Young Leaders, We See You!

“I LOVE TO SEE what young people can do before someone old tells them it’s impossible.”

This pithy quip by David Brower, the legendary environmentalist and founder of Earth Island Institute, probably best embodies the spirit underpinning the New Leaders Initiative’s Brower Youth Awards (BYA), which turns 25 this year.

“Earth Island’s roots have grown all over the place since the first BYA, taking on new dimensions and that’s all amazing evolution and progress … but that essential spirit of recognizing a young person’s efforts, [of telling them]: We see you! You are doing good. Keep doing it! that hasn’t changed, and that has its roots in David Brower,” says Ariana Katovich, who at age 22 was among the first persons to win the award.

Indeed, Brower recognized early on that youth look at the world through a lens yet unfiltered by the slings and arrows of life that wear down adults, that the vim and vigor they bring to causes can energize movements and engender lasting change.

But he was also keenly aware that young people were, more often than not, left out of critical conversations on the environment and even their own future thriving in this world. Which is why one of his last wishes was that Earth Island use funds from his 1998 Blue Planet Prize to create a platform that would elevate youth voices and give them a fighting chance to get a seat at the table.

Set up in 2000, as the 88-year-old activist was battling cancer, the Brower Youth Awards does that every year by recognizing the outstanding leadership efforts of six young leaders, ages 13 to 23, across North America who are working in myriad, creative ways to protect our shared planet and its people.

“It was a really powerful endorsement for someone who was just starting in their career,” recalls Katovich, who was recognized for creating the Shoreline Preservation Fund, a ballot initiative for the students at University of California, Santa Barbara. She received the award along with the first cohort of young leaders at a small ceremony in San Francisco in October 2000, just a month before Brower passed away. “I think it was validation that I was really on the right track,” says the now executive director of the Santa Barbara Wildlife Care Network and Earth Island board member.

Over the past quarter century, the Brower Youth Award has been given to 147 young activists for creating, organizing, and implementing projects or campaigns around wildlife habitat protection, college fossil fuel divestment, clean energy initiatives, protecting Indigenous lands, fighting toxic pollution, advocating for public transit, and more. The hallmark of BYA is the rigorous search and selection process run by Earth Island’s New Leaders Initiative program, which is deeply committed to elevating voices from diverse backgrounds and building leadership.

Reading through the applications offers so much hope for the future, says Danny Thiemann, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, who has been on the finalists’ selection panel several times. “Poetry is often described as an exercise in defending what’s worth noticing,” he says. “There’s poetry, I guess, in what they are doing,”

It definitely gives Earth Island great joy to see how many BYA winners have since pressed on with their efforts to build a better, more just world.

A small sampling: Deland Chan (BYA 2001), who won the award for undertaking the restoration of the Native Species Garden in the last nine acres of natural forest in Manhattan, now works in San Francisco’s Chinatown, empowering community members to have a say in shaping their urban environment in ways that are ecologically sound; Shadia Fayne Wood (BYA 2004), who won for her relentless lobbying to pass legislation to refinance New York’s Superfund program, is now founder and executive producer of the Survival Media Agency, a team of global media-makers that “creates powerful stories about the most important issues of our time”; De’Anthony Jones (BYA 2010), who was awarded for his efforts to engage youth of color in the environmental movement through community learning, environmental service, and teacher-student partnerships, now works at the San Francisco Human Rights Commission; Alex Freid (BYA 2013), who co-founded Post-Landfill Action Network (PLAN) to help students set up programs to reduce campus waste, is now director of PLAN’s Atlas Zero Waste project, which empowers young leaders to help their campuses establish zero waste commitments; Chloe Maxmin, (BYA 2013), who was instrumental in getting Harvard University to divest from fossil fuels, went on to serve as the youngest woman in the Maine legislature and co-found Dirtroad Organizing, which supports activists and legislators working to bring “equitable and just democracy” to rural America.

While not every winner has stuck to the environmental field, most of them say that the recognition helped strengthen their faith in themselves. That’s true of Rachel Barge (BYA 2007), who now runs LeapGrow, a collective of expert growth marketing consultants. Barge says winning the award helped her grow her network and recognize her entrepreneurial mindset. (Barge won for co-creating The Green Initiative Fund, which has since provided more than $3 million funding, via grants, for projects that improve and support University of California Berkeley’s campus sustainability efforts.)

“I think it’s also a lot about the connections and the doors that are opened because of the award,” says Jessian Choy (BYA 2002), who is also an Earth Island board member now. “I don’t think I’d be where I am today if it weren’t for BYA,” says Choy, who won for founding the Student Environmental Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She now writes Sierra magazine’s Ask Ms. Green column and is a trauma therapy and healing consultant. “The beauty of the BYA [alumni] is that we may be doing something different but we are all working with the same goal – creating a better world.”

Thinking around what that work means has evolved since the award was created. After all, as Katovich notes, a lot has changed in the world in the past 25 years. Among other things, the mainstream environmental movement has broadened in its scope from being mostly about reducing pollution and preserving open spaces to acknowledging what was long evident to many — that the natural world isn’t a thing apart from the human world, that protecting this planet also means upholding the rights of its people. And climate chaos, the catchall crisis of our times, has by-and-large become the central focus of the movement.

These changes are reflected, in fact were anticipated, by young green activists who are increasingly turning their attention to intersectional issues such as disaster preparedness (Hamid Torabzadeh, BYA 2022), getting Black and Brown girls outdoors (Riya Chandra, BYA 2023), transit justice (Peter Pham, BYA 2021), and holding Canada accountable for its role in the climate crisis (Haana Edenshaw, BYA 2020). Young people are also finding more and more ways to reach us through sophisticated use of technology, social media, and other communications channels, observes Susan Kamprath, Earth Island’s director of operations who has been with the institute for over 25 years and has witnessed the shift firsthand. “But no matter what tools they have had now or in the past, they are always remarkably creative,” she says.

New Leaders’ Initiative has been responsive to these trends in youth advocacy, making sure that young activists’ work is not only recognized, but also that they receive the support they need to keep on. NLI does this via a week-long leadership camp ahead of the fall awards gala, offering awardees capacity-building trainings as well as time together to share ideas and create bonds that will sustain them in years to come.

Learn more about this Earth Island program at broweryouthawards.org.

“Every year I think about what are the most relevant skills that a young person can learn, so every year there’s new training added in response to their needs,” says NLI Director Mona Shomali, who has been directing the program since 2017. “For example, this year we have added a panel on ecoanxiety for the first time because enough winners in recent years have told me about their ecoanxiety … We are also having a city councilwoman give a talk [on politics and policymaking] because so many youth are now trying to influence government processes, whether it’s by drafting bills or running for office.”

For Shomali, the leadership week, where she gets to spend quality time with the winners, is the best part of the job. “I feel like I really learn a lot from them,” she says.

That focus on learning from young minds is what will continue to keep BYA relevant in the years ahead, says Earth Island’s CEO Sumona Majumdar. “Not just in the environmental movement, but in the social justice sphere too, we need to be centering the voices of those impacted the most, and not only are young people among impacted communities, they also have innovative solutions and important perspectives to share … We feel privileged to have been able to bring together and listen to more than 140 young leaders over all these years.”

Joanne Yen, 2023 communications intern, contributed to this report