three states that permanently eliminate convicted felons’ right to vote, unless they get an individual pardon from the governor.)
Lisa has seen people move mountains to snatch coal—but also believes in the power of people to move mountains for social justice.
“I believe that each of us must pursue our lives as if our actions matter, as if what we do makes a difference. This is, I think, an operational definition of hope. … We don’t have to decide whether or not it will matter. We can simply choose to act as if it does,” she recently told UNC students. “And lo and behold, when enough people act as if what we do makes a difference, anything becomes possible.”
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