The Atlanta-based nonprofit Captain Planet Foundation hosted its annual Benefit Gala on Saturday, March 15 — complete with an on-brand “green carpet” for guests’ arrival — and raised more than $500,000 through the night.
The gala, one of the largest environmental fundraisers in the city, honored three awardees:
- Maggie Baird, founder of food insecurity and plant-based diet nonprofit Support+Feed
- Steve Koonin, CEO of the Atlanta Hawks and State Farm Arena which became the first TRUE Platinum certified sports and live entertainment zero-waste arena in 2022
- Dejea Lyons, Co-Founder of Protect our Future, Planeteer Leader, and Princess Diana Legacy Awardee
The Captain Planet Foundation nonprofit has been around since 1991 and gets its namesake from the popular “Captain Planet and the Planeteers” animated series that ran in the early nineties.
Past honorees of the gala have featured the likes of former President Jimmy Carter, Mark Ruffalo, Dr. Jane Goodall, Sir Richard Branson, Bill Nye, Rev. Dr. Gerald Durley, and more.
Superhero of Earth
Support+Feed works with a number of Atlanta-based nonprofits and restaurants to provide plant-based meals and educate people on the benefits of a plant-based diet. Since its founding in 2020, it has provided over 1.5 million plant-based meals or pantry items to locations including Atlanta and the rest of the world.
Baird, awarded the Superhero of Earth Award at the event, said that the shift to a plant-based diet is one of the most effective things an individual can do to reduce carbon emissions.
“Of course, major corporations and governments do own the bulk of responsibility, and we know that they’ve placed that [responsibility] on the individual as a distraction,” Baird said. “However, as individuals, we have a lot of power and opportunity — and we know that eating a plant-based diet, even if you just add one plant-based meal a day for 30 days, really adds up.”
According to the United Nations, a switch to a plant-based diet can translate into an annual reduced carbon footprint of around “2.1 tons with a vegan diet or up to 1.5 tons for vegetarians” compared to the carbon-intense processes that go into a meat-based diet.
Baird, who first became vegan in 1976 after reading Diet for a Small Planet, has been advocating for plant-based meals on a personal basis for those privileged enough to incorporate those into their diets for decades. She joked in her acceptance speech that unlike many who are dubbed “nepo babies,” she feels like a “nepo parent” because of the spotlight she and her work now gets thanks to her famous musician children — Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell.
Still, she and Support+Feed recognize barriers to eating healthy — whether it be availability of food, cost or even cultural considerations like traditional meals incorporating meats.
“We can focus on meals that are similar, or slightly different but culturally relevant on the plant-based side of it,” Baird said, adding that partner organizations are normally very honest on what meals are working and which ones are not. “We also provide recipes, and make those recipes appropriate for the community that we’re serving [with] affordable ingredients that can be easily sourced and are recognizable.
The education component is so important, Baird said, because meat-centered diets have limited general knowledge of other types of diets.
“People are not aware of them. Part of it is really just exposing people, creating more acceptance of plant-based food, more access and demand to plant-based food,” said Baird, adding that in addition to knowing about the strain that animal-based diets can put on the environment, her personal experience of losing her mother at a young age to heart attack further commits her to pushing for healthier diets. “I have all the reasons for wanting to help people eat a healthier diet, and I think when people realize so much of their own health and the health of the planet is really just on their plate, we can do so much.”
The Superhero for Earth Exemplar Award
Sofi Armenakian, head of sustainable strategy for the Atlanta Hawks, accepted the Superhero for Earth Exemplar Award on behalf of Steve Koonin — and was joined onstage by the Atlanta Hawks’ own Harry the Hawk.
Statefarm Arena, as the first sports and live entertainment venue in the world to receive the Green Business Certification Inc. TRUE Platinum certification in 2022, is a trailblazer for venues of this size — and accomplished it in just a year after setting its goals.
