The grant Brittanie Dabney is using to launch eco-youth labs for underrepresented kids.
Brittanie Dabney grew up camping and walking the Detroit Riverfront with her parents, and it gave her two things: a love of the outdoors and a front-row look at environmental racism, the stark difference in how clean her Detroit neighborhood was compared to the suburbs. That contrast set the course for her life.
She turned it into expertise. Dabney spent more than a decade in environmental toxicology, studying microplastics, PFAS forever chemicals, and contaminants in Michigan's water, with stints at the Nature Conservancy, the Detroit River Coalition, and Wayne State, and she is now finishing a PhD in biology and urban sustainability.
Then she built a company. Dabney founded Ecosphere Organics, a Detroit biorefining startup that takes food waste from local restaurants, leftover apples, coffee grounds, banana peels, and converts it into reusable material, even natural pigments from hibiscus and grapefruit for art and 3D printing. Her Waste to Wonder project, part of Detroit's Month of Design, turned that waste into pigments for artists. She is using a 20,000 dollar grant to launch eco-youth labs that introduce kids in underrepresented communities to environmental science.
"She saw the unfairness as a kid, then spent her life engineering the fix."
The throughline is that she did not treat the problem as someone else's. A kid who noticed her neighborhood was dirtier than the next one over became the scientist and founder building the solution, and then made sure the next generation of kids gets to see that path exists.
This is the builder ANF loves to spotlight. Turn the thing that made you angry into the thing you build. Dabney did it with science, a company, and a lab for the kids coming next.
She grew up seeing the gap. Now she is closing it.