Climate Cardinals is an international youth-led NPO making climate education more accessible

Climate Cardinals identified an existing gap in language accessibility for climate information and have made a proven impact. We began the organization because we realized that the climate movement and environmental education were leaving people behind. According to Bahji et al., even though only 20 percent of the global population speaks English, 75 percent of all scientific information is only available in English. To respond to this crisis, we've translated over 2 million words of climate information into 100+ languages. Through our efforts to make climate information more accessible to people around the world, Climate Cardinals is empowering youth internationally to be translators and educators of climate information. Localized climate education is crucial to address our ecological crisis as each community experiences the impacts of climate change differently. 

Creating a zero-carbon, sustainable world starts with access to information.  Accessible education and information in a native language is the first step for communities to embrace solutions that adapt to a warmer climate. Over 90% of scientific literature is written in English, and only 17% of people can speak it. For the remaining 83% of individuals, information about global warming solutions is inaccessible due to this language barrier. Additionally, many of these individuals are located in impoverished communities that have been affected the most by climate change, compounding the issue. The climate-crisis will not be solved by one singular solution. That is why our non-profit aims to expand access to the thousands of progressive solutions that already exist in the English language and translate this critical information to the world. 

Spreading the knowledge of climate change to 83% of non-English speakers (around 6.7 billion people) will rally much-needed support for climate change action. When better informed, people can advocate for their communities, shed light on regional environmental issues, and understand multi-national and intersectional perspectives on climate topics. Climate Cardinals exists to empower non-English-speaking communities to have access to information regarding climate change as well as progressive solution-based information that already exists. Climate Cardinals bridges the gap between communities, employing the power of words to educate and solve problems together. 

As the world’s largest youth-led climate nonprofit, we strive to promote multilingual climate education and communication. Our signature translation program, in collaboration with Google and Translators Without Borders, has translated over 2 million words in 100+ languages. This international movement has reached millions of people across 80+ countries. Our translation solution leverages technology to spread vital science-based data and information regarding progressive and adapting solutions for a myriad of climate crisis issues, including extreme weather and natural disasters, ecosystem protection, identifying risks of environmental hazards, food systems, clean energy, and more. 

Climate Cardinals is scaling our impact to leverage global youth networks and empower grassroots climate education to equip everyone to become part of the climate solution. We are launching the world’s largest youth climate volunteer program. As our volunteer base has exponentially grown to over 16,000, the number of youth passionate about climate action has surpassed the opportunities available within our translation program.  Climate Cardinals seeks to foster grassroots climate education opportunities to invigorate our volunteer base and become translators of the climate movement in their communities. 

Our volunteer base offers a unique opportunity for our organization to expand across the globe in the form of Chapters, increasing local engagement and championing place-based climate work. To ensure that each community is receiving climate education relevant to their particular impacts, we are empowering youth to spearhead their own divisions of our organization. We will provide chapter leads with climate curriculums, toolkits, educational videos, and more in their native languages to ensure they have the materials needed to be climate champions in their communities. Climate action must be unique to each location, which is why our platform will give youth the necessary tools to lead these localized education efforts.

Furthermore, we empower those in impoverished communities to have a voice through our innovative chapter program, allowing youth in uneducated areas who are dedicated to making an impact to start their own Climate Cardinals chapter in their school, community, or organization. Our organization will be supplying the necessary tools and resources for youth to be grassroots climate advocates and educators within their communities and in every corner of the world.

Our organization serves those who are impacted the most by the climate crisis and lack the necessary resources to educate, inform, and solve it. We aim to assist individuals who live in impoverished communities or areas with minimal resources available in their native language—such as some regions in the Middle East and Africa. Our solution directly improves the underserved communities that currently experience a lack of access to climate solution information in their native language. The lack of adequate information creates a devastating inability to combat climate change.

Our solution combats this by disseminating accessible, youth-oriented climate education materials. We will also be collaborating with TNC to create an ambassador program via this newsletter to keep a diverse coalition of youth informed about climate policy and negotiations. We provide them with the opportunities, tools, and platforms needed to succeed, empower, and grow. We work to implement this through our various programs, the most prominent being our translation initiative. In partnership with Translators without Borders, we have translated over two million words of climate information for partners like Yale University, UNICEF, the UN Environment Programme, and the government of Italy. Notably, we have also recently partnered with Google to integrate their new, cutting-edge AI tools into our workflow, more than tripling our current translation capacity. 

Additionally, our solution serves youth climate advocates across the globe. Climate Cardinals seeks to foster grassroots climate education opportunities to invigorate youth climate advocates to become translators and educators of the climate movement in their communities. We started with translating languages, and now we are translating resources into actionable insights. Empowering youth to lead place-based climate education in their own communities is crucial for climate action and justice, as each community experiences the impacts and effects of climate change differently. Climate action, adaptation, and mitigation must be customized per location, which is why our volunteer opportunities will give youth the necessary tools and resources to lead these localized education efforts.

From a strategy and execution standpoint, we are well-positioned to deliver our solution. This is largely attributed to the fact that our leadership and volunteer base are comprised of the very individuals we seek to serve. Our approach involves integrating the perspectives and needs of our target demographic into our daily operations, enabling us to gain genuine insights into their concerns and craft holistic solutions accordingly.

