- The Yaya Leadership Initiative, launched in memory of late Indonesian environmental leader Nur Hidayati, aims to develop a new generation of community leaders, particularly women, young people, Indigenous peoples, and grassroots activists.
- The initiative builds on Yaya’s leadership approach, which emphasized sharing power, supporting women and young activists, and connecting environmental, Indigenous, agrarian, and human rights movements.
- Organizers say the initiative is especially important as Indonesian environmental defenders face rising threats, while social movements struggle with fragmentation, polarization, and a lack of leadership succession.
- The YLI has begun supporting emerging leaders through fellowships and aims to build networks that help activists remain in their movements, work across causes, and nurture the next generation of leaders.
JAKARTA — It had been 648 days since Nur Hidayati, an Indonesian environmental activist fondly known as Yaya or Mbak Yaya, died of cancer.
Rukka Sombolinggi, secretary-general of Indonesia’s largest Indigenous organization, AMAN, had counted every one of those days.
“ It makes me sad,” she said at the launch of the Yaya Leadership Initiative in Jakarta on Aug. 14, which would have been Yaya’s 53th birthday. But seeing the initiative launched in Yaya’s name gave Rukka another way to think about the loss.
“Although she has gone, there are legacies, ideas and actions she left behind that we can still benefit from,” she said.
The initiative, known as the YLI, brings together environmental, Indigenous, agrarian, fisher, human rights, and other movements to develop a new generation of community leaders — particularly from the ranks of women, young people, Indigenous peoples, and grassroots changemakers.
Facilitated by the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi), the country’s biggest green NGO, alongside organizations including the Indigenous alliance AMAN, the Consortium for Agrarian Reform (KPA), and the Indonesian Union of Traditional Fisherfolk (KNTI), the YLI aims to build the capacity, networks, and support systems of people working for social and environmental justice.
The initiative is built around four principles that Yaya championed throughout her career: solidarity, equality, environmentalism, and diversity.
But its proponents say the YLI is more than just an effort to preserve the memory of one of Indonesia’s most prominent environmental leaders. They say it’s an attempt to carry forward a particular way of doing leadership — one centered less on power and position than on helping other people become leaders themselves.
“Everyone will inevitably leave this world, but the core principles and ideas must not disappear; they have to be passed on,” former Walhi executive director Zenzi Suhadi said at the launch.
A leader who built other leaders
For her supporters, Yaya’s leadership was less about commanding a movement than about empowering other people to lead one.
Over more than two decades in the environmental movement, she worked with communities affected by environmental destruction and became a prominent figure in Indonesia’s civil society movement. She served as executive director of Walhi from 2016 to 2020.
People who worked with her remember not only the positions she held but also the way she used them.
Boy Jerry Even Sembiring, Walhi’s current executive director, said Yaya pushed him toward leadership even though he initially didn’t want it. Rather than allowing him to remain a participant, she challenged him to seek a leadership position at the NGO.
Khalisah Khalid, public engagement manager at Greenpeace Indonesia and a protégée of Yaya’s at Walhi, remembers a similar approach. One of Yaya’s defining characteristics, she said, was her willingness to share power.
“She doesn’t want to grow on her own, but brings others along so that they can grow together,” Khalisah said.
Yaya also led through empathy and care, Khalisah said — something she experienced personally as well as professionally.
“During the time Mbak Yaya led, there weren’t many leaders who could do that — lead with empathy and care,” she said. “But for me and the women staff at Walhi, Mbak Yaya understood us deeply and could become a support system.”
After Khalisah’s mother and older sister died, she said, Yaya became like another older sister to her.
“She supported every decision I made,” Khalisah said.
That support extended beyond words. Yaya sought to incorporate consideration for women’s responsibilities into organizational policy and budgets.
Khalisah recalled attending a weeklong Friends of the Earth International event while worrying about being separated from her child. Yaya told her to have her sibling bring the child to the event, even though doing so would be expensive.
For Khalisah, that was an example of how Yaya turned her values into organizational practice.
Yaya’s approach to leadership was also visible in her career. She served as executive director of Greenpeace Indonesia from 2009-2012, and could have pursued a more senior international position after that. Instead, according to colleagues, she chose to go to Walhi as head of its campaign department. She eventually became executive director in 2017.
During her time at Walhi, she also sought to build institutions that could nurture future activists. In 2019, she established the Walhi Training Center as a hub for environmental activist education, and introduced a gender policy aimed at promoting equality and making the organization a safe space for people of all genders.
For Dani Setiawan, head of the KNTI, the traditional fishers’ union, Yaya was a connector rather than simply an organizational leader. He described her as a “solidarity maker” who connected movements and strengthened relationships among them.
That was rooted in her belief that environmental problems could not be separated from social, political and economic structures, Dani said.
“She became a connector, a solidarity maker, and someone whose expertise was strengthening the movements that existed in Indonesia,” he said.
