Young, Gifted and Green

Young, Gifted and Green incorporated in 2016 as Black Millennials for Flint, a national youth-led environmental-justice organization the Memphis educator and policy advocate LaTricea Adams founded in direct response to the Flint water crisis. The organization rebranded in 2021 as Young, Gifted and Green to broaden its mandate beyond a single crisis and to carry the Flint template into climate and air-quality fights across the country.

The Memphis chapter anchors the organization’s work. Adams grew up in the Hyde Park and South Memphis neighborhoods that the 1940s and 1950s clearance projects shaped and that the Valero refinery and the retired Allen Fossil Plant have polluted for generations. When xAI announced the Colossus supercomputer on the former Electrolux site in Boxtown in 2024, Young, Gifted and Green joined Memphis Community Against Pollution, the NAACP Memphis branch, and the Southern Environmental Law Center as co-appellant on the administrative challenge to the Shelby County Health Department’s July 2025 air permit.

Young, Gifted and Green’s approach pairs policy advocacy with youth-led organizing. The group runs fellowships for Black and Brown young people entering environmental-justice work, publishes briefings on federal and state climate rules, and maintains a multi-city network that links Memphis to Flint, Jackson, and the Gulf Coast. LaTricea Adams serves as president and chief executive and has testified before Congress and state legislatures on cumulative pollution burdens in Black communities.

The organization’s website catalogs the Colossus work, the Flint work, and the ongoing Mississippi-Tennessee state-line fights that xAI’s expansion into Southaven has opened. The Memphis office functions as both a local organizing base and a national case study for how Black-led youth environmental organizations build durable power across a decade.