Central to our strategy is the establishment of chapters, which serve as crucial conduits for representation and guidance to align ourselves with our community. We've developed comprehensive chapter toolkits, constitutions, and guidelines tailored to empower individuals under 18 to actively engage with peers in their schools, clubs, and communities. Through these chapters, we aim to foster a sense of ownership and agency among youth, enabling them to mirror the efforts of our volunteers. We plan to learn from their feedback and implement it in our own initiatives in the future. 

Climate Cardinal’s chapter program boasts an impressive network of 16,000 youth volunteers across all six habitable continents. Notably, the majority of our chapters are established in regions where Climate Cardinals is already operational. Consequently, our chapter members directly represent the demographic we are committed to serving, ensuring that our solutions truly reflect their needs and aspirations.

Furthermore, our founder comes from the Middle East, which means she has personal experience when it comes to a lack of climate information in her mother tongue.

Climate Cardinals’ partnership with TWB has allowed us to translate 3,000 pages and counting of climate information into over 100 different languages. We measure our impact through our membership and reach: 72% of expected beneficiaries are located in the Global South; 69% of expected beneficiaries to be in non-English speaking majority nations; 70% of expected beneficiaries to be women; 26% of expected beneficiaries to be from “Least-Developed Countries” according to the UN. Furthermore, In lifetime reach, 79% of our social media presence is located in the global south, a region where historically ~80% of the population is unaware of climate change. 

In addition, CC has rapidly become a global leader in climate translations, spearheading a one-of-a-kind AI translation hub. Leveraging our volunteer base of 16,000+ youth in 80+ countries and translating over 2 million words of climate information into 100+ languages, we empower the people to educate and mobilize their community for climate action. With an average of just 16 among our volunteers, we’ve shown we can deliver. We have partners such as UNICEF, the UN Environment Programme, Yale University, and the Italian Government to help translate important information, such as the UNEP’s Youth #ForNature initiative. With a reach of 500,000, our work has been featured in The New York Times, CNN, TIME, on the front page of the Washington Post, selected as the winner of the TEDGlobal Idea Competition, and chosen for the Forbes 30 under 30 Class of 2023. 

We have also onboarded a full-time chief operator for our organization to drive CC Impact further.

There are various things that encouraged us to apply for MIT Solve. Firstly, monitoring and evaluation support is needed to build an impact measurement practice. This is because our impact is reflective of how well our organization is doing. Therefore we would like to make sure we are measuring all of the impact we make through our various initiatives. Furthermore, by getting a more accurate picture of our impact, we are able to figure out which one of our initiatives is working and which is wasting resources. 

There are multiple factors that encouraged our team to apply for MIT Solve. Primarily, we aim to attain monitoring and evaluation support to build an impact measurement practice. Our global impact is a direct representation and measurement of our organization’s success. We want to ensure we are taking steps to include proper and accurate measurement tools to track the impacts that we make through our various initiatives. By accurately tracking and measuring our implementation success rate, we can increase the efficiency of our organization by directly linking resource allocation to the success of the nonprofit's mission. 

Another reason behind why we applied is leadership coaching. This is because our organization has grown dramatically in size over the last couple of years which means that our leadership capabilities need to grow proportionally. This growth in leadership capabilities has been quite difficult to achieve, which is why we have hired a full-time chief operator. Hopefully, with the leadership coaching, we will be able to grow our leadership capacity more and effectively use the large volunteer base that we have here at Climate Cardinals. 

In addition to increased accuracy in our monitoring and evaluation process, we seek to improve our organization through MIT Solve with an increased focus on leadership. Because our organization has grown dramatically in size over the last couple of years, our leadership capabilities need to grow proportionally, and we require leadership coaching. The growth in leadership capability has been difficult for us to achieve. We hired a full-time chief operator but want to continue to expand our part-time and full-time roles. Hopefully, with increased leadership coaching, we will be able to grow our leadership capacity and effectively use the large volunteer base that we have here at Climate Cardinals. 

Access to investment and grant opportunities through MIT Solve could dramatically increase our capacity to create change. Financial resourcing is currently our biggest constraint. We have the workforce, the motivation, the talent, and the experience, but we believe that our impact could be increased proportionally if we were able to acquire additional financial resources that could help us hire permanent employees, finance leadership training and workshops, and fund our programs and the specific requirements of maintaining our technological network.

To date, we are the only nonprofit organization dedicated to translating climate literature. With over 16,000 volunteers who are translating and sourcing climate information with partners like the United Nations, the Italian Government, and Yale Climate Connections, we have proven success. Our translations are centered around international climate policy and includes a youth’s version of the IPCC report, the UNDP’s Youth4Climate Manifesto, UNICEF Children’s Climate Risk Index, and UNEP’s Youth #ForNature Planetary Health Petition. 

With increased funding, we will expand our translation capacity from roughly 1 million words per year to over 3.4 million words translated per year. By funding more professional translators to proofread our documents, an AI translation hub, a climate glossary, and a dedicated translation director, we will be able to unlock our full translation capacity, as estimated by our professional translation network (Translators Without Borders and Respond Crisis Translation). We currently have more translation requests (~60 per year) than we have the capacity for, and by increasing our translation speed, we will be able to accommodate all requests. 

