Last month longtime environmental advocate Michael Hansen stepped down as Executive Director of the Greater Birmingham Alliance to Stop Pollution (GASP). GASP employees Jilisa Milton and Latrice Dudley were selected to take over the role as co-directors due to their complementary strengths, Hansen previously told the Lede.

In her Q&A this week, Milton said she would be handling GASP’s advocacy efforts and expressed her hopes to get the Birmingham community more involved in the organization’s work.

Prior to your new role, what was your position and GASP and what responsibilities did you have?

I started working at GASP last year around October, so a little bit less than a year ago. And I started as a deputy director at GASP. At the time, I was interested in kind of like, a position that allowed me to be creative with all the different skills that I have. Because my background is in advocacy work, but in different ways. I’m an attorney, I’m a social worker, I’ve done grassroots organizing. And I’ve just been in different areas of the movement from reproductive justice to disability justice, to anti carceral work. And I just felt like it was time to have a position that allowed me to be creative with all the different skills I had, but also something I cared about a lot.

But I feel like I went into the process of applying for deputy director also wanting to learn executive skills. So, I applied for that, and the board and Michael decided that they wanted to hire two directors [her and Michael]. And so, we ended up kind of splitting our roles between the two of us in ways that really complemented each other.