Action for the Climate Emergency (ACE) Supports Young Leaders as They Fight for a Better Future
Julian Arenas and the rest of the East Madison Action Team
Recent years have seen an impressive increase of youth involvement in climate movements that are challenging the status quo. Not only have youth been participating in these movements – they’ve also been leading them. One organization partially responsible for this is Action for the Climate Emergency (ACE), a national non-profit that educates, inspires, and supports young people as they advocate for solutions to climate change.
Most of ACE’s strength comes from their Youth Action Network of over half a million young people in all 50 states, as well as several Action Teams made up of student Fellows. These Action Teams pressure local elected officials to declare climate emergencies and can be formed anywhere in several states by a young person who wants to advocate for the climate.
Marco Marquez
“It’s my job to support them with resources, with training, with mentorship along their path to making sure that they run successful campaigns,” said Marco Marquez, ACE Program Manager for Wisconsin, in an interview with the Wisconsin Environmental Health Network (WEHN). ACE offers training sessions on a wide array of topics intended to provide students with the skills and knowledge needed to address disinformation, organize fellow students, meet with elected representatives, and host a protest or rally.
What makes ACE unique is its choice to frame climate change as an emergency. This may seem extreme to some, but due to decades of inaction, we are already experiencing climate change in the form of large-scale hurricanes, devastating wildfires, frequent droughts and floods, and other catastrophic events. “It’s not just something that’s affecting people in Southeast Asia or in Africa, it’s affecting people in the United States too,” Marquez said. “It’s something that needs to be addressed right away and waiting is not going to do us any justice.” This mindset fuels ACE’s young advocates as they lead campaigns to urge federal and local leaders to declare climate emergencies and take action on the climate crisis.
Julian Arenas
In 2020, ACE ensured that youth had their voices heard in the United States elections by getting 59,442 youth climate voters registered to vote, including 20,000 from Wisconsin. In the same year, a group of Fellows developed Youth Think Climate, an international youth-led magazine dedicated to highlighting youth stories on the climate crisis. One of these Fellows was Julian Arenas, a Madison high-school student who started Youth Think Climate with his ACE peers as a way to give youth voices a platform in the climate movement, where they have routinely been silenced. The magazine, which has three editions published, features submissions in a variety of mediums from youth across the country and world. “It’s so rewarding to look through submissions and see personal narratives, poetry, photography, artwork, all about the climate crisis,” Arenas said about the experience in an interview with us.
While the work that Julian and Marco do to advocate for climate action is rewarding, it is not without its challenges. Climate advocacy is consuming work and can be difficult to balance if it is not one’s primary occupation. Because of this, many climate activists, especially youth, are familiar with the feeling of burnout. Julian experienced this feeling himself while tackling the climate crisis on top of being a student, athlete, and active member of his school’s Green Club. “I sort of had to take a step back and refocus my goals and think about how I can continue to be a climate activist in a way that’s healthy for me and the people I’m working with,” he said.
In addition to the demands of activism, ACE also faces difficulty in conservative communities, where it is more of a challenge to get a meeting with an elected official to discuss climate change. For young people wanting to organize in these environments, especially young people of color, the potential for backlash from the community can be an obstacle. ”That’s something that we really need to be mindful of…that if young people want to organize with us, that we’re making sure that that’s as safe as possible,” said Marquez. In environments less friendly to climate action, ACE may sway a bit from the emergency framing and instead prioritize smaller victories that can still make a positive impact.
Julian, Marco, and the East Madison Action Team
While significant, these challenges have not stopped ACE from pushing forward in the fight against the climate emergency. In 2021, ACE launched the #NoworNever campaign, which is focused on Action Teams urging elected officials at all levels of government to declare climate emergencies. In Wisconsin, seven Action Teams are working on securing meetings and planning events with elected officials. “We’re really hoping that if we can get cities to declare climate emergencies, then we can hold our city leaders accountable,” Marquez said. Since being launched, #NoworNever has grown into a coalition of organizations including Fridays for Future U.S., GreenFaith, and Our Climate, among others. ACE hopes to continue expanding this coalition and is calling all youth-led, youth-serving, and intergenerational climate organizations across the climate movement and other intersectional social justice movements to join.
There is a lot of work to be done to address climate change, but the young leaders of ACE are not to be underestimated. “Throughout all of my time working with youth from across all ages they’ve always met and exceeded my expectations,” said Marquez. Rather than waiting for the government to come to the rescue, today’s youth are taking climate action into their own hands. In doing so, ACE leaders look to their fellow advocates for hope. “It’s really relieving and refreshing to know…there are millions of us around the world who believe in climate science and who believe that climate change is something that we need to fight for and fight against,” said Marquez. The climate emergency may be this generation’s biggest challenge, but they’re not giving up anytime soon. As Julian expressed, “I think we’re close to something and I think that’s really driving me…we’re almost there, we’ve just got to keep going.”
View clips from our interviews with Marco Marquez and Julian Arenas in this video on our YouTube channel. Video created by Erin Hastings with conten creation from Bailey Griffin and Hannah Mortensen.
This article and video are part of a project funded by the Energy Foundation with the aim of highlighting stories that illustrate the benefits of clean energy investments, climate action, emissions and air pollution reductions, and/or policies that make progress possible in Wisconsin.