Charles Orgbon III: How young people can change the world

My school had a service requirement. I was looking for, as a fifth grader, the easiest thing I could find and [picking up] litter around my school campus was just that. It got me wondering, “Why would someone destroy our planet?” I started a website to talk about this stuff. And then I questioned, “Why can’t young people all across the country have schools that support their environmental efforts? And what kind of change can we create about these issues when young people are involved?” So I developed training resources to help young people see how they could start their own environmental campaigns. Soon I realized that teachers and school administrations are not always ready for what the students present to them, so I have to talk to adults about what it means to work with students, too. So, I actually train adults just as much as I train students nowadays.

It helps young people walk through the process of taking an inventory of themselves and their community and work with a team of their peers to figure out how community weaknesses can be addressed. Then, they take a step back and ask, “Which of these projects could we actually create meaningful change around? What would be an action plan around one potential project? What is the cost, and what will be the steps within that step? Who are we going to involve, and who is able to even address this problem?” And in the end, reflecting on what went well. How can we pass along the work and how can we make it sustainable so that the project continues? How can we train other young people to do what we did, and learn from our mistakes?

The organization that existed in 2008 has evolved into an organization that’s global, an organization that’s engaging more young people. We’ve funded over 50 youth groups and given away over $78,000 in grants to spark youth-inspired ideas about environmental issues. We’ve also planned our own five international conferences and helped fund and develop numerous other national conferences here in the United States.

The organizations in my community that I’ve been on the boards of always want more partnerships, more money, more resources. And I think that can be a really dangerous cycle to give in to instead of just working with what we have now. Because this is what I’ve learned: Working with what I have now frees up so much more space for me to do things more effectively with the things that I do have. Instead of thinking about all of the things that I don’t have in order to get this work done, being resourceful with what I do have is so much more efficient use of my time.

Within our organization, absolutely not, but I think that the environmental movement doesn’t get it and that there’s not a lot of investment around diversity. One of our former vice presidents, Ann-Marie Alcántara, wrote “The End of Exclusive Environmentalism,” an Ensia article. Ann-Marie brilliantly ended that we need to engage young people at meaningful levels of organization and do that in a way that doesn’t involve manipulation, doesn’t involve tokenism, and provides plenty of opportunity, because young people today are more multicultural than they have ever been before in history.

Dr. Dorceta Taylor’s research showed us that one-third of mainstream nonprofit environmental organizations and one-tenth of government environmental organizations have no people of color on staff. When we engage young people in a substantive way within the environmental movement, we should inherently alter these multicultural deficits.

When President-elect Donald Trump accepted his win, he had at his side his son. I would want to know what kind of world he’d want to create for his son. And I’d want to know if he’d be interested in seeing and talking to the communities that are being impacted by climate change. And the cost to national security. The reality is that many of our military bases are built near coastal areas that could be underwater because of climate change. Some naval equipment is becoming futile because of changes in ocean salinity. Bridges are going underwater because tidal areas are having higher tides than they used to, so the Department of Transportation needs to be involved. It’s just so incredible when we think about the massive threat to our infrastructure that climate change poses. It has a real cost to our country and President Obama was the first president to call this a national security issue, and I think it’s very accurately so.

We can’t give up hope. Our planet is facing some equation of mitigation, adaptation and human suffering related to climate change. The human suffering we will face will be some function of how willing we are to actually implement climate mitigation and adaptation strategies. As I visit our globe’s Arctic region, I realized that we’ve reached a point beyond “stopping climate change.” Climate change is here, and we must work together to curb its impacts. We have no choice but to be hopeful. The other options are not really pleasant.