Earth Guardians Inc.

Earth Guardians (EG) is an intergenerational organization that trains diverse youth to be influential leaders in the environmental, climate, and social justice movements across the globe - using art, music, storytelling, on-the-ground projects, civic engagement, and direct and legal action to advance solutions to the critical issues we face as a global community. Founded in 1992, the purpose of EG is to form a resilient movement with youth at the forefront by empowering them as leaders and amplifying their impact. We provide youth with the training, tools, and mentorship they need to channel their passions and creativity into advancing social and climate justice.

EG’s foundation is based on centering the experiences, knowledge, and voices of youth and other underserved communities. Our work involves three buckets: youth agency, community engagement, and climate impact. Our theory of change is to promote youth leadership in the environmental movement, especially among marginalized and underserved groups, by utilizing education, training, community building, and direct climate justice action. We aim to center marginalized, tokenized, and underserved communities’ voices, ideas, needs, and efforts in the climate justice movement by providing educational resources, micro-grants, network connections, public speaking opportunities, training, campaigns, partnerships, & mentorship to inspire intergenerational leadership. Through our work, our vision is a global shift towards centering these perspectives as the key to healing the climate and environmental crisis.

Goal One: This is goal #1 because our first priority is to provide our youth with the most current and influential leadership and activism skills needed to succeed.

Goal Two: New programs include our Activist-Certificate program and Earth Voices Inspiring Shift, which deploys 6 of our youth into underserved communities to engage them in community projects.

Goal Three: We plan to focus on programming that is the center of our mission: our Crews. We plan to recruit more and develop new resources to create more impact.

Youth Leadership Empowerment - The Youth we work with through our Crews, Regional Directors, Youth Council, Speakers Bureau, youth Staff, and Indigenous Youth Initiatives - are the heart of our organization and we will put a focus on providing them 4 pieces of training this year aiming to empower them to use their voice, skills and advanced climate justice education in becoming better leaders in environment and climate justice movements. The training we will provide are: a. Youth leadership training b. Initiative Youth Initiative training c. Speakers Bureau training - (targets 20 youth who have been active in our campaigns and show promise in being speakers to promote our work and our mission.) d. Africa/Europe Youth Leadership Boot Camp for our youth leaders across both continents.

In the previous year, we have found ourselves adapting to several external changes. To begin with, having to change our program structure due to the second outbreak of COVID 19. From conducting in-person training to empower our Indigenous Youth, and train our staff - we had to shift with the rest of the world and adapt to provide hybrid training. This was a challenge at first - as from working remotely since the first wave of COVID 19 the in-person training was a place to work, interact and brainstorm on our mission in person. We also found ourselves having to adapt to the visible external movement of encouraging Equity and Diversity in our organizations. This is something that we had already noticed as a gap - running an organization of diverse youth with no one who looks like them or understands their personal struggles leading them. To address this gap we were able to bring on board a new BIPOC Executive Director and Operations Director along with 5 Indigenous Youth leaders. Making our team of 12 be majority diverse and inclusive. On top of this, we took an extra step in ensuring we were living our truth and not only empowering the youth - but also giving them the forum to put their empowerment to use. In the past year, we are proud to have transitioned into a majority youth lead organization - whereby 9 out of our 12 staff are youth.