Furthermore, Climate Cardinals also focuses on translating resources into actionable insights. With the Youth Climate Ambassador Program, which is launching in Q2 of 2024, Climate Cardinals will be launching an enhanced version of Ptera, our climate newsletter that was launched in June 2023, in partnership with The Nature Conservancy. This program will focus on leveraging research and resources across organizations in combination with Climate Cardinals’ extensive youth network to curate and distribute youth-focused climate content. The Ptera team helps turn research, reports, and other climate materials into shareable and actionable weekly resources and toolkits for youth ambassadors. Through this collaboration, we hope to engage, educate, and empower the younger generation to take a proactive stance on climate change. We will offer youth ambassadors a credible and impactful role that can foster a sense of belonging to the broader climate change movement. 

We provide two ways for ambassadors to engage with our programming. Through Ptera, climate reports, scientific papers, and courses will be sent out in digestible and compelling formats. Ambassadors can directly reshare key points via social media with provided graphics and short-form videos to build climate awareness. Additionally, ambassadors will be given the tools and resources needed to feel empowered to speak in person to their local communities on relevant climate topics. Climate Cardinals will also be hosting challenges and competitions to increase engagement among youth ambassadors.

Climate Cardinals aims to combat climate misinformation by offering precise information about climate change to individuals who speak languages other than English. Our theory of change is built upon a logical framework that links our activities to immediate outputs and longer-term outcomes for our target population.

Firstly, our activities involve recruiting multilingual volunteers who are proficient in various languages. These volunteers play a crucial role in translating scientific information about climate change into their native languages. Through their efforts, we produce accurate climate content in multiple languages. We then disseminate this translated material through diverse channels such as social media platforms, community events, and partnerships with local organizations. The immediate outputs of these activities include the creation of translated climate content and the subsequent increase in awareness among communities regarding climate change. As a result, individuals gain access to accurate climate information in their native languages, which lays the foundation for our intermediate outcomes.

In the intermediate phase, we anticipate empowered communities that are equipped with accurate climate information. This access to knowledge enables individuals to make informed decisions about their actions and advocacy efforts. Furthermore, it fosters enhanced engagement within communities, as individuals are more likely to participate in discussions and actions related to climate change when information is accessible and understandable. This increased engagement ultimately leads to heightened advocacy for climate-friendly policies and practices. Empowered individuals are more inclined to advocate for such initiatives within their communities and beyond, contributing to the broader movement for climate action.

Over the long term, we envision several outcomes resulting from our efforts. These include a reduction in misinformation about climate change as accurate information becomes more readily available and accessible. Additionally, our initiative aims to foster greater understanding and appreciation of climate science, thereby strengthening resilience within communities. Informed individuals are better equipped to adapt to the impacts of climate change, reducing vulnerabilities and enhancing overall resilience.

The evidence supporting our theory of change comes from various sources. Third-party research has consistently shown that access to accurate information is essential for fostering understanding and action on climate change. Feedback from our target population indicates increased understanding and appreciation for accessible climate information. Moreover, ongoing monitoring and evaluation efforts allow us to assess the effectiveness of our activities and make necessary adjustments to our approach.

Climate Cardinals' goals are to reach out to individuals from all over the world and to provide culturally accurate translations of climate literature to underprivileged communities that are unable to access or read the 70% of scientific literature written in English. We have over 16,000 volunteers who are translating and sourcing climate information into over 100 different languages with partners like the United Nations. This international movement has reached millions of people across 80+ countries. We also utilize our volunteer base to foster grassroots climate education opportunities to invigorate this volunteer base to become translators of the climate movement in their communities. 

Some indicators that we use to measure our progress are word count tracking, quality assurance metrics, audience engagement metrics, and partnership metrics. For word count tracking, we track the number of words translated per month and annually and compare actual word count against projected targets to measure progress toward increased translation capacity. For quality assurance metrics, we implement quality assessment tools to evaluate the accuracy and reliability of translated documents and collect feedback from stakeholders and end-users to identify areas for improvement and ensure high-quality translations. As for audience engagement metrics, we monitor website traffic, download counts, and social media engagement metrics to assess the reach and impact of translated materials. Finally, for partnership metrics, we maintain a database of existing and potential translation partners and track the number of partnerships established, renewed, and expanded over time.

Track impact: We aim to develop a framework to quantify the impact of our translations. This might involve tracking increases in web traffic, user engagement, and awareness measures in the communities we serve post-translation.

Improve translation quality: While AI/ML tools have greatly improved, they're not perfect. We'll continue to refine our processes through a feedback loop with our volunteer network and paid translators to ensure the translations are accurate and culturally sensitive.

Our success will not only be measured by the number of words translated or languages added but also by the impact we have in spreading climate content across the internet and empowering communities with information and resources that were previously inaccessible due to language barriers.

Our method for overcoming language obstacles in climate communication is novel and distinctive. Our AI team partnered with Google, allowing us to pioneer a specