Teenagers in the U.S. are mobilizing and using advocacy tools at the grassroots level as part of a global movement to fight climate change.
How can young people join the movement to combat climate change?
Niharika Bhavsar, a recent graduate from The Blake School in Minnesota and The School for Ethics and Global Leadership at the African Leadership Academy, addresses this question in our latest episode of The Kids Are Alright podcast.
Reporting from Minnesota in the United States, Bhavsar speaks to activists Sweta Srinivasan and Lia Harel on how they became aware of the climate change movement at a young age, how they joined the movement and how they are working to improve people’s lives.
Bhavsar also discusses how to promote sustainable practices using social media and the other techniques.
Harel says she decided to join the fight against climate change because she was “seeing all these young people inspired to take action and take hold of a future that they want and make it something that is not what is currently on the horizon.”
Supporting the climate movement
Srinivasan, 17 and from the U.S. state of Florida, founded Girls for Science, an environmental organization. Harel, a 19-year-old from Minnesota, is a student analyst at the Roberts Environmental Center at Claremont Mckenna College and a former member of the Minnetonka Climate Initiative.
An avid beekeeper, Bhavsar has supported environmentalist initiatives at the local and national level in the United States. She has written for The Circle, a monthly newspaper covering American Indian news, arts, and culture in Minnesota, and Unite the World, an initiative launched in 2016 in Tunisia that aims to coach leadership skills by getting teenagers involved in promoting peace and tolerance.
(Podcast editing by Mollie Davidson and News Decoder partners Podium.me)
Tendayi Chirawu is News Decoder’s Communications and School Engagement Manager. A citizen of Zimbabwe, Zambia and Namibia, she has a masters degree in Global Communication & Civil Society from the American University of Paris. She joined News Decoder in July and has experience working for non-profit and for-profit organizations in Africa, Asia and Europe. Chirawu is a published author and has written for international news publications.
