Editor of Tracking the Crisis

Meleiza Figueroa is a journalist and educator based in California who started out as a community organizer in Los Angeles facilitating study groups for activists in the early 2000s. She has produced public affairs programs for KPFK Pacifica Radio over the past 20 years, and was the lead researcher on the 2005 film "Walmart: the Cost of Low Price."

After working briefly in the tech industry in the early 2000s, she went back to school to study climate change and agroecology, graduating from UCLA and the University of Chicago, and nearly finishing her PhD program in geography at UC Berkeley. She has taught courses in geography, environmental studies, and globalization at UC Berkeley and Sonoma State University, and was a faculty-owner of the Cooperative New School for Urban Studies and Environmental Justice.

She was the National Press Director for the Stein/Baraka campaign in 2016, and during the first Trump administration, she traveled around the country with the Movement School for Revolutionaries, co-leading workshops for activists on organizing locally to strengthen communities against increasingly oppressive forces.

She has written for Truthdig, The Nation, Truthout, and Against the Current, and has been a correspondent for public affairs shows on Free Speech TV.  In more recent work with Indigenous communities, she has co-facilitated workshops and presentations for environmental organizations and state/federal agencies connecting the dots between Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Western science.