Jamin Bray, co-director of the Missouri Environmental Education Association (MEEA),

enjoys strumming in the Ozarks. Photo courtesy of MEEA

Jamin Bray, Co-Director of the Missouri Environmental Education Association (MEEA), knows where change starts. She confidently insists: “right here.” A lifelong educator with a soft spot for empathy, Bray said she believes that a conversation is the first step in any real change making. And for MEEA, an organization dedicated to providing environmental education for a more sustainable future, change is the problem and the solution.

“When I talk about climate, I’m always trying to help people understand,” Bray said. “If I talk to somebody who doesn’t ‘believe’ in climate change, I’m like, ‘Talk to me. Let’s have a conversation,’ and then I can see their point of view.

“Wouldn’t the world be better if everybody would have conversations like that?” Bray asked.

Her love for the earth began, as with many environmentalists, in the earth. Her earliest memories find her and her siblings playing in the dirt and trees of Joplin and Branson, Missouri. She spent her summers at Table Rock Lake.

“We were always outside. It didn’t matter, we were outside. We were in a tree. We were playing games, we stayed outside until we had to come in and take a shower and get ready for bed,” Bray said. “It was a lifestyle. That connection with the lake and the fish in the water was just an early, great memory for me.”

Bray is a trained scientist with a self-proclaimed “gift for gab.” She is a musician as well, and headed out west to the University of Colorado-Boulder inspired by the lyrics in John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High.” After a year in the mountains, she returned to Missouri to complete her bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

After earning her degree, Bray followed the music once again to Branson with her family.  Upon returning, she decided to pursue her master’s degree in wetland water quality science.

“I had already started picking up on this thing through my music. Then I was starting to be more inspired by people in my own profession. They were the ones who could interpret that information really well to the public,” Bray said. “As I matured, I started realizing a lot of people don’t understand the work that our scientists are doing.” Bray decided that for the sake of the country and the world, they better start understanding.

With this awareness and a growing passion for education, she switched her graduate degree to Parks and Recreation.

“The switch was based on, how do we serve our community? By helping them understand the research that we do,” Bray answered her own question.

This mission of what Bray calls “interpretation” — ensuring that the public understands the sometimes difficult-to-understand  information — is what brought her to MEEA. To get to that point, she worked as a park naturalist at Montauk State Park, and then moved into formal education as an English and science teacher.

“Those two backgrounds brought interpretation and education together for me and gave me the credentials,” Bray said.

As an educator, she had been a member of MEEA for years. At one point, she decided she was going to join the board.

“I just wanted to be more involved,” Bray said. “But then an executive position came open, and I jumped on it.”

In 2022, she started as Assistant Director of MEEA. She was originally brought on to take care of the overflow tasks on the then Executive Director Lesli Moylan’s plate, tasks that would not have required the experience and expertise that Bray has.

“When Jamin came on board, it just seemed silly not to kind of split up some of the tasks among ourselves and then give each other lanes that are our purview,” Moylan said.

Among several other resources for environmental educators, MEEA offers online courses through its website that are designed to equip educators to teach environmental topics consciously and creatively.

In the next year, MEEA will offer a new online course covering climate justice, a term used to describe the disproportionate impacts of climate change on marginalized communities.

“Climate change is not the same for everybody. But it’s everyone’s responsibility to try to figure out how to safeguard everyone that’s in our community. In my mind, climate justice relates to where people live and what they do for a living. That’s global, but climate justice is more human being focused,” Bray said.

This sting of climate injustice worsens after recognizing that, “the groups and nations that contribute the least to the causes of climate change are experiencing the most harm from it,” according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

In spring 2023, the Yale program contributed to a survey that found that only 34% of Americans said they have heard of climate justice.

“We as a global community, and those of us who are scientists and educators, have a responsibility to push out this information about climate justice. This is not just us saying ‘the world’s on fire’,” Bray stressed.

While the percentage of Americans who have heard of climate justice is low, the percentage goes up to 53% of people who say they support the goals of climate justice after learning about its definition and meaning.

The upcoming online course on climate justice perfectly exemplifies MEEA’s values: environmental education, and working to support marginalized and historically underserved communities that are taking the brunt of climate change’s impacts.

“Being an Ozarkian — growin’ up pretty poor, actually — I feel like the rural parts of our state are underserved. That’s probably why I got hired honestly, because we’re wanting to expand out to rural areas that get forgotten. They really do,” Bray said.

Bray now resides in Salem, Missouri with her husband. Moylan agrees that her strong bond to rural Missouri is extremely valuable to her work.

“Having Jamin on board as somebody who lives and breathes rural life has been a boost in terms of us being able to authentically connect with all state residents,” Moylan said. “She’s definitely helping me learn a lot about current issues in rural areas of our state.”

Moylan said the heart of MEEA’s mission is empathy, an attribute she said Bray is steeped in.

“It’s my superpower. I feel like I used to freak out about that. And now I like to celebrate it, because I think this empathy helps. I know, it helps me as a teacher, as an educator,” Bray said.