SVYCA's 2023 Youth Leadership Summit!

Our 2023 Youth Summit was a resounding success! Thank you to all our student attendees and volunteers, panel speakers, adult climate allies, and elected officials for attending! We couldn't have done it without you! 

I’m George Hu, the co-lead of the Los Gatos/Saratoga Youth Climate Action Team and a rising senior at Saratoga High School. Inspired and empowered by the day of learning on climate actions, education, and leadership building, I’m here to share with you some noteworthy moments and reflections of the summit from the perspective of an active listener, student leader, and the moderator for the Energy Panel.  

Throughout the day, our youth engaged with our speakers through interactive panels and roundtable discussions. I found I had something to learn from all of these panels! For our Keynote Panel, we invited speakers Rod Diridon Sr, Ken Branson, and Veda Banerjee. Our panelists discussed a variety of topics, ranging from statewide electrification policy to the importance of voting green. Banerjee, representing California Environmental Voters, revealed that Prop 30, a tax on income above $2 million for zero emissions cars and wildfire prevention, was defeated by advocating. The loss of a beneficial environmental bill as a result of voter inaction furthers the importance and power of green voting, which is becoming more necessary in today’s society.

After our Keynote Panel, we welcomed our first break, a valuable opportunity for our youth attendees to interact and network with and ask questions to our tablers. The tablers’ organizations covered diverse backgrounds in the field of environmental advocacy, such as clean energy, vegan foods, and elected office. 

During our pre-lunch breakout room panels, we had a Circular Economy Panel, a Transportation Panel, and an Energy Panel. As moderator for the Energy Panel, we invited Silicon Valley Clean Energy, Peninsula Clean Energy, Silicon Valley Power, and San Jose Clean Energy. Our youth attendees learned about Community Choice Aggregates and different accessibility and educational programs each company offered, such as San Jose Clean Energy’s Solar Access Program and Silicon Valley Clean Energy’s Resilience Grants. 

In the early afternoon, we held our Green Careers Panel, in which we invited Evan Hynes, Antoinette West, and Dan Evans — spotlighting their companies of Climatebase, Elemental Excelerator, and Itron, respectively. The panel highlighted the exponential growth of green careers from a wide variety of professions, ranging from liberal arts to STEM. One of the most memorable panel questions concerned tech startups. During the Audience Q&A portion, a student asked Hynes, as CEO of Climatebase (an online environmental job database), on how to create a startup and secure funding for environmental companies. Hynes compared it with his friends’ and his own experiences of creating an online company. Through that, our audience learned firsthand insights about startups, which will be heavily utilized in the next few years as more and more environmental companies are created. 

Nearing the end of the summit, we broke out into city, county, and state-oriented breakout groups, which aimed to cultivate a space for spontaneous and in-depth conversations between youths and elected officials on specific climate policy actions. As the co-lead of the Los Gatos/Saratoga Youth Climate Action Team, I mobilized my team to brainstorm tangible city and school-district-wide actions on improving climate literacy in our community, as we all agreed that was a major opportunity for improvements. It was fascinating to hear everyone’s point of view, such as holding assemblies to educate youths and incentivizing them to follow greener practices in school and in their personal lives. Our discussions led to great actionable results, and we plan to enact them within the year!

Overall, the 2023 Youth Summit was a huge educational and networking opportunity for many of us. I want to again give a huge thank you to everyone who attended, and encourage you to keep posted about our 2024 Youth Leadership Summit next summer!