Candice Youngblood
About Candice's Work
Candice Youngblood is a passionate environmental justice lawyer and advocate. An asthmatic, she grew up in Los Angeles County living beside major freeways. Candice became motivated to protect the right to breathe clean air after realizing that the high rates of asthma and other respiratory diseases in low-income communities and communities of color are linked to their disproportionate traffic pollution exposure. Raised in a family of truck drivers, she is also committed to achieving a just transition for fossil fuel-dependent communities as we shift toward a clean energy economy.
Candice earned undergraduate and law degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. During law school, Candice published an academic article focusing on the ways in which lawyers, environmental organizations, and philanthropists can support the environmental justice movement without displacing community voices. She also organized a 200+ attendee environmental justice symposium to increase environmental justice scholarship and discourse within the environmental legal field. Through Berkeley Law's Environmental Law Clinic and Karuk-Berkeley Collaborative Legal, Candice provided pro bono legal services for San Joaquin Valley disadvantaged communities and the Karuk Tribe of the Klamath River. In 2019, she received Berkeley Law’s annual Francine Marie Diaz Memorial Award for her commitment to social justice.
Candice currently practices law at Earthjustice, where she focuses on issues at the intersection of clean transportation and racial justice. She first joined Earthjustice’s Los Angeles office as a litigation assistant in 2015 and returned as a Skadden Fellow in 2021. Her previous legal experience includes serving as a law clerk to the Honorable Dale A. Drozd in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California and interning at the California Department of Justice; Shute, Mihaly and Weinberger, LLP; and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
In 2020, Candice founded Youth on Root, a California-based nonprofit project whose mission is to center low-income youth and youth of color as change agents in their communities by providing tools for learning from each other and opportunities to use their unique power to promote environmental justice.
