When danger meets Destiny, Destiny wins

Rising senior Destiny Watford takes on a threat to public health, convinces a community, and clinches an environmental prize.

June 9, 2016

Destiny Watford '17 helped found Free Your Voice and convinced the Curtis Bay community to oppose a national incinerator. (Photo courtesy of Doug Kapustin)
Destiny Watford '17 helped found Free Your Voice and convinced the Curtis Bay community to oppose a national incinerator. (Photo courtesy of Doug Kapustin)

Destiny Watford '17 is aptly named. Even before she graduates with degrees in both English and mass communication[BROKEN LINK], she seems set on a course for impact in her community.

Watford won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for her work with the Free Your Voice action group to stop plans to develop the nation's largest incinerator in South Baltimore's Curtis Bay community—a community already plagued with higher-than-average respiratory disease cases. She started that work when she was just 17. Now, she's been featured on Time.com as one of the magazine's 2016 Next Generation Leaders.

Read Time.com's "Fighting for Environmental Justice on the Streets of Baltimore" to see how this TU rising senior has already made a huge difference in Maryland.

“ People thought of our fight to stop the incinerator [as some] cute after-school hobby,” she says. “It was not just a hobby, it was an act of survival. ”

Destiny Watford '17, in Time.com