About the Event
We start the online event with author Naomi Klein speaking about her new Young Reader book, "How To Change Everything: a Young Person's Guide to Protecting the Earth and Each Other"; we will have a Q&A format so that Bay Area Youth ask questions of this global researcher and movement leader.
Then we host a panel of already-active youth who are addressing the climate crisis. You will learn what they do and how we can begin to fix this problem. You will learn how you can get active and what steps you can take. The last session gives you time to work with other Youth on a new or existing project or campaign. Let's work together towards building a better world.
Schedule
10:00 - 10:10 Commemorate: Opening & land aknowledgment
10:10 - 10:40 Inspire: Naomi Klein Q&A on How to Change Everything
10:50 - 11:35 Empower: Panel of youth groups
11:45 - 12:30 Conspire: Join an affinity group or working group
12:30-12:45 Commit: Report back, commit to further action and closing
About Naomi Klein
NAOMI KLEIN is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist and author of the international bestsellers, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate (2014), The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007) and No Logo (2000).
This Changes Everything was an instant New York Times bestseller and is being translated into over 25 languages. Nominated for multiple awards, it won the 2014 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. The documentary inspired by the book, and directed by Avi Lewis, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2015.
Since This Changes Everything was published, Klein’s primary focus has been on putting its ideas into action. She is one of the organizers and authors of Canada's Leap Manifesto, a blueprint for a rapid and justice-based transition off fossil fuels. The Leap has been endorsed by over 200 organizations, tens of thousands of individuals, and has inspired similar climate justice initiatives around the world.
In November 2016 she was awarded Australia’s prestigious Sydney Peace Prize, for, according to the prize jury, “exposing the structural causes and responsibility for the climate crisis, for inspiring us to stand up locally, nationally and internationally to demand a new agenda for sharing the planet that respects human rights and equality, and for reminding us of the power of authentic democracy to achieve transformative change and justice.”
Klein is a member of the board of directors for climate-action group 350.org. In 2015, she was invited to speak at the Vatican to help launch Pope Francis’s historic encyclical on ecology, Laudato si’.
In 2017, Klein became Senior Correspondent for The Intercept. She is also a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute and contributor to the Nation Magazine. Recent articles have also appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, the London Review of Books and Le Monde.
She has multiple honourary degrees and in 2014 received the International Studies Association’s IPE Outstanding Activist-Scholar award.
In June 2017, she will be releasing a new book called No is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need.
About Youth Vs. Apocalypse
Youth Vs. Apocalypse is a diverse group of young climate justice activists working together to lift the voices of youth, in particular youth of color and working class youth. Their collective action aims to fight for a livable climate and an equitable, sustainable, and just world.
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YVA started as a group of Oakland youth, supported by adults in their community, using direct action and lobbying to fight a proposed coal terminal in their city, then expanded its focus to other climate justice issues. After a video with youth from YVA pushing Senator Feinstein to support the Green New Deal went viral, YVA students organized press conferences, gave interviews, wrote Op Eds, and developed a website. By September 2019, YVA organized a crowd of 30,000, after working as a group to develop an intersectional set of targets and demands, organizing transportation for thousands of students from around the Bay Area, and connecting with dozens of labor and community groups, many of whom took climate action for the first time. YVA youth have supported climate actions across the state, taken leadership on local and statewide campaigns, and continued their presence in national media. YVA was recently named by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as one of (and the only youth-led) the YBCA 100. YVA is now a local group of young people who are impacting national conversations on climate.
About the Alliance for Climate Education
ACE is America's leading education and advocacy organization for young people. Their programs have given millions of students the information they need to step up and take action. And their nationwide action network brings hundreds of thousands of climate activists together to fight for the future.
