This article was contributed in support of RHIZE.

Young leaders around the world are taking a stand for access to healthcare and healthy environments. These changemakers are organizing in different ways than ever before, embodying what Rhize—an organization that supports emerging social movements around the world—calls “participatory citizenship.” These leaders are catalyzing change in their immediate communities and around the world, often without the support of civil society institutions.

In their game-changing report, Rhize found that youth are building some the most vibrant solutions to today’s pressing global issues. But there is a growing disconnect between innovative youth leaders and institutions.

By turning to the experiences of four dynamic youth leaders advocating for health, let’s celebrate these youth leaders and learn from their work. These youth leaders are putting participatory citizenship into action and building a healthier world for all of us.

Here are 4 young climate change leaders making an environmental difference. 

Linh Do

Linh is a social change advocate who has been working to connect local stories of climate and environmental issues for the last decade around the world. Linh is founder and editor-in-chief at The Verb, where she works with an international team to globalize and humanize UN issues and campaigns through storytelling, amplifying local issues being tackled through people-powered action to a global audience. She has grown The Verb’s community of writers and readers to over 17 countries.

Through her work founding The Verb, Linh has worked to create a digital platform to make global climate change policies and work more accessible to the public through articles and blog posts. A lot of The Verb’s success is rooted in their ability to engage and represent a variety of perspectives on the platform.

“It’s really interesting to see the cross section of people we’ve brought together. There are definitely people in [our network] who hate one another. But for us it is really cool that we are able to play this convener role and have this one platform that simultaneously represented the World Bank and someone who has been to every WTO protest,” said Doh.

The Verb values engaging diverse perspectives not only on their platform and across their network but also among their staff. Through a decentralized and nonhierarchical approach, Linh has been able to build an organization focused on coaching, empowerment and scaling through distributed leadership. Though she is the editor-in-chief, she has built a culture at The Verb that decreases hierarchy by creating collective ownership so that she and her staff can have open and honest conversations while addressing their breadth of opinions, ideas, and concerns. This has increased their ability to learn from one another and strengthen The Verb overall.

Evan Weber

Evan is  Co-Founder and Executive Director of US Climate Plan, a youth-led network that works to train and support young leaders in the climate justice movement. Through US Climate Plan, he supports networks and bottom-up campaigns by building powerful communities that pressure government to do more on climate issues. He does this through trainings, convergences, supporting on strategy and actions, and connecting people across communities and geographies.

With his work at US Climate Plan, Evan supports networks and bottom-up campaigns building power and putting pressure on governments for climate action. They focus on developing and connecting grassroots leaders for a locally-driven climate change movement. Given their networked approach, Evan thinks about impact in terms of the strength and breadth of youth participation as opposed to measuring return on investment in terms of more traditional metrics. When reflecting on the ways in which US Climate Plan’s nontraditional structure impacted their relationships with partners and funders, Evan said, “Partner organizations and foundations think that this work only happens through extremely measurable outcomes and need certain types of metrics to validate that work. But this is a limited understanding of how change happens. We track impact differently and ask: how many people are we engaging, how is this spreading, what are they learning?” Sometimes it is hard to see the direct impact because, Evan implies, it is hard to measure how individual actions add up collectively. Yet, the change in perception or increased youth agency is essential to sustaining youth led work in order to ultimately achieve these visible wins.

Arno Zimmerman

Arno is the co-founder of Coolar, a venture that develops cooling systems that can work without electricity. Coolar’s technology enables doctors and health professionals throughout the Global South to preserve lifesaving medicine and vaccines in a reliable and eco-friendly way.

David Lawless

David Lawless is an environmentalist, who originally became engaged in his local community. Because of his work, David was accepted into Global Changemakers, an organization that connects local leaders around the world to each other and to needed resources that make their work more impactful. Access to this network of youth leaders has helped David gain more clarity about his personal role and his organization’s niche within a broader, global context while also strengthening his connections more specifically to the global environmental movement. David’s success has been integrally linked to his ability to benefit from existing infrastructure at the national and global level that seeks to connect and engage environmental and climate change leaders.