Master of Human Rights student (MHR ’26) Hank Hellstrom didn’t always know he wanted to study human rights.
“I went to school for mechanical engineering, a different path than the one I ended up taking, although I was interested in climate change at the time,” he explains. “When I finished my undergraduate degree, I changed how I thought about the world and what I thought about engineering. I realized I wanted to work on a more systemic level than I thought I could before.”
The pivot was the start of a journey from working in emergency shelters, to building capacity for programs supporting immigrants and refugees, to joining the MHR program. This year, Hellstrom received the Sharon Grimes Human Rights Fellowship, a $1,000 grant that is awarded each year to a Master of Human Rights student with a commitment to human rights and the environment.
The fellowship was established by Grimes, a retired communications manager and Equal Employment Opportunity officer who worked at the University of Minnesota for many years. Her core values include social justice, human rights, and protecting the environment.
Commitment to serving others
Hellstrom first became interested in climate change and environmental justice as an undergraduate student at Georgia Tech. Through classes he took relating to climate change, sustainability, and environmental justice, he realized that the challenges surrounding climate change were not simply a matter of technology and science, but primarily about politics.
After graduating from Georgia Tech, Hellstrom decided to step back from engineering and reexamine his career trajectory. He worked in emergency shelters for two years as he considered his future career path and contemplated how he might best serve others. That experience solidified the connection between human rights and Hellstrom’s interest in the environment.
One of the devastating effects of climate change is the forced displacement of people from their homes due to environmental factors, and the resulting increase in the number of climate refugees.
While most people displaced by climate change move within their own countries, those who do cross borders cannot claim refugee status or legal protection under current international law. But as environmental disasters and slow-onset changes like drought and desertification drive more climate migration, the debate over creating a protected class for climate refugees has intensified.
Hellstrom later worked at the International Institute of Minnesota, an organization dedicated to assisting refugees and immigrants integrate into their new communities. He decided to pursue his Master of Human Rights degree to better understand how to implement policy-level changes.
To Hellstrom, supporting human rights in the context of climate change includes helping communities to adapt their livelihoods to climate realities, improving infrastructure to weather natural hazards, advocating for the rights of the displaced, and crafting effective policies to support climate refugees. It also means pursuing legal remedies to attempt to repair damages impacting the most vulnerable communities.
Environment and human rights are linked
Environmental justice is essential, he notes, since the most vulnerable communities are historically the least responsible for climate change. Last year Hellstrom created a poster presentation and wrote a paper on the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, the international fund created to address the environmental loss and damage experienced by developing countries at the hands of historical polluters.
“The environment plays a very direct role in human rights,” Hellstrom said. “Think about rights to clean water, food, and health. This is directly related to the environment you are in.”
The all-encompassing nature of climate change means that all members of the world share a stake in advancing solutions—which presents the Herculean task of coordinating diverse actors, organizations, and nations with competing economic interests and political visions. Hellstrom understands the challenges.
“The main difficulty of climate advocacy is how to get people to care about other people across the world who they will probably never see and who are different from them,” he says, adding that while this is a huge challenge, it’s also one that people have contended with in other contexts historically.
This is where the Sharon Grimes Human Rights Fellowship comes in.
“I’m on this path to learn the skills that I need to professionally advocate for human rights and the environment in the context of climate change,” says Hellstrom. “The fellowship supports me and makes it easier to conduct advocacy work. I’m very grateful for that.”
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A version of this story was originally published by the Human Rights Program.
