Inconvenient Youth: Teens Expand Al Gore’s Climate Project
NASHVILLE, Tennessee, April 20, 2010 (ENS) – Teens who want to fight climate change now have a place to share their pledges, actions and ideas.
Inconvenient Youth, the new teen climate education initiative of The Climate Project, a program of Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, will launch on Earth Day, April 22 with a website, www.inconvenientyouth.org.
The Climate Project was launched in 2006 to train 1,000 people to give Gore’s talk from the Oscar-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”
Inconvenient Youth will enable five teens to participate in The Climate Project’s upcoming training with the Nobel Prize winning former vice president, to be held in June.
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Former Vice President Al Gore with teenagers at an ice rink in New York City (Photo by Tagai Mentorship Program) |
“Inconvenient Youth is built on the belief that teens can help lead efforts to solve the climate crisis,” said Gore. “It will give this generation – which has a unique stake in this issue – a chance to organize and exchange ideas with other young people who want to do their part to address the climate crisis.”
“Perhaps most importantly, this initiative was inspired by youth and shaped by youth with their unique viewpoint guiding it forward,” Gore said.
The Inconvenient Youth initiative dovetails with the Alliance’s Repower America “youth surge” campaign to organize students on college campuses across the country.
“It’s not a website; it’s a community,” explained Inconvenient Youth Manager Sam Davidson. “We are building a community – a place where people engage, encourage and empower one another to take action. We’re not broadcasting ‘green tips’ from on high; we’re creating a space where teens can share their ideas and their solutions.”
Teenagers who are ready to have an immediate impact in their communities can visit Inconvenient Youth’s website between April 22 and May 15, 2010 and apply to be personally taught by Gore at The Climate Project’s next training session.
Teen applicants will go through a committee review process. Those selected will become official Climate Project presenters who will deliver a new slide show to their local communities based on Gore’s latest book, “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.”
“The ultimate goal of Inconvenient Youth, at least for me, is to provide ideas and to consciously act on those ideas, while pursuing efforts that make obstacles entirely irrelevant,” said Shilpi Misra, a member of the teen advisory board, called the Super Youth, which helps shape the direction of the youth community.
Inconvenient Youth began as an effort by Mary Doerr, who as a 16-year-old presenter for The Climate Project, wanted to connect her own age group with the urgency of doing something about climate change.
Doerr adapted The Climate Project slideshow for a youth audience and toured the country to deliver a customized youth talk to students. Inconvenient Youth is an outgrowth of those talks.
The Climate Project now has eight international branches with more than 3,000 presenters worldwide. In March 2010, The Climate Project became a program of The Alliance for Climate Protection, which also runs the Repower America campaign.
The mission of the Alliance for Climate Protection is to educate the public about the harmful effects of climate change and to work toward solutions at a grassroots level worldwide. Official Climate Project branches are located in the United States, Australia, Canada, India, Spain, the United Kingdom, Indonesia and Mexico.
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