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Organized by Boston Latin School Youth Climate Action Network and MIT Radius
Registration is LIVE. Please register early to guarantee a spot in your preferred workshop.
Summit Schedule:
9:00am —10:00am: Registration/Check In
10:00am—11:00am: Welcome, Keynote Speaker
11:00am—12:00pm: Workshops
12:00pm—1:30pm: Lunch/Exhibitors/Activities
1:30pm—3:00pm: Next Steps, & Door Prizes!
Location: MIT Stata Center Building 32, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA
Date: Saturday, May 21st, 2022, 10am (Registration and Breakfast open at 9:00)
Details: Event is open to the public (youth and adults) & is FREE! Breakfast & Lunch included
Contact Info: youthcanbls@gmail.com
Organizers: Boston Latin School YouthCAN & Radius at MIT
**Attendees should bring their own refillable water bottle. Water will be available but otherwise drinks will not be provided.
**Masks are required at all times indoors when not eating/drinking. If you arrive without a mask, one will be provided for you.
TO REGISTER PLEASE COMPLETE THESE 3 STEPS:
1) Download and complete the parental consent form here and upload it with your registration in step 2 or bring it with you on the day of the conference
2) Fill out the webform below to register for one of the following workshops (please do not complete the form more than once)
3) Register here for a TIM Ticket (MIT’s visitor pass) to enable access to the building’s exterior doors.
Air Quality in Boston – Roxbury Environmental Empowerment Project
Description: Want to learn more about the effects of air pollution on climate justice and environmental justice? Come join the Roxbury Environmental Empowerment Project as we discuss how poor air quality is separated by neighborhood, class and race in Boston and how this impacts our communities!
Food Instability is Intersectional – BLS World Wildlife Fund
MiSTEAKS of the Meat Industry: Come and join us in learning about how food instability is intersectional. Take a deep dive as we explore specifically how the meat industry exploits marginalized communities and animals and contributes to the growing issues of climate change.
FULL The Citizen-Consumer 2.0 – Prof. Ellis Jones
Join Ellis Jones, Author of The Better World Shopping Guide, and learn how to use the latest data to navigate our 21st century landscape of products and companies. How can you figure out the difference between green companies and greenwashing corporations? We’ll talk about the latest tools, practical strategies, and how to multiply your consumer impact. We’ll even learn how to apply these same simple ideas to more successfully navigate the world of politics (left to right) and media (fact-based vs. fake news). From climate change to human rights, animal protection to social justice.
Swiping Right on Native Plants – Massachusetts Youth Climate Coalition – Audrey Brenhouse
The Belmont High School Climate Action Club will educate participants about the importance of native gardens. Attendees will learn about the types of plants native to Massachusetts and their purpose. The workshop will include a hands-on activity which will allow each participant to make a unique dating-like profile which will be used to develop roots with a “native plant soulmate”, which they will get to take home and grow. We will conclude our workshop by discussing how to implement a native garden in a participant’s own school and/or community.
Boston’s Last Standing Marsh – New England Aquarium Clima-Teens
Belle Isle Salt Marsh, Boston’s last standing marsh, serves an important purpose in helping to absorb storm surge and extremely high tides which helps protect East Boston, Winthrop and Revere. As sea level rises salt marsh ecosystems will continue to provide an important role in mitigating flooding for these at-risk communities. Belle Isle Salt Marsh faces several threats including pollution from Logan Airport, surrounding land development, and invasive species like green crabs. Join us to learn more about the importance of salt marshes and what you can do to help us protect Belle Isle Salt Marsh and the communities it touches.
Adaptation, Mitigation, Solution – Eastie Farm
Join Eastie Farm to talk about how to adapt to our changing ecosystem to ensure safety for our most vulnerable communities. We’ll share tangible actions and discuss real world solutions to the changing climate.
Resilience as Resistance: Mental Health as a critical skill for Young Climate Activists – Our Climate
Learn alongside the staff at the nonprofit Our Climate how to balance your care for your inner and outer world. Discuss with peers navigating everything from anxiety, to burnout, to depression. Brainstorm ways we can make the climate justice movement more emotionally resilient and sustainable. Practice integrating your work into a balanced schedule that leaves you time for family, friends, and schoolwork.
FULL Film A Public Service Announcement – Improv Performer and Educator, Joe Gels and Educator, Dustin Brownell
Description: Workshop participants will be shown what makes for an effective PSA. Then they will be given props and support in filming a 30 second PSA about climate change and sustainability. Find out how to get your message across in an engaging way!
Antisemitism and the Climate Crisis – JYCM
Join the Jewish Youth Climate Movement for an exploration of climate change as a community-based phenomenon whose modern manifestations of crisis are rooted in a past that is still with us today. As we contextualize the climate crisis amid intersecting oppressions and explore how major systems such as mass corporations, Nazism, and antisemitism colluded to bolster the oil industry in decades past, we will apply this systemic framework to what the dual rise of the climate crisis and antisemitism means for our generation of young people growing up in a fraught world today, and how our communities navigate and disrupt cycles of retraumatization through violence and upheavals that take shape in new contexts but retain old forms. Ultimately, though, this workshop is about healing: as a movement, we seek to turn our familial pasts and uncertain presents into the cultivation of hope, as we take collective action for a sustainable and equitable future world for all.
The Practice of Land Acknowledgements and Relationships – North American Indian Center of Boston – Jean-Luc Pierite
Building upon the practice of land acknowledgements, an embodied approach actively engages participants through personal expression. In this workshop, Jean-Luc Pierite (North American Indian Center of Boston) shares his own social interventions within this framework on the scale of protests, policies, and prototypes. Participants will form deeper connections from an exploration of positionality such as being a guest in another’s homeland. Whether through art, media, or technology, centering land acknowledgements grounds the work as informed by relationships with land, human, and non-human actors. From a climate, social, and economic justice perspective, these embodied expressions foster systemic equity and reciprocity.