Dewi Kartika, secretary-general of the KPA, the land reform movement, said Yaya’s approach also taught fellow leaders the importance of taking care of one another.
“We didn’t always have the same understanding as Yaya, but our experience together with Rukka and Yaya made us realize that social movements that don’t take care of one another will become fragile,” Dewi said.
A movement under pressure
That emphasis on solidarity has become more urgent as environmental and human rights defenders in Indonesia face growing threats.
A new report released in May by the NGOs Satya Bumi and Protection International recorded 64 cases of threats and attacks against environmental human rights defenders across the country in 2025, affecting 259 individuals and 15 communities. That was nearly double the 33 cases recorded in 2024. The cases involved environmental issues, Indigenous rights, and land conflicts.
The report documented a range of threats, including criminalization, intimidation, physical violence, and restrictions on civic space. It recorded 35 cases of criminalization alone, involving 191 victims.
Satya Bumi and Protection International said the attacks have become not only more frequent but more diverse and severe, and argued that protection needs to extend beyond individuals to their organizations, families, and wider networks.
The report also found that NGOs and advocacy organizations are playing an important role in filling gaps in state protection, by providing legal assistance, raising public awareness, training communities, and expanding support networks around defenders facing threats.
For the YLI’s organizers, building those networks is part of the challenge.
Dewi said many of the issues confronting Indonesia can’t be addressed by one movement alone. Indigenous rights, human rights, democracy, gender, and environmental issues are deeply interconnected, yet social movements increasingly suffer from what she described as “fragmentation and polarization.”
That fragmentation makes cross-movement organizing more important, she said.
The YLI is intended to help bridge those divides, continuing an approach that Yaya practiced throughout her career.
Another challenge is regeneration.
Indonesia’s social movements have produced many frontline activists — people who confront problems directly in their communities. Zenzi, who succeeded Yaya as Walhi’s executive director, recalled that she encouraged him to understand movements through three interconnected components: the frontline, the grassroots base that sustains it, and the wider supporting system around it.
The environmental movement in Indonesia has been relatively successful at producing people willing to stand on the frontlines, he said, but has struggled to develop the other parts of that ecosystem.
“So the YLI will make sure that the seeds, seedlings, and potential cadres that may not have emerged yet are given a hand, protected and nurtured,” Dewi said.
Rukka put the stakes more starkly.
If young leaders are not emerging, she said, then “we have failed.”
Women face additional obstacles in environmental activism. Dewi said social expectations, limited access to opportunities, and the difficulty of balancing activism with family responsibilities can prevent women from developing their leadership potential.
“Hopefully the YLI can become an extended hand for women with potential,” she said.
Growing the next generation
One of the YLI’s first steps is to support emerging leaders through fellowships. Among the inaugural recipients is Puan Maharani, a young woman from the Blitar Farmers’ Association in East Java province and member of the regional chapter of the KPA. She said she hopes to study law and eventually defend Indigenous farmers.
“The YLI will support the emergence of women advocates [like Puan],” Dewi said. “For women activists in the regions, they don’t have access, but they have knowledge and potential. They only need a little encouragement.”
The idea is not simply to give emerging activists resources and send them back to their communities. The YLI also aims to connect them with one another, creating relationships that can strengthen individual movements and build broader ones.
That’s particularly important in a landscape where defenders can face legal action, intimidation and physical threats, activists say. The report by Satya Bumi and Protection International found that Indigenous people were the largest category of individual victims, followed by community members and farmers.
For the YLI, leadership therefore means more than having people capable of speaking publicly or organizing protests, proponents say. It means building up people who can remain in their movements, support others, work across movements, and eventually help develop those who come after them.
Riswan, one of the young activists involved in the initiative, said Yaya understood that young people should not just be mobilized when movements need bodies for demonstrations or elections. They should also have a role in determining the policies and future that affect them.
That philosophy is particularly relevant at a time when young Indonesians face a climate crisis alongside shrinking civic space, he said.
The YLI’s organizers say they ultimately want to create an ecosystem in which people can become leaders, remain leaders, support one another, and produce the next generation of leaders.
For Rukka, that’s what made the launch meaningful despite the grief surrounding it.
“Seeing [the turnout] tonight, this is what we call a life that continues to have meaning,” she said, “because although [Yaya] has gone, there are legacies, ideas and actions she left behind that we can still benefit from.”
Banner image: The launch of Yaya Leadership Initiative (YLI) in Jakarta on Aug. 14, 2026. YLI was launched in memory of late Indonesian environmental leader Nur Hidayati, who used to lead the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi) from 2016 to 2020. Image by Hans Nicholas Jong/Mongabay.
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Cite this article
Hans Nicholas Jong (2026). New leadership initiative carries on legacy of late Indonesian environmental activist. Mongabay Conservation news. DOI: https://doi.org/10.66709/news-326637
