“In this future, industrial facilities provide good, unionized jobs without harming people or the environment, and communities once burdened by pollution lead the transition.”

‍Industrious Lab, an environmental nonprofit that focuses on industrial decarbonization, is a Giving Green Fund grantee for its work on cement, aluminum, chemicals, and fertilizers. The organization’s work sits within one of our research areas exploring how philanthropy can decarbonize heavy industry, which is responsible for roughly a third of global emissions and has long been overlooked by climate funders. 

As part of our new Voices of Impact series spotlighting Giving Green’s Top Climate Nonprofits and Giving Green Fund grantees, we connected with Dominique Thomas, Partner and Field-Building Director at Industrious Labs. She walked us through her journey from grassroots organization to climate leadership, and shared how she reimagines heavy industry as a force for equity and regeneration.

The Q&A has been edited for brevity and clarity. The views and experiences shared in this conversation are those of the authors and reflect their unique perspective. We’re grateful to them for sharing their story with us.
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Q: Could you briefly introduce Industrious Labs and its work to accelerate industrial decarbonization?

Industrious Labs exists to deliver unstoppable policies, people power, and analysis to reduce dangerous emissions drastically, hold industry accountable to communities and workers. 

We envision a future defined by a new industrial revolution—one where heavy industry is no longer a driver of pollution, but a pillar of a regenerative, just economy. In this future, industrial facilities provide good, unionized jobs without harming health or the environment, and communities once burdened by pollution lead the transition.

To get there, we focus on four core areas of impact.

• Through analytics, we equip campaigns with the data and tools they need to win. Our analytics work provides actionable, campaign-driven insights that help organizers and advocates track progress, test strategies, and make real-time decisions. We build publicly accessible tools and share learnings to democratize access to data,  making it easier for a broad range of organizations, including those outside the traditional climate space, to engage in industrial decarbonization. 
• A powerful movement needs deep roots and wide reach, and that’s where our field-building work comes in. Industrial transformation demands more than policy and technical fixes; it requires organizers, workers, economic development leaders, and people with lived experience of pollution and disinvestment. We invest in this movement infrastructure by regranting, training, convening coalitions, and building capacity across sectors to grow a diverse, intersectional movement ready to win.
• We also run campaigns that bring power to bear where it matters most. Our team brings decades of experience in coalition building, grassroots organizing, strategic advocacy, litigation, and policy. We lead and support campaigns that connect local action to federal levers, combining deep strategy with coordination across stakeholders, from communities to decision-makers, to drive bold, systemic change.
• Finally, narrative power fuels political and cultural momentum. We use communications to shape the story of industrial transformation through compelling messaging, bold storytelling, and rigorous analysis. We align message, messenger, and moment to create a sense of inevitability around decarbonization and justice, ensuring communities, not corporations, define the future of industry.

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Q: Tell us about your journey. What led you to Industrious Labs, and how your experiences have shaped your approach to industrial decarbonization?

My path to leadership hasn’t been linear; it’s been shaped by lived experience, community, and a deep commitment to justice. I began my career in health care, running clinical trials and conducting research. At the same time, I was volunteering full-time with Black Youth Project 100, organizing with public housing residents on anti-state violence campaigns. Looking back, I realize I’ve always been an organizer, even before I had the words to describe it.

That work was transformative. It taught me how to build strategy in collaboration with people most impacted, and how to engage both personally and politically. It was through those conversations that I first encountered environmental racism and began to understand the deep connections between environmental injustice and the lives of Black people.

I didn’t grow up thinking of myself as part of the environmental movement. Climate change was often framed as saving the polar bears, something that felt distant, abstract, and centered on whiteness. But in organizing, I saw people who looked like me naming the ways environmental injustice was shaping their lives and fighting back. It made me reflect on my own story, growing up poor, raised by a single mom, shaped by systems of oppression, and I realized: people like me experience the climate crisis more directly, more painfully.

That realization prompted me to pursue climate work. I didn’t see Black people centered in climate conversations, and I wanted that to change. Across the country and around the world, Black communities were leading powerful work, resisting, organizing, and building solutions, but their stories weren’t being told.

In the spring of 2022, I saw an opportunity to join Industrious Labs, and I took a leap. Here, I’ve brought everything I’ve learned, from science to strategy, organizing to systems change, to take on the biggest challenge of my life: building a movement to transform industry in a way that delivers on climate, justice, and jobs.

I live by Afrofuturism, a sociopolitical movement that blends artistic expression and science fiction for Black people across the diaspora to imagine alternative futures where we are empowered, liberated, and central to shaping our narrative. What grounds me in this work is the unwavering vision that oppressed people have always held for their own liberation. When I approach this work through a racial, economic, and climate justice lens, it’s deeply personal, rooted in my own experience and in the legacy of Black resistance that continues to shape the world.

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Q: How is Industrious Labs thinking about international climate justice, as sectors like cement and waste expand into low- and middle-income countries?

Cement is essential to modern infrastructure, roads, bridges, dams, and buildings, but it comes at a steep cost to our climate and frontline communities.  If we continue on the current path, we risk locking in carbon emissions for decades. But by acting now, we can accelerate the shift to net-zero cement and concrete systems,  building a future where industry supports both people and the planet.

The Global Cement and Concrete Network is built around three strategic pillars: 

• Creating demand for low-carbon cement.
• Scaling best practices across regions and sectors.
• Demonstrating net-zero pathways rooted in justice and sustainability.

