People We Meet: For Arieann Harrison, eco-activism is in her DNA

Attend any neighborhood meeting in Bayview-Hunters Point, whether it’s put on by tenants groups, the neighborhood’s air protection program or the Hunters Point Shipyard’s citizens advisory committee, and you are bound to come face to face with Arieann Harrison. 

Harrison, the CEO of the Marie Harrison Foundation, an environmental justice nonprofit named after her mother, is a formidable opponent to anyone with a key interest in projects that could pose a health risk to her neighbors. 

That’s because Harrison has skin in the game. 

Harrison lost her mother in 2019 after a long battle with lung disease. She had never been a smoker. Although it has not been proven, Arieann Harrison blames the Hunters Point Shipyard, a toxic Superfund site where her mother worked in her youth. 

Later, as an adult, Marie Harrison tirelessly advocated throughout the 1990s for a transparent cleanup of the site, and fought on behalf of environmental concerns throughout the neighborhood.

Her efforts eventually helped lead to the closure of the Hunters Point Power Plant, which prior to 2006 spewed pollution over the neighborhood. 

“I guess you could say it’s in my DNA,” said Harrison, when asked why she decided to turn to activism herself. 

But it wasn’t an automatic calling. “I’ll be the first person to tell you,” Harrison said, sitting in Bayview’s Southeast Community Center, “I didn’t want to be nothing like my mother and father.” 

As a teenager, Harrison had a taste for rebellion. At night, she would climb out of her bedroom window and change her clothes in the dark to follow the Bayview-Hunters Point-born, all-Black heavy metal band Stone Vengeance to their next gig.

“I was an angry kid,” said Harrison, who now laughs about it. “When you’re young and carefree, you don’t give a shit about anything.” 

Harrison’s first love was for music. While following the band, she played her own music, writing lyrics and playing the keyboard in now-closed holes-in-the-wall across San Francisco and Oakland. 

“It was a wild time,” Harrison said, recalling one memory in which she dared a member of Stone Vengeance to dive headfirst — in his leather pants — into a lake in Golden Gate Park.

“It got scary fast. It was so dark, we could just hear splashing,” said Harrison. “But it was so fun, we went back the next weekend.” 

But when Harrison went to her first social-justice meeting at City College, it fit like a glove.

“I grew up in those rooms,” said Harrison, whose father was also an activist and a member of the Black Panther Party. “And I grew up with the notion that you had to do something.” 

Harrison worked as a case manager in Bayview for decades, never moving from the Hunters Point waterfront, and often taking care of her younger sisters and brothers while her mother worked to gather evidence that the U.S. Navy had botched its cleanup of the shipyard. 

When her mother died in 2019, Harrison was left with a very large shadow. Neighbors who knew her mother will often stop her in the street, including during Mission Local’s interview, exclaiming how they knew her mother.

“Hey, I know you!” called out one Bayview resident. “I knew her when she was just a little girl,” he said. “I knew her mother very well.” 

But her fear, she said, is that one day her mother will be forgotten.

“I don’t want us to just be memorialized in pictures and street names,” she said, sitting in the community center’s cafe, in which murals of community activists are plastered over the walls. “I want our children to see the fruits of all that she’s done.” 

The year after her mother died, Harrison hosted an Earth Day event. “Kids came from everywhere,” said Harrison. “There were so many kids, they covered it from the air to the ground.” 

Harrison started the Marie Harrison Foundation in 2023, working with children in Bayview and across San Francisco to teach science and environmental justice.

“I wanted to see it through,” said Harrison. “I wanted to make sure that what she started did not end without a greater outcome.” 

The foundation has also worked to pressure industries to reduce truck traffic and air pollution in the neighborhood and has worked to hold the U.S. Navy accountable at the shipyard. She’s also started a scholarship in her mother’s name. 

When she watched her kids march into City Hall and towards the mayor’s office on Earth Day in 2019, Harrison stood back, in awe.

“I almost broke inside,” said Harrison. “Someting in me broke. I just thought, this is why. It’s like my mom’s spirit was with me, and I haven’t stopped since. And I won’t stop until we get the desired outcomes that we need.”