Meet Sanja Whittington
Democracy Green Executive Sanja Whittington is a recognized environmental, community grassroots, and progressive leader and an environmental justice social science expert on cumulative impact and health disparities.
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Sanja has worked as a grassroots organizer, an environmental activist protesting and defeating dirty corporations, and a social science researcher highlighting the unseen inequities in communities of color wrought by disastrous corporations and climate disasters. 
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Sanja knows that to heal the land is to heal the people, the organization's ethos. Climate justice and environmental justice cannot be disentangled from the historical oppression of marginalized peoples and the current modern impacts it has on everyday frontline folks. Sanja believes that to tackle climate change truly is to center "justice" for the most impacted by climate change.
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Under Sanja's leadership, Democracy Green co-petitioned and won a health effects study petition to the US EPA for epidemiological studies on the health effects of one of the most lethal chemicals to hit our nation: PFAS. Sanja has led disaster and recovery work that supported thousands of North Carolinians following climate disasters and led regional environmental justice and democracy tours training hundreds of community members to become air and water quality experts. Her social science recommendations have been published in the nation's first PFAS clinical guidelines for the CDC. Sanja's research on lead hot spots has supported state government agencies in advocating on Capitol Hill for funding relief. Thanks to this advocacy, North Carolina received funds from the BIL $15 billion Lead Service Line Replacement Funding to support pipe replacement in disadvantaged communities.
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In 2022, Sanja launched a virtual workshop in partnership with several other statewide organizations and the NC Division of Water Infrastructure, providing a breakdown of ARPA funds for water infrastructure and grant requirements for communities. Due to this workshop, a predominantly-Black community in Sampson County, NC, received a grant for $13.2 million to connect water for its residents for the first time in history.
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Sanja's work has been seen in Southerly, Bloomberg Law, NRDC, EWG and others. She sits on the Board of Directors for the Our Voices of Change Political Institute. A political-candidate training institute for women of color, funded by Yale University and the Council of Independent Colleges.

 
Sanja is an Afro-Indigenous woman, native to the Appalachians and a descendant of the Kingdom of the Happy Land, a former US Royal settlement post-Emancipation. Sanja says her greatest accomplishment is her two children, La'Meshia and Robert. Sanja resides in Fuquay-Varina, along the Cape Fear River, on Lumbee, Skaruhreh/Tuscarora, and Catawba land.