Earth Island Institute’s New Leaders Initiative recognizes six young changemakers from North America every year for their outstanding efforts to promote ecological sustainability and environmental justice. Here are the recipients of the 2024 Brower Youth Awards.
As an asylum seeker from Burkina Faso, Raina Maiga has firsthand experience with how people often feel they have no power to influence policy decisions. Which is why she works to ensure that young people’s voices are included in the legislative process.
Maiga is the executive director and director of legislative affairs for Confront the Climate Crisis, a youth-led organization focused on environmental issues in Indiana. Under her leadership, the organization cowrote and lobbied for two state bills in 2022 and 2023 aimed at creating a statewide climate-solutions task force that would help develop a climate action plan for Indiana. The organization also held annual events at the Statehouse in Indianapolis to educate young people, especially from minority communities, and facilitate discussions with legislators. Additionally, Maiga helped secure $20,000 in yearly grants to support high school students’ participation in these events. Confront the Climate Crisis also supports student efforts to connect with their city councils to enact local climate resolutions.
In 2022, Asa Miller, an aspiring marine biologist with deep roots in Cuba, first read about efforts to restore coral in the country’s Matanzas Province. While coral loss is a global crisis, developing countries like Cuba are disproportionately affected and often lack the resources to address it. In 2023, Miller launched ¡Viva el Vivero!, (Long Live the Nursery!), an international campaign to help restore Cuba’s stunning coral reefs.
Over a series of visits to Matanzas, Miller conducted extensive interviews with divers and scientists to document their efforts, helped analyze data to determine which of their coral nurseries had the highest survival rates, and drafted detailed maps of the restoration project. Back in New York, he founded a marine biology club in his high school to help raise funds to purchase tools to plant coral fragments grown in the nurseries back into reefs. Miller then produced a short documentary about his team’s restoration methods to serve as a primer for other developing countries interested in doing the same. The film won awards at film festivals worldwide.
Learn more at broweryouthawards.org.
Yuki Qian lives in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area, a region that, due to its geography and history with steel mills, has extremely high levels of radon, a colorless, odorless, radioactive gas that is responsible for 21,000 deaths a year in the United States. Many of these deaths could easily be prevented if adequate awareness and mitigation measures were implemented.
Qian grew up in a family where home renovations for health were not always financially feasible, so she understands how gaps in policy and resource distribution can impact public health. In 2023, with support from Youth Climate Advocacy Committee at the Pittsburgh Phipps Conservatory, Qian founded RadONRadOFF, a project that distributes free radon test kits, information about low-cost remediation methods, and safety education to local communities, especially in lower-income and highly impacted areas. Additionally, Qian is also working with state officials to pass radon-mitigation policies that will help close this public-health and environmental-disparity gap.
Vishruth Dinesh wanted to get involved in climate activism when he was eight years old. But whenever he asked adults what he could do he was given suggestions like buy an electric car, which small children and teenagers, who make up the majority of the global population, cannot implement.
So, in late 2022, Dinesh created The Green Therapy, a grassroots organization dedicated to anchoring young people in the climate movement via sustainable gardening, which not only helps reduce food waste, preserve native biodiversity, and combat pollution, but is also affordable and universally accessible.
The Green Therapy works directly with schools, helping them set up garden-based educational programs that pave a path for youth to become rooted in nature. Currently, the nonprofit is actively collaborating with 14 schools all across the San Francisco Bay Area. It has worked with and equipped thousands of students with the knowledge and skillset to protect the health of the planet by practicing sustainable, native-friendly gardening at and beyond the school environment.
As an artist, Austin Picinich believes that when combined with a community-focused purpose, art can have a much larger impact and inspire others to make a difference. In 2021, Picinich created Save Our Salmon through Art (SOS), a nonprofit that creates public arts projects to educate, engage, and empower communities to be better stewards of local streams. Picinich’s campaign was inspired in part by Juanita Creek, a stream less than a minute from his home where only three salmon returned to spawn in 2021.
As part of this work, Picinich hosts interactive mural painting events. He designs, outlines, and color-codes salmon-themed murals onto blank walls. Then, during “SOS Community Days,” volunteers work with attendees, who each get their brush and cup of paint, to complete the mural. So far, Picinich has led nearly 750 volunteer painters in the Greater Seattle area. The events have had over 3,000 attendees and raised more than $28,000 for stream restoration.
Amelia Southern-Uribe grew up in the US South, in communities that were at increased environmental risk. Living in these places helped them recognize early on that environmental justice is connected to the liberation of people of color, queer people, and other marginalized communities.
In 2019, Southern-Uribe founded the first Arkansas chapter of Zero Hour, an organization dedicated to environmental justice. The chapter, in Fayetteville, inspired more nearby chapters, putting Arkansas on the map for Southern climate activists.
Southern-Uribe wanted to do more to combat Arkansas’s low rankings in education (49th in the nation), knowing that racism and environmental neglect are exacerbated by the educational disparities faced by youth in marginalized communities. So, in 2022, they co-founded Roots magazine, which disseminates regional and generational environmental knowledge and amplifies the voices of bipoc Southerners. Roots also provides free art supplies to writers and artists and distributes free copies of the magazine to students, changemakers, and community members across the state.
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