Community Sentinel Award

Learn more about the Community Sentinel Award for Environmental Stewardship

Watch the 2022 Program

ABOUT THE AWARD

The impacts of the oil and gas industry are palpable across the United States: farms and forests are carved open by dangerous pipelines, communities are invaded with fracked wells, towns are choked by petrochemical emissions, streams are littered with throwaway plastics, states in every region are plagued by extreme weather and a rapidly changing climate. Though environmental injustices abound, we continue to find hope in the environmental advocates and community activists working to document, report, and confront fossil fuel harms and injustice in their communities.

To honor these environmental heroes, FracTracker Alliance created the Community Sentinel Award for Environmental Stewardship, now in its eighth year, the annual award ceremony co-hosted by Halt the Harm Network that celebrates individuals whose noble actions exemplify the transformative power of committed and engaged people. In collaboration with our sponsors and partners, the award is presented to multiple recipients at a virtual reception before fellow activists, allies and conspirators, all of whom are working towards a healthier and more just future.

Each awardee receives $1,000 and is recognized at the Community Sentinel Awards ceremony, held this year on Thursday, December 8, 2022. We also welcome our partners and community members to submit the names of activists who have passed away over the last year, so that we may honor their lives and their work during the Legacy of Heroes presentation during the awards ceremony.

2022 PROGRAM

WATCH THE PROGRAM

MEET THE WINNERS

Cesar Aguirre

2022 Award Winner

Cesar is a Senior Community Organizer with Central California Environmental Justice Network (CCEJN). As a child in a family of migrant farm workers who turned into community organizers, Cesar was exposed to community organizing and advocacy at an early age. Since starting with CCEJN, Cesar works in rural communities in Kern County helping fenceline communities affected by oil and gas and pesticides understand how to protect themselves from these sources of pollution and how to advocate for systemic changes that prioritize their health. Cesar has participated in multiple projects where he has trained residents on how fracking and other activities related to the oil and gas industry are negatively impacting their neighborhoods.

Dr. Joy and Jo Banner

2022 Award Winner

Dr. Joy Banner and Jo Banner are Co-Founders and Co-Directors of The Descendants Project, a nonprofit foundation committed to the liberation of the Black descendant community through the dismantling of inequitable and discriminatory economic, environmental, and social systems inherent in the violent legacies of slavery. As part of this work, they are on the front lines of the struggle against environmental racism in the form of petrochemical plants along Louisiana’s River Road, otherwise known as "Cancer Alley.” Joy and Jo are proud members of the local descendant community with rooted ancestry that can be traced to the 18th century.

Dr. Crystal Cavalier-Keck

2022 Award Winner

Crystal Cavalier-Keck is the co-founder of Seven Directions of Service with her husband. She is a citizen of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation in Burlington, NC. She is a board member of the Haw River Assembly, the Women‘s Resource Center in Alamance County, and Benevolence Farm. Crystal was a Fall Cohort of the Sierra Club’s Gender Equity and Environment Program and Women’s Earth Alliance (WEA) Accelerator for Grassroots Women Environmental Leaders in 2020. Crystal completed her Doctorate in Organization Leadership at the University of Dayton in August 2022, and her dissertation focused on the Social Justice issue of Missing Murdered Indigenous Women in Gas/Oil Pipelines in frontline communities.

Chanté Davis

2022 Youth Advocate Award Winner

Chanté Davis is an 18-year-old climate activist and ocean conservation advocate attending Duke University. She is a lead organizer with the Sunrise Movement, (a youth-led climate action organization fighting for a Green New Deal) and has done work ranging from mutual aid, campaign leadership, and electoral work supporting youth in the South. During the summer of 2021, Chanté led a 400-mile march from her hometown of New Orleans, Louisiana to Houston, Texas (where she now lives after Katrina) with the Sunrise Movement to garner support for the Civilian Climate Corps and a Green New Deal. She is also the founder of One Oysean, a campaign she created, focused on the inclusion of BIPOC youth within the ocean conservation movement.

Jill Antares Hunkler

2022 Award Winner

Jill Hunkler is a mother, teacher, artist, grassroots organizer, and environmental advocate. She is a seventh generation Ohio Valley resident in Belmont County, Ohio, the most heavily fracked in the state. Jill served as Executive Director of Concerned Ohio River Residents and is currently reviving a grassroots organization she created in 2015, Ohio Valley Allies. She considers herself a fracking refugee. Due to the vast oil and gas infrastructure that polluted her country home in the Slope Creek Valley, she experienced negative health impacts, and was forced to relocate. She educates the public about the threats we face due to the polluting and destructive oil and gas and petrochemical industries and helps empower people in her community and beyond to stand up for their rights for a healthy environment.

Laurie Barr

2022 Community Choice Award Winner

Laurie Barr is an activist, citizen scientist, co-founder of Save our Streams PA, and a co-founder of Defend Ohi:yo‘, the advocacy alliance formed between indigenous and non-indigenous allies along the Ohi:yo’ or Allegheny River. She has spent the last decade hunting for orphaned and abandoned wells and researching stream health in Pennsylvania. Laurie’s work has been used by state and federal regulators, oil and gas well plugging companies, a slew of reporters, and has led to breaking, influential studies on the link between abandoned wells and methane emissions. Her tireless reporting to officials has led to changes in regulatory policy and administrative practice, helped residents finally get wells leaking for 20 years or more plugged (sometimes twice), influenced legislative agendas, and inspired academic study in the too-often neglected and economically depressed northern tier of Pennsylvania, as well as the southern tier of New York.