Betsy Lopez-Wagner

Betsy López-Wagner launched López-Wagner Strategies, An Equitable Communications Agency®, in 2020 and serves as its team's principal. She presently serves on the United Nation’s Ocean Decade Communications Working Group and is the former co-chair of NOAA's Office of National Marine Sanctuaries Business Advisory Council, a national 15-member council supporting NOAA's National Marine Sanctuary System, and recently completed four years of service on the board of directors for the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. 

She's mentored and trained U.S. and global youth ocean and climate advocates. And, she's co-devised strategies alongside grassroots activists to ensure their power is seen, heard, and felt from regional to national and international levels by developing a culture of storytelling that elevates authentic personal narratives to emotionally connect with audiences and inspire action. She is committed to supporting the growth of an equitable conservation movement to strengthen global, national and state-level priorities to advance ocean justice, protect our environment, democracy, and above all, people – especially those on the frontlines of an increasingly warming planet, rising ocean and social injustices.

She’s led strategic, bilingual and equitable communications initiatives on climate action and ocean justice throughout her career, including at the Packard Foundation, LCV, and Earthjustice, as well as alongside her Equitable Comms colleagues in a successful Stop Poseidon advocacy campaign to stop the California Coastal Commission’s permitting of a dirty desalination plant, as facilitators for the Ocean Justice Forum which inspired the first U.S. Ocean Climate Action plan under the Biden-Harris Adminisration, in supporting Azul and its first-of-its-kind U.S. Latinos and the Ocean commissioned polling, authoring an award-winning environmental justice curriculum for EarthEcho International educators, and in advancing equitable partnership and grantmaking strategies for various organizations.

She's a leadership coach, trainer, storyteller and anti-racism practitioner with deep sci-comms grantmaking, language justice, partnerships and community organizing experience. She's frequently partnered with Wonder Strategies and Goodwin Simon Strategic Research to support communications trainings on Heartwired to Love the Ocean, as well as Heartwired storytelling for reproductive rights in Latin America — an extension of her climate justice work — and has supported the Colorado Health Foundation, Fondation CHANEL and Namati alongside her Wonder colleagues.

During Betsy’s tenure at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation she led an Ocean Communications portfolio focused on the most pressing issues in global ocean conservation in the U.S., Mexico, and Chile. She advised and introduced opportunities to advance grantmaking to new grantees representing organizations led by people of color and women of color, and focused on ocean-climate journalism. She was one of three co-founders of the Foundation’s first affinity and employee resource groups. She served as Communications Director for LCV’s Chispa and was the first Bilingual Press Secretary (Spanish) at Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law firm.
Prior to her work in the nonprofit sector, Betsy worked for media outlets in Illinois and California. She was an award-winning journalist and freelance writer. Nearly two decades ago, her work in Public Affairs began at the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie. She is a Columbia College Chicago graduate and has a graduate certificate from Cornell University.

She is also actively involved in grassroots organizing and community projects, including the co-formation of Residents United for a Healthy Lowell, a Michigan-based grassroots, nonpartisan group working to stop a proposed AI data center in West Michigan.