“We work in sports and entertainment; it’s a very competitive field and no one else had done it, and we wanted to be first and do it at the highest level possible,” Armenakian said. “[It] was very remarkable to go from diverting 10 percent to 90 percent from landfill. It required us to be mindful in how we communicated, and intentional about our supply chain and the infrastructure in our building.”
Small actions, like simply ensuring bins were placed properly throughout the venue and ensuring no bin was alone but rather found in a group so visitors could make the decision to dispose of it properly, went a long way.
“We were already procuring things that were compostable; our supply chain was pretty clean, but we were not being intentional to ensure that it was going somewhere for commercial composting capabilities,” Armenakian said.
The nature of this work, however, requires the humility to know it’s always working towards doing better, Armenakian said. That’s why she and her team are constantly learning and striving to improve.
“The hardest parts are the things that are not divertable, which we’re still working on. There’s still that 10 percent of landfill that takes place,” Armenakian said, adding that every day new solutions are arising to chip away at those harder to divert materials. “We want to make sure we’re consistent. A lot of times you get a certification and you’re like ‘yay, we did it,’ but the important thing is consistency — day in, day out, year after year.”
Statefarm Arena incorporates the fans into the fun, too, with programs like “Recycle and Win,” which award a fan who recycled their waste properly with a trip to the court at halftime.
Just as one good deed inspires another, Statefarm Arena’s success seemed to rub off on others; though Statefarm Arena is the first live sports and entertainment venue to receive this distinction, neighboring Mercedes Benz Stadium also reached the level of excellence in 2023 — becoming the first professional sports stadium to garner the achievement.
The Young Superhero
Lyons, 22, was honored with the Young Superhero for Earth Award; she said much of her drive comes from her upbringing in the Cayman Islands.
“I was surrounded by beauty; I was so blessed to see things firsthand that other people only ever see in movies,” Lyons said. “I’ve had personal interactions with turtles and stingrays and sharks and just a clear blue sea… because I’ve been so interconnected with nature, I’ve been able to fall in love with my environment.”
For all the natural wonders she has experienced, however, she understands that for many people, the effects of climate change are more abstract than her experience of seeing her island feel its effects firsthand.
She also noted that due to the size of islands in the Caribbean — both physically and geopolitically — the voices from those islands are often ignored despite U.N. personnel recognizing it as potentially “ground zero” for climate effects.
One of the best tools to overcome this apathy? Social media. Being Gen Z — a generation that grew up with social media — empowers activists like Lyons to share their stories and connect people to places that otherwise wouldn’t seem so unfiltered.
“There’s a lot of Caribbean environmentalists who are also social media creators that speak on these issues diligently, giving us updates on what they’re experiencing in their own island. So it’s about amplifying those voices wherever we can,” Lyons said. “If you can make someone see something or hear something, they can never unsee, and they can never unhear it.”
Her environmental advocacy stretches over the last six years, through which the Captain Planet Foundation has supported from the beginning. Her first major cause was stopping a cruise port from being built on her island in 2019 due to environmental and socioeconomic concerns.
A recipient of both the Princess Diana Award and the Princess Diana Legacy Award, which recognize outstanding young people who are making a difference in the world, Lyons has made a name for herself in the environmental space — leading beach cleanups in the Cayman Islands, attending multiple conferences like the U.N. Climate Change Conferences (COP), edited pieces in an environmental magazine and as of last year interning with Captain Planet Foundation.
Her journey, however, hasn’t been a walk in the park. In her acceptance speech, Lyons recounted how people discouraged her actions, like protesting the cruise port.
“My parents used to receive calls from people within our community telling them that I was on the wrong side of history,” Lyons said. “Those words lingered with me, making me question everything even more… despite those doubts, I kept going.”
Her message to others looking to make a difference in their own communities? Start. Then stay the course.
“The challenges you face are not signs that you are on the wrong path. They are proof that you’re needed. Keep pushing forward, keep learning and keep believing in the difference that you make,” Lyons said.
