After leaving Harvard, she went to work on Wall Street for a large firm doing international transactions. This work was not fulfilling for her, so she left it to work for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. She began to work in environmental law as a clerk for Judge Earnest Rosenberger. Environmental law was a relatively new field in the early 1980s, and Lowe became the environmental law expert in chambers, conducting legal research and writing opinions. Next, Lowe went to work as Assistant Commissioner for Operations and Policy for the New York City Department of General Services in 1990. Her responsibilities included reviewing policies and ensuring that the agencies’ procedures conformed to the new city charter requirements and environmental policies.

After leaving General Services, Lowe became the Executive Director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance (NYCEJA), an umbrella group composed of grassroots organizations.   

Lowe then served as the Director of the Energy and Environment program at the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), a membership organization of over 275 religious institutional investors. She worked at ICCR for seven years. At ICCR, Lowe organized shareholder campaigns and researched corporate impacts on global warming, the global water crisis, genetically modified foods, and toxic pollution for ICCR members.

In addition to her dedication to helping others move forward in their careers, Lowe was involved with diversity efforts on many levels, including speaking out against biased or prejudicial actions and serving on the board of her Greenwich Village neighborhood. As a board member, she fought to preserve the historic district. She used this same fighting spirit when she went into neighborhoods with people of color burdened with pollution, where the buildings and houses are dilapidated, and there are no green parks where children can play. In such neighborhoods, she often found a lack of organizational sophistication and little understanding of how the government works or how decisions are made.

Much of her job was facilitating the dialogue between such communities, government, and industry. Together with community activists, they find pressure points in the system through letter writing, participation in public hearings, protests, and negotiation. The highlight of Lowe’s career was the Organization Strengthening Award NYCEJA received from the Jesse Smith Noyes Foundation in 2000 for its “outstanding contribution to the environmental movement.” During her tenure, NYCEJA also won an award from the New York Citizen’s Environmental Coalition.

Lowe experienced some discouraging moments. She found the lowest point of her career came when the Garden Coalition she represented lost the lawsuit to protect the community gardens from real estate development. Although the gardeners had improved the vacant, garbage-ridden lots by planting and maintaining the gardens at their own expense as community amenities, they did not own the land.

Challenging government action in the courts is always difficult, but for low-income people, the time and cost involved make it prohibitive. Lowe realized that “courts are rarely an effective venue for communities to protect themselves against environmental harm, especially for poor communities. They don’t have money to make campaign contributions that buy access to the politicians who run the system.” When asked why she has stuck with a career in the environmental field, she said, “You do it because it’s right…You don’t quit because the job is hard. When obstacles arise, it makes me want to fight that much

harder.”

At ICCR, she did legal analysis of corporate reporting for conformity with the Securities and Exchange Commission rules. Her legal skills were also kept sharp, staying current with developments in environmental law. She enjoyed working with wonderful, smart, savvy, and committed people. She said that she did not do this job for money rather, she liked what she did and had fun.

In 2010, Lowe founded UCI Environmental Accountability, a consulting firm that advises foundations, institutional investors, and nonprofit organizations on corporate environmental performance. She was a Senior Strategist for As You Sow’s investor initiative on coal, which worked to improve disclosures of and reduce the financial risks facing coal-dependent utilities.

Most recently, in 2014, she served as a program officer at the Rockefeller Family Fund, where she was instrumental in the fossil fuels divestment decision and engaged in projects like the Rural Electric Co-op Democracy Project in Alabama. She worked for corporate accountability at the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility and, as Executive Director of the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance, she fought back when NYC tried to bulldoze the public gardens and blew the whistle when NYC would not recognize the damage that pollution was causing to communities of color. She was also active with many organizations in New Orleans and the South.

Lowe was a member of the American Bar Association’s Committee on Environmental Disclosure member and a Senior Fellow of The Future 500. She served on the Highlander Research and Education Center and River Network boards.

Leslie Lowe passed away on November 22, 2017.