“Our planet and youth are telling us the same story. Vital connections have been severed between human beings and nature: within nature itself; and between people, religions, governments, and commerce. This disconnection is the origin of the climate crisis, it is the very root – and it is where we discover solutions and actions that can engage all people, regardless of income, race, gender, or belief. We live on a dying planet … If putting the future of life at the heart of everything we do is not central to our purpose and destiny, why are we here?” - Paul Hawken (Regeneration)
The intertwined social and environmental polycrisis is catalyzing two very different reactions among youth: one highly destructive, the other, its opposite! The existential threat of runaway climate change and ecological collapse, coupled with chronic poverty, injustice, and societal disregard, fuel fear, anger, and disengagement and outlash, resulting in a panoply of adverse educational and societal outcomes (APA, pg 6). At the same time, these stresses have catalyzed a robust, global, and highly diverse youth climate justice movement that has persisted against all odds, even despite global pandemic.
How can we as educators catalyze that positive transformation in our students: from traumatized and troubled to irrepressibly engaged – in learning, in the common good, in shaping our positive future? How do we help each student find their essential niche in this process? How do we create the next generation of justice-centered, science-grounded climate solutionaries – and how do we do so quickly in crisis conditions?
CELI partners participate intensively throughout the year in a networked improvement community, using an improvement-science approach to achieve the following objectives:
How does the CELI NIC do this? By:
The magnitude of our intertwined climate and justice polycrisis demands that we prepare our students for harsh realities – because our students will be living with the consequences for the rest of their lives. Yet those very realities can leave students feeling hopeless, helpless, overwhelmed, and even suicidal (Ojala & Bengtsson 2019; Clayton et al. 2017) disabling them academically and socially. While these stresses can undermine scholastic achievement, they can also galvanize young people to action. Indeed, they are doing so worldwide (e.g., Salamon, 2020), with young and old recognizing the connections between climate disruption, racism, and social justice (e.g., Bowman, 2020; Fritz, 2020, UNICEF, 2020), and have now successfully demanded a prominent voice at the UN Climate Conferences (COP 28 Youth Climate Delegates). At this critical turning point in human history, educators can either allow these polycrisis traumas to further disengage students from education, or we can leverage our students’ passions for justice, nature, action, and beauty as a motivation to learn, to engage, and lead.
The Climate Empowerment Learning Initiative (CELI) is an attempt to do just that. To survive the fear, uncertainty and anger, and then steward and lead the transition to a sustainable and socially just world, our students must know, emotionally and intellectually, that a far better world is achievable through their collective and individual actions. CELI seeks to provide the lived experiences for students and their teachers to enable that transformation.
From a climate justice and solutions perspective, our two schools, Cesar Chavez Middle School and Tennyson High School, support some of the nation’s most vulnerable and significant student populations in the nation, if not the world. With vast-majority low-income student populations*, Chavez and Tennyson also receive the vast majority of the district’s newcomer students (new immigrants, unaccompanied minors, and refugees) into their World House Program, which provides one year-of specialized support for the newcomers. The majority of these students suffer disruptive social trauma, poverty, and language isolation, in addition to the usual challenges of academic and cultural transition. While dominated by Latinx learners, World House at any given time may serve children from as many as 30 different countries, speaking 12 different languages. The World House Program currently has about 500 students and takes in about 10 new students monthly. Unsurprisingly then, Tennyson and Cesar Chavez, are consistently ranked as the lowest performing high school and middle school, respectively, in a District in which only 25% of students are considered at least proficient in math and 37% in reading (Niche 2024).
Such conditions tend to produce an embattled, demoralized, survival-driven psychology throughout the school community, and this was certainly the starting point for our two CELI schools. Indeed, on the very first day of CELI’s launch in the Chavez School Community, while the school principal was proudly announcing the launch of the Program, the District was sending a notice of planned closure of the school. While the closure proposal was reversed, at least in part because of objections mounted by the CELI senior partners, the visibility of the CELI project, and the light it was able to cast on the significance of the work in the CELI schools; it is emblematic of the embattled state of these school communities.
But, we note that the very same demographics that create major educational challenges in these schools also make CELI students the perfect demographic for climate solution-making. The diversity of these schools is an asset to climate solutionaries (72-73% LatinX, 7-8% Asian, 5-6% Black, 7% Filipino, 3% Pacific Islander, and 2-3% White), who must be able to talk across boundaries of all sorts. In particular, our dominantly Latinx CELI community is well positioned to engage: Hispanics are not only disproportionately affected by climate disruption through economic vulnerability and disproportionate representation in critical employment with high heat-stress risk factors (e.g. farm and warehouse work), they are also the most likely to act. National studies indicate that under-represented minorities (Hispanics in particular) are both more concerned about the climate crisis and more inclined to take action than are their white counterparts (Ballew et al., 2020; Pearson et al., 2018; Mora and Lopez, 2021). Climate solutions must champion equity, within and across nations, or they will inevitably fail; the system is too brittle to support negative tradeoffs or sustain the crumbling status quo.
*According to National Center for Education Statistics: Among Tennyson High School students, in 2021-22, 74% qualified for the free lunch program in 2021-22 and an additional 6% qualified for the reduced lunch program (NCES 1). In the same year, among Cesar Chavez Middle School students, 79% qualified for the free, and an additional 8% qualifies for the reduced lunch program (NCES 2).