SOLD OUT – “Choose Us: Youth Climate Strike Demands Solutions and Action Now!”

Join us for a conversation with youth climate leaders, moderated by former Vice President and Climate Reality Project founder Al Gore, to learn how to move their demands forward with the urgency required by the global climate crisis.

We’ll also hear a solutions-based presentation by Dr. Katharine Wilkinson from Project Drawdown based on the book Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming. New York City Council Member Costa Constantinides will join us to highlight local solutions, and Blue Planet Alliance founder Henk Rogers will provide a global outlook. Together we’ll provide the framework for identifying existing solutions and policies that are already working and need to be scaled up quickly.

Sponsored by Blue Planet Alliance and presented in partnership with 350NYC, The Climate Reality Project, Drawdown NYC, and Pachamama Alliance. Participating groups include Fridays for Future, Earth Uprising, Earth Guardians, Sunrise Movement, Zero Hour, Extinction Rebellion Youth US, and more. For more information about the Climate Strike, visit strikewithus.org.

Doors open at 6:50pm.

Featuring:

Former Vice President Al Gore
45th Vice President of the United States
Founder & Chairman, The Climate Reality Project – @climatereality

Former Vice President Gore is the co-founder and chairman of Generation Investment Management, and the founder and chairman of The Climate Reality Project, a nonprofit devoted to solving the climate crisis. He is also a senior partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and a member of Apple Inc.’s board of directors.

Gore was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1976, 1978, 1980, and 1982 and to the U.S. Senate in 1984 and 1990. He was inaugurated as the 45th vice president of the United States on January 20, 1993, and served eight years.

He is the author of the #1 New York Times best-sellers “An Inconvenient Truth” and “The Assault on Reason,” and the best-sellers “Earth in the Balance,” “Our Choice: A Plan To Solve the Climate Crisis,” “The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change,” and most recently, The New York Times best-seller “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.”

He is the subject of the documentary movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” which won two Oscars in 2006 — and a second documentary in 2017, “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.” In 2007, Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for “informing the world of the dangers posed by climate change.”

Sophie Anderson
Co-National Coordinator, Extinction Rebellion Youth US
@xryouthus

Sophie is co-national coordinator of Extinction Rebellion (XR) Youth US. XR Youth US launched in April 2019 and has rapidly spread to over 50+ locations across the country. Extinction Rebellion is a non-partisan international movement that uses non-violent civil disobedience in an attempt to halt mass extinction and minimise the risk of social collapse as a result of climate change. XR’s rapid growth has been propelled by youth activism. Sophie has over ten years of experience in advocacy and activism.

She has done extensive work with Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) to advance toward a cure for Type 1 Diabetes, including meeting with congressional leaders, keynoting at the San Francisco One Walk, fundraising and mobilizing supporters. She is also passionate about social justice work, which has included creating an award winning documentary film titled ‘I am a Girl’ about gender inequity around the world. She has been involved in the climate change movement for five years and co-led a climate change conference in San Francisco this past spring.

Sophie is a junior in high school at the Packer Collegiate Institute, where she is a member of the varsity volleyball team. She recently moved to Brooklyn, NY from San Francisco where she attended the French American International High School.

Xiye Bastida
Earth Guardians
@earthguardianz

Xiye is a teenage climate activist based in New York City and one of the lead organizers of the Fridays For Future youth climate strike movement. For the first climate strike in March, 2019, she mobilized 600 students from her school and has taken a citywide leadership role in organizing climate strikes and speaking out about climate justice issues in rallies and town halls.

Bastida was born and raised in Mexico as part of the Otomi-Toltec indigenous peoples. She sits on the administration committee of the Peoples Climate Movement, where she brings the voice of youth to existing grassroots and climate organizations.

Bastida launched a youth activism training program to expand the climate justice movement and is a member of Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion. In 2018, she was invited to the 9th United Nations World Urban Forum to speak about indigenous cosmology. She received the “Spirit of the UN” award in 2018.

Naomi Hollard
Sunrise Movement Fellow
@sunrisemvmnt

Naomi is a Franco-Caribbean organizer based in Philadelphia, PA. She graduated this year from Columbia University majoring in Neuroscience and Behavior. Naomi led out neuroscientific research all four years of college. Her fourth year, moved by Sunrise Movement’s powerful sit in November 2018 for the Green New Deal and scared that another destructive hurricane, fueled by climate change, could hit her family who live on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, Naomi started organizing through Sunrise Movement to stop climate change and create good jobs for ALL people.

In November and December 2018, Naomi organized office visits at Congressman Nadler’s office for the Green New Deal, and January 2019, she founded the Sunrise Columbia hub. She recruited over 300 members and organized 50 active members over the course of the spring semester. On March 15th, she organized a Climate Strike through Sunrise Columbia which hundreds of people attended and which hosted the governor of Washington Jay Inslee. She was interviewed by Columbia Spectator, the New Yorker, MTV, and the Years Project.

In May 2019, she helped officially recognize Sunrise Columbia as a Columbia University student group. She continues to work with Sunrise Columbia. Naomi is now a Sunrise Movement Fellow who leads out trainings throughout the US to help the youth become more effective at leading out actions and organizing for the Green New Deal.

