Engaging Youth in Climate Resilient Education

April 20, 2022, 12:00 PM PDT

For this session, I will speak to my experience as a mother, organizer, and now Executive Director of Mycelium Youth Network (MYN), an organization that actively prepares frontline youth of color for climate change. I will begin by speaking to the failures of conventional schooling to practically prepare our younger generations for the realities of climate change and the socio and emotional impacts that failure has on young people, especially frontline youth who are already experiencing the effects of climate change.

I will share out lessons learned from working at the frontline of climate resilient education across our three programs: climate resilient schools, Youth Leadership Council, and Gaming for Justice. I will speak, in detail, about our work with our Youth Leadership Council that provides youth a paid opportunity to radically transform their schools and communities. I will share out how we were able to create this youth-led community planning process that is building out real infrastructure change at the level of their schools and neighborhoods.

I will end with concrete strategies that planners, government officials, community organizers and educators can use to speak to young people in a way that empowers and supports them without tokenizing them.