Greetings!

Here in the dawning days of 2025, I am full of gratitude to find myself right here, writing to you as the new Executive Director of our New Mexico and El Paso chapter of Interfaith Power and Light (IPL). I am deeply honored to join this remarkable community of people who care so deeply for our Earth and continue to rise to chart a path forward in these extraordinary times. Your commitment to all of creation inspires and uplifts me, and I am eager to engage with you in this transformative journey.

It is a deep honor to follow in the footsteps of Sister Joan Brown, who co-founded the New Mexico chapter of Interfaith Power and Light almost twenty years ago and faithfully sustained its bold voice and witness over these years. Joan’s embodied love and commitment to just action in the face of the reality of climate change shines a bright light in our region. Thank you, Joan!

We are blessed to have Clara Sims continuing as the Assistant Executive Director of IPL (NM and El Paso). Clara’s inclusive leadership has been such an inspiration and tremendous support during this time of organizational transition. I personally am excited and grateful to work with her. Her kindness provides a natural balm in every place she is present.

A little about me: I’m a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and until recently I applied myself to work in the fields of housing, homelessness, and behavioral health. This was work I found deeply meaningful; and yet I recognized an emerging calling to do more about climate change. Since college environmental science classes in the late 1990s, the climate crisis has been the framing matter of my perspective on life. Folding all justice matters into one global situation. Pressing all nations and peoples on earth to work together as one family to solve it. In sessions with my spiritual director and on my own, I was praying to be able to do climate work in a way that would be spiritually and emotionally rooted for me. I was praying for vocational guidance and opened myself widely to how that might arise.

Amidst this spaciousness, late in the summer of 2024, Sister Joan and I reconnected on a camping trip in the Jemez Mountains and, in short, this chance encounter brought an invitation to serve that felt like an answer to my very intimate prayer. This mission. With all of you. 

Interfaith Power and Light has articulated a vital mission and vision. The mission is to inspire and mobilize people of faith and conscience to take bold and just action on global warming (climate change). The vision is of a stable climate where humans live in right and just relationship interconnected with a healthy, thriving natural world. 

At a time when, as we all know, the US federal government will be shrinking into denial of and irresponsibility toward the serious climate challenge at hand (even as the United States, historically, has emitted more greenhouse gases than any other nation on Earth), such grassroots communities within which we are rooted will provide creative and vital avenues for us to move forward. We will be like the sacred water that flows around obstacles. We can and will show the global community that people in this region are committed to doing our part in this critical time.

In New Mexico, especially, where the Permian Basin spreads deeply into our southeast region, burdening this small state with one of the most intense areas of fossil fuel extraction in the world, we are poised to lead in profound and prophetic ways.

I will close with inspiration from Joanna Macy, whose ‘Work That Reconnects’ provides a powerful frame for our ongoing engagement. Macy articulates work that unfolds as a ‘spiral journey,’ articulated in four parts. The work begins with gratitude, recognizing what nourishes and sustains us in this life. Then we honor our pain for the world. We get in touch with anger, sadness, recognize our numbness, etc. This part is essential. What we can experience in the presence of compassionate eyes alchemizes and allows us to move to see with new eyes. From this place we go forth, we commit to action from this new and transformed place. And we continue the spiral journey, around and around again, continuing to renew ourselves and recommit to transformed action.

Thank you for joining us in a transformative journey, beloved community! We will stay in touch with you and invite you to stay in touch with us as we move forward. There will be lots of different ways to get involved, share your own voices, and join with others in action that shines with the light of justice and care for all of creation. In the following section of this newsletter, we have information to help you prepare to be voices of and for the Earth in the upcoming legislative session. 

We ourselves are truly the ones we have been waiting for; and now is our time.

In gratitude, 

Desirée Bernard