Photo courtesy Michai Robertson. Retrieved from caribbean-beat.com
I have a bachelor’s and master’s in international environmental law. I started out wanting to focus on aspects of justice and equity and realised in my third year, when I did an environmental law class, that the type of justice I was looking for was more on a systems level, as opposed to an individual level. With that, I decided to come back to Antigua after doing my bachelor’s.
I didn’t go into private practice — I started out in government. I moved into the Department of Environment, which opened up doors more broadly to defending the public interest — of humans, and our natural systems.
I was lucky enough that my boss — Ambassador Diann Black-Layne — was already in the centre of that world … the authority on things like raising finance for solving environmental problems. That’s why I ended up in the financing space.
Diann mentored me — really pushed me and gave me multiple opportunities. I’ll be forever grateful for that. I don’t think there’s any other department where I would have been exposed to all these international meetings and opportunities for building my capacity if it weren’t for her. I haven’t seen it in other countries.
She has one of the youngest departments, with people not only from Antigua but across the region and the world. Janine Coye-Felson [from Belize], who is a juggernaut in the space of sustainable financing, is also that way.
I’ve learned so much from these two Caribbean women: the way you go about dealing with diplomacy; positioning yourself and leveraging interests and positions; pushing for a collective good of small islands — not only from the Caribbean, but more broadly.