Jamie Margolin
Founder & Co-Executive Director, Zero Hour
@thisiszerohour

Jamie is a 17-year-old Colombian-American writer, community organizer, activist & public speaker. She is the founder and co-executive director of an international youth climate justice movement called Zero Hour that lead the very first “Youth Climate March” in Washington DC and 25+ cities all around the world during the summer of 2018.

She is also a plaintiff on Our Children’s Trusts’ Youth v. Gov Washington state lawsuit, suing the state of Washington for denying her generation’s constitutional rights to a livable environment by continuing to make climate change worse, and she is a climate justice organizer in her local Seattle community. Her debut book, “Youth To Power: Your Voice and How To Use It”, is hitting bookstores worldwide in 2020

Alexandria Villaseñor
Earth Uprising
@earth_uprising

A 7th grader who — frustrated by the lack of progress of the UN Climate Change Conference in Poland, and inspired by 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, Alexandria — became a national and international organizer for the first-ever global youth climate strike on March 15, 2019, mobilizing nearly 2,000 youths from 123 countries to demand climate action from their world leaders.

Alexandria was awarded the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival’s “Disruptor” Award and The Common Good Foundation’s Changemaker Scholarship and is on Politico’s list of the top 100 people influential in climate change policy. Alexandria continues in her role as a prominent climate strike organizer, and is working to bring accurate climate science and climate change education into K-12 schools.

Dr. Katharine Wilkinson
Vice President of Communication & Engagement at Project Drawdown
Senior Writer for the New York Times bestseller Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming.

Dr. Wilkinson is an author, strategist, and teacher, working to heal the planet we call home. Her first book, Between God & Green: How Evangelicals Are Cultivating a Middle Ground on Climate Change, was dubbed “a vitally important, even subversive, story” by The Boston Globe.

Katharine speaks internationally, sharing her expertise at Aspen Ideas, Skoll World Forum, Talks @ Google, TED Women, and through frequent media appearances. Her TED Talk on gender equity and global warming has more than 1.3 million views, and her writing has been published by BBC, CNN, and USA Today, among others. In 2019, Planned Parenthood honored Katharine as a “Legend in the Making.”

Katharine’s interdisciplinary background spans academia, business, and the social sector. Previously, she was Director of Strategy at the purpose consultancy BrightHouse and worked for The Boston Consulting Group and Natural Resources Defense Council. Katharine has taught at the University of Oxford and Agnes Scott College. She currently advises on Mary Robinson’s feminist climate podcast, Mothers of Invention, and serves on the boards of WildArk and Chattahoochee NOW.

Katharine holds a doctorate in Geography & Environment from Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and a B.A. in Religion from Sewanee—The University of the South. She is happiest on a mountain or a horse. Her website is www.kkwilkinson.com.

Costa Constantinides
New York City Council Member, 22nd District
Chair, Environmental Protection Committee

Council Member Constantinides represents the New York City Council’s 22nd District, which includes his native Astoria along with parts of Jackson Heights, Woodside, and East Elmhurst. He serves as chair of the Council’s Environmental Protection Committee and sits on six additional committees: Civil Service & Labor, Contracts, Cultural Affairs, Oversight & Investigations, Sanitation, and Transportation. Environmental policy has been a priority for Costa. The Council unanimously passed his bill to reduce carbon emissions 80% by 2050, now Local Law 66 of 2014. To help achieve this, Costa has sponsored additional legislation to encourage more use of solar, wind, geothermal, and biofuels.

Henk Rogers
Founder, Blue Planet Alliance

Henk Rogers is one of the world’s leading advocates and activists for reducing, and eventually eliminating, humankind’s dependence on fossil fuel. He is the founder, visionary and chairman of the board at Blue Planet Foundation, whose tireless efforts helped pave the way for Hawaii to enact a policy that calls for electric utilities throughout the state to rely on 100% renewable energy by 2045.

Henk is also the founder and chief executive officer of Blue Planet Energy, one of the leading providers of energy storage systems (i.e., batteries) that power homes, businesses and utility grids. The company’s innovative technology is advancing the safety, reliability and energy output of battery systems.

Henk is also the founder and president of Blue Planet Research, a private research laboratory that has designed and built off-grid renewable energy infrastructures, Blue Ion energy storage systems, HI-SEAS Mars/Moon habitats and hydrogen production systems.

He is now focusing beyond Hawaii to help others enact mandates for 100% renewable energy in their regions. He has spoken at three Inter-Parliamentary Union assemblies, where he collaborated with the 178 member countries to draft an emergency climate change resolution.

His newest initiative, Blue Planet Alliance, takes a “mandate first” approach to initiate global climate change action. The Alliance aims to create measurable and scalable results among individuals, organizations, cities, states, countries and eventually, the world.

Prior to focusing on environmental protection, Henk was a pioneer in Japan’s fledgling computer game industry and developed the Black Onyx, the first role-playing game in Japan. He is perhaps best known to mainstream video game enthusiasts as the founder and chief executive officer of Blue Planet Software, which manages the worldwide rights to Tetris, one of the most popular video games in history.