Youth Advocacy Program | Uplifting the voices of the future
The Sierra Club of Hawaiʻi’s Youth Program is committed to developing future leaders calling for equity, justice, and liberation of our people and our environment. Through cultivating youth activists to learn the tools of advocacy to create systemic change, we aim to build relationships with and among like-minded youth across Hawai’i. A major component of our work is to meet youth where their passions lie in their community, centering youth-led visions for systemic solutions and collective action in the campaigns they participate in.
We provide grassroots organizing training, strategic storytelling skills, leadership development, and campaign support to 14-28 year olds, with intentional work in working class BIPOC communities. This takes the form of activities including but not limited to: in-person training, peer-to-peer coaching, campaign support, organizational networking and relationship building, and organizing events locally.
Change in action—
Just Transition Labs
A series of youth-led forums to engage in building a collective vision for a transition from an extractive, exploitive, fossil fuel dependent economy to a regenerative, justice-centered, economy that honors traditional knowledge to restore our relationships with one another and our ecological systems. Narratives and activities will be focused on Hawaiian knowledge and place-based solutions, youth empowerment, mutual learning, and aligning our vision for collective change. Our goal is to uplift youth voices within each ahupuaʻa so that their concerns and solutions are heard in decision making whether through media or policy. JTL’s are an incubator for mutual learning, transformative narratives, and community building.
Youth Energy Justice Colloquium Series
A monthly series of interactive forums for high school, college, and university students to help foster an understanding how our energy system works, creative problem solving and building a movement for a just transition to a clean energy future.
Each month, subject matter experts and frontline community members come together with youth activists to share their lived experiences in energy injustice, past and present. Each forum incorporates an action that participants can take on the issue discussed and build grassroots power.
Hoʻohuli
A web-based voter guide, created by students in the 2020 election cycle, to underline candidates’ statements on the issues that matter most to them and encourage voters to vote with values, not name recognition. Following the election, youth can use this guide to follow the newly elected candidates’ work and hold them accountable to their issue statements. The voter guide was an outcome of the Community Change Forums you’ll find below.
Flip the Script: Inclusive Justice
In response to the inspiring work of the Black Lives Matter movement’s growing activism, especially among youth, we created a space to bring together Oʻahu-based youth and community leaders to discuss the histories and experiences of systemic racism, white supremacy, and colonialism in Hawaiʻi. It is a critical space where youth can connect racial justice and economic justice to the issues they care about.
We know this is just a starting point, but it is an important pathway to better understand the full scope of equity issues for community-resilience advocacy. This interview series is also an outcome of the Community Change Forums.
Community Change Forums
Conversations are a catalyst for change. The Community Change Forums are a space for youth to listen and learn from one another on issues they care about. At the beginning of every session we discuss the meanings of justice, equity, and liberation.
The goal is to build a baseline of understanding about what it means to be an organizer in your community—taking action with friends and family to change your school, campus, or city which leads to opportunities to co-create solutions, whether it be through institutional change and/or policy advocacy.
EJ Reels Camp for Girls 2020
The Reel Camps for Girls with the Hawaiʻi Women in Filmmaking “is a creative space where girls unleash their creativity, build confidence, and initiate a long-term individual transformational journey from passive recipients, to active makers of their own stories.”
We participated in a weeklong camp to discuss local and global environmental injustices, decolonization frameworks, systemic change, and circular economies. Everyday the girls were exposed to different issues to inspire their content and bring their passions alive through filmmaking mentorship. One thing was made clear in this camp, youth care deeply about their future and want to create solutions to protect our collective wellbeing. Follow their day by day accounts of the camp here.
(Virtual) EJ Tours
Seeing is believing. This initiative is a way to uplift the people and places behind an issue. In partnership with Hawaiʻi Women in Filmmaking, participants get training in filmmaking and environmental justice advocacy.
This initiative is an adaptation from our in-person environmental justice tours that have historically been done in and with communities on Oʻahu. We still do the EJ tours, but we are living in a digital world and adapting more and more each day to using multimedia to educate.