Environment chief will focus instead on church ministry

When Rev. Mariama White-Hammond steps to the microphone at press conferences, she often calls on everyone present to slow down and take a breath, or maybe participate in some lively line dancing. That’s the spirit that the 44-year-old Dorchester resident has brought to her role as the city’s chief of Environment, Energy, and Open Space, a post she has held since 2021.

This week, White-Hammond told the Reporter that she’s planning to step aside from her position in Mayor Wu’s cabinet to focus full-time on her role as lead pastor at Dorchester’s New Roots AME Church.

“I’ve done pretty well with doing all the things I committed to doing, and now we’re at an inflection point where I need to devote more time to my church,” she said in an interview. “It’s important that government can move forward, but I also believe for government to work well it needs strong civic and social justice organizations on the outside. A lot of our movement organizations have struggled to recover from the pandemic. You can’t do movement support work, which I always did a lot of, as a government official.”

White-Hammond will end her time at City Hall on April 26. There’s no word yet as to who will replace her.

She took on her cabinet post under Mayor Kim Janey, who served in an interim capacity following the departure of former Mayor Marty Walsh, when she was serving as pastor at New Roots AME.

“It has become hard to manage both…but we have reached a number of milestones now that I am very proud of and that allow me to transition,” she said.

White-Hammond brought a distinctly different approach to her work as a cabinet member, so having a sliver of spirituality, even at a press conference, was something she eagerly brought to the table.

Famously, during the rollout of the Franklin Park Action Plan in Franklin Park on a bone-chilling December day, she asked everyone in attendance – including the television camera operators – to take a moment to be silent and take a deep breath. Later she invited them to dance with the Rhythm Riders line dancers, eliciting grumbles from some in the media.

But it brought joy to many others, and White-Hammond said that was one of her objectives when she accepted the city position.

“I have always kept my spiritual work separate from this work, but I don’t keep my ethos separate,” she said. “This work can and should be done with joy. One of the values in our cabinet is joy.”

The city’s parks, which she has overseen as part of her cabinet role, are places where people found joy amid the turmoil and grief of the pandemic. White-Hammond said that “stewarding people’s joy” is something she hopes will continue with her successor, who has not yet been named.

Among her accomplishments, White-Hammond lists her work in instituting the Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance (BERDO) that was passed by the city council; founding and funding the city’s PowerCorps jobs; and bringing in the Office of Food Justice under her cabinet post. However, she said, she really learned the most about the need to update the electrical grid.

As an advocate, she said she learned to say “no” to fossil fuels, but as a government official she learned that so much needs to be done for the demise of fossil fuels to really happen.

“I was always an advocate of electrification, but this allowed me to dive more into what it will take to make sure we have enough electricity to electrify everything,” she said. “I was protesting the substation with others in East Boston and I still believe that substation should be on MassPort land, to be honest. But it did afford me the opportunity to look closer at the growth of our grid.”

White-Hammond founded her church, which meets at the Epiphany School in Melville Park, five years ago and has been devoted to the ministry after growing up in a family of ministers and swearing she would never work in ministry. She has been intentional about gathering her own congregation in Dorchester – a place she loves.

“My life centers between Savin Hill, Fields Corner, and Uphams Corner,” she said. “I believe we have the best bubble tea here in the city. The zip code 02125 is the third most diverse zip code in America…I do have a lot of belief in the power of Dorchester – not just for our city, but also for America.”

White-Hammond, who said she intends to dive deeper into neighborhood work, hopes to help promote Dorchester cohesiveness and working together. In the meantime, she will take her extra time to focus on the church, yet also get involved in a SCUBA diving project in Barbados, run a marathon in Detroit, and finish working on a book she started before her time at City Hall.

“While I won’t be in my role with the city anymore, I love this city and I’m not going anywhere,” she said.