Youth Climate Action Shines at the MOST Awards

A few weeks ago, the Madison-area Out-of-School Time (MOST) initiative held its annual conference honoring the accomplishments of Madison area youth and the incredible workers who support them. Nearly 400 people from 70 different community-based organizations attended 30+ workshops detailing the complex and highly skilled work of supporting youth development from kindergarten through high school. It made me proud to know that the City of Madison supported over 12,000 youth and 1.5 million hours of programming last year in collaboration with the Madison Metropolitan School District. I want to give a special shout out to one of the sessions related to empowering youth to address climate change through their own methods.

The By Youth For Youth (BYFY) program provides high-school aged youth with funding they can grant to youth led projects throughout Dane County. The youth leaders on the committee develop funding priorities, issue a Request for Proposals, and review projects submitted to them for potential funding. All projects funded must be youth serving. The deliberations required of the BYFY committee members to accomplish these tasks teaches them communication skills and gives them experience as community leaders and decision-makers, setting them up for great success in the future.

This summer, a subset of youth from the BYFY program, the Youth Climate Action Interns, applied and were selected to participate in a special program. The City applied for and received funding from Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation and United Cities and Local Governments to fund youth led projects aimed at mitigating and adapting to climate change. BYFY was chosen as the sub-grantor of the funds. The youth were tasked with distributing the funding in the manner typical of BYFY, with the caveat that the funding priorities were to be related to the City of Madison Sustainability Plan and that they would receive instruction from experts on how to assess projects’ abilities to solve climate related problems. We recently posted the projects they funded here. 

When I first announced this project, I was excited just to hear about the possibilities and the projects, which I thought would be mostly educational. I was impressed to hear from my staff that the BYFY Youth Climate Action interns had requested that the City become even more involved with communicating our Climate priorities to school aged children. Their poised deliberation and commitment to fairness promoted an air of unity at their grantee awards ceremony and learning session at the MOST conference. Not only that, but the projects they funded were almost all both educational and operational at the same time - from reducing waste, to ecological restoration, to promoting a green economy, to establishing a renewable energy powered charging station at a little free library! I’m sending  congratulations to the youth climate action interns and to all the awardees! I’m proud that Madison is part of this Youth Climate Action work, and inspired by all the youth who are involved.