This network is guided by a deep commitment to a just transition, the development of a circular economy, and the pursuit of a livable climate. That means prioritizing access to green cement for Global South communities, not just as a climate imperative, but as a human rights issue. It also means reckoning with the cement industry’s role in public health crises, environmental degradation, and economic injustice, especially in communities that have borne the brunt of extractive development.

As a Global North group, we are investing power and resources into helping catalyze this global effort. Our role is to connect diverse actors: from decarbonization experts and policymakers to supply-chain leaders and environmental justice advocates. This network will bring together a coalition capable of pushing bold, scalable solutions, nationally and internationally, to radically reduce cement’s carbon footprint.

But let us be clear: while we are committed to building and coordinating this infrastructure now, our long-term vision is one of true leadership by Global South organizations. These groups must shape the strategy, drive the narrative, and be the public face of the movement to decarbonize cement. They bring lived experience, regional expertise, and a deep understanding of what justice looks like in their communities.

We don’t just need technical solutions. We need power-shifting solutions, ones that ensure climate action is driven by those most impacted, and that industrial decarbonization is not another story of exclusion, but a model for global solidarity.

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Q: What’s one major accomplishment recently that best illustrates how donations translated into real-world impact?

For generations, fenceline communities, disproportionately BIPOC, low-income, and non-English-speaking, have lived in the shadow of heavy industry. These are the neighborhoods that have borne the brunt of industrial pollution: breathing toxic air, living with heightened health risks, and navigating economic precarity, all while being systematically excluded from the policy decisions shaping their lives. At Industrious Labs, we believe that the people most affected must have the power to define the future. Through trust-based partnerships and a commitment to accessible, actionable information, we’re working to shift the balance of power, putting data and narrative in the hands of those who’ve long been ignored. In 2024, we launched the Industrial Equity Mapper: Stories of Industrial Pollution (IEM), a first-of-its-kind tool that pairs hard data with lived experience to illuminate both the reality and the possibility of life on the frontlines of heavy industry.

What began as a scrappy prototype has grown into a robust organizing and research tool. The IEM layers emissions, health, economic, and demographic data across 12 key U.S. geographies with powerful, first-person narratives from impacted communities. It doesn’t just map environmental harm, it helps reveal the purpose of industry today and the future communities are already building.

We deepened our understanding of how essential it is to pair local industrial impact data with the insight and leadership of frontline communities. Many of these communities are already doing the hard work of envisioning and building more just, regenerative futures. Our latest expansion builds on this foundation, with a sharpened focus on three areas:

• State-level engagement in California, where industrial emissions intersect with fierce organizing and evolving policy,
• Sector-specific deep dives into cement and chemicals — two of the most carbon- and toxics-intensive industries,
• Strategic inclusion of rural and bipartisan regions, where local voices are too often overlooked but vital to building broad, lasting coalitions.

Already, this work is surfacing shared truths and bold visions. In interviews conducted over the past several months and concluding in the coming weeks, we’re hearing a recurring theme: communities are rejecting the false choice between economic security and public health.

Q: Lastly, how has Industrious Labs adapted to political shifts, particularly during the current administration?

While the path to federal industrial transformation may narrow depending on election outcomes, our mission remains both viable and urgent. In this moment, we are sharpening our focus and diversifying our strategies. Promising opportunities lie ahead, from expanding our international work (such as in cement) to scaling corporate campaigns and deepening our impact through robust state-level initiatives. But a central, defining question now guides our next chapter: How do we build a resilient organization that can weather political shifts and still drive transformative change? The answer lies in building more power, wielding it strategically, and sustaining it over time.

To win on industrial decarbonization, we must grow our long-term capacity, develop visionary leaders, and strengthen narrative power in partnership with communities and the broader field. We must deepen public support that can move decision-makers not just when it’s easy, but especially when it’s hard. That means being strategic about what it will take to win, regardless of who holds political office at any given moment.

No matter where we direct our efforts, whether in climate-leading states or those where resistance runs deeper, our strategy cannot stop at mobilizing our base. We must do more than rally our allies. True transformation will require us to become much more skilled at engaging the persuadable middle: stakeholders who may not currently prioritize our issues, or who may even hold passive opposition.

This isn’t about compromising our values or appeasing entrenched opposition. It’s about understanding the whole landscape of influence and expanding our ability to move it. There are persuadable constituencies and stakeholders across industries, communities, and regions, whose power, when engaged strategically, can help unlock the scale of change we seek.

To achieve this, we must continue to build both our internal and external strategic muscle. That means cultivating the skills to persuade, to organize across differences, and to shift perception through powerful narrative and coalition work. Sometimes, this involves working with individuals and institutions that span a broad spectrum of alignment, ranging from passive opponents to neutral actors, always grounded in a clear-eyed analysis of what is required to build durable, people-powered change.

And to be clear: this expansion of strategy does not mean deprioritizing our current partners. The wins we’ve secured and the trust we’ve built with frontline and aligned organizations are the bedrock of our work, and they remain non-negotiable. But if we are serious about transformation, we must widen the aperture.

This is the work of movement-building: rooted in values, disciplined in strategy, and expansive in imagination. That’s how we build the resilient infrastructure, political power, and cultural momentum necessary to realize industrial transformation, no matter the headwinds.

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