She took on the oil and gas industry and won: Roishetta Sibley Ozane
Roishetta Sibley Ozane is an environmental justice leader and Founder & CEO of The Vessel Project. She was born in Ruleville, Mississippi, a small town in the heart of the Delta. A mother of six, she was raised in a family that always helped others. Her grandmother fed the hungry for decades and helped register people to vote.
Roishelta began her career giving back through AmeriCorps and other programs. She eventually started working as a community health worker, which was a volunteer role at the time. She educated Black people, in particular, about the health ailments ravaging their communities, including diabetes, strokes and heart disease.
At the time, she didn’t know anything about the environmental justice movement; she had never even heard of that term.
“I lived in rural, poor Mississippi, where people didn’t even have the basic necessities like clean water and food, and they were dying at rapid rates from alarming health conditions that our white counterparts were surviving,” she said. “So, I wasn’t really on the environmental justice scene the way that I am now, because I started my work in community organizing, community development.”
She eventually moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana, where she noticed the city’s numerous oil and gas refineries. She wondered, “Why are there so many? Why? Why is there always fire? Why is there always some type of smoke? What is this pollution?”
Years later, a major freeze came to her region, and she realized her community was unprepared.
“So I parked my car on the street in North Lake Charles, which is a predominantly Black area, and I walked down the street, and I just started knocking on doors, and I was like, ‘A freeze [is] coming. What [are] you going to do?’”
Many of the people she talked to did not have a plan and did not have the funds to prepare, so she knew she had to do something but didn’t have the funds herself. She turned to Facebook to ask for help. She ended up getting hotel rooms for some of the families to stay in as well as monetary donations to ensure that others could eat and survive the frigid temperatures.
“And that’s when I learned the power of crowdsourcing, the power of social media, the power of grassroots organizing, the power of community, the power of not relying on the government to solve the problem,” she said.
Her movement of helping her neighbors grew larger and larger until the local news heard about the great work she was doing. They asked her what she called her group, and The Vessel Project was born.
“These are just things that are flowing through me out into the community…The name was born right in the midst of helping people,” she said.
Roishetta realized that all the natural disasters coming to the area were not by chance. She learned that the city’s landscape had something to do with all the recent natural events being “record-breaking.” She zeroed in on all the chemical plants in the area.
She invited the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Agency to Lake Charles and gave them a tour of the area. She showed them how the refineries were poisoning their water and soil and introduced them to communities where cancer diagnoses and deaths were concentrated. She eventually built a coalition of people leading the charge for environmental justice in her area. They joined a national chorus of environmental activists applying pressure on the federal government at the time.
Shortly thereafter, the Biden Administration announced a pause on LNG (liquid natural gas) export permits in 2024. Although this short-lived victory showed the world what is possible, Roishetta said the fight is far from over.
“The first step was the pause. The second step is stopping all approvals. The third step is making these facilities clean up the mess they’ve already made,” she said.
As The Vessel Project continues its work of providing for the community and helping neighbors prepare for the next natural disaster, Roishetta is grounded in her faith. She said she’s trying to help people just like Jesus did, and much like him, that starts with “feeding” them first.
“And that’s all I’m trying to do. I’m trying to feed people first, so that they are not hungry, and help people to put out the fires that they are fighting internally, emotionally, mentally, and physically, so that they can see the bigger picture of what’s going on around them, so that they can be involved in the decision-making, so that they can have pride in themselves, in their environment, and in their community,” she added.