Our Team / Elena Ortiz
Elena is an environmental communicator, facilitator, and advocate dedicated to making community-centered climate and environmental policy.
At Better World Group, she applies her background in community-driven non-profit programming and communications to support strategic communications, environmental justice and policy projects.
Before joining Better World Group, Elena completed a Master’s of Environmental Science and Management at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School, focusing on climate and environmental justice, policy, and strategic environmental communications. Through the program, she completed a year-long, master’s group project to incorporate social equity into Ventura County’s wildfire planning process. Elena helped identify communities who face disproportionate fire risk due to biophysical factors and socioeconomic marginalization, conduct community focus groups, and develop recommendations to increase community resilience.
Before Bren, she collaborated with communities to build healthy, resilient neighborhoods through food justice and active transportation projects. This included coordinating Las Milpitas, a community garden in her hometown Tucson, Arizona, where she led community engagement and partnerships efforts and co-led a racial equity initiative. More recently, she worked on pedestrian advocacy in Boston, Massachusetts to make walking a safer, more viable means of transportation across the state. Elena is excited to bring this experience to her role at Better World Group to advance wildfire resilience policy, community benefits related to renewable energy development, and contribute to projects such as California’s Outdoors for All Initiative.
When she is not at her desk, you can find her cooking/eating, hiking, camping, and learning new hobbies that take her outdoors.