Donna Chavis

• Founder and Convenor
• RedTailed Hawk Collective

Ms. Chavis is the founder and Convenor of the RedTailed Hawk Collective and a Program Manager with the Climate and Energy Justice Program of Friends of the Earth US. She is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of NC with a 50-year advocacy history of social, racial, and environmental justice. Throughout that history, she has been a leader in the national environmental justice movement since its inception in eastern North Carolina in the 1980s. As a co-founder of the Robeson County Center for Community Action in 1980, Chavis participated in multiple environmental justice campaigns related to toxic and nuclear waste throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

As a Commissioner of the Racial Justice Commission of the United Church of Christ, she played an important role in the Commission’s environmental justice work, including as a member of the Planning Committee. for the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991. She remains committed to those principles and has integrated them into her work.

In her current role as Climate and Energy Justice Program Manager with Friends of the Earth, Chavis was a leader in the successful campaign to stop the construction of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Before joining Friends of the Earth, she founded the RedTailed Hawk Collective, an indigenous-led collective focused on environmental justice in North Carolina, to ensure that indigenous peoples’ voices were included and to support indigenous infrastructure development.

Chavis resides in her hometown of Pembroke, North Carolina, with her spouse, Rev. Mac Legerton. They are the parents of four and grandparents of five children. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Pembroke with a BA in Mathematics and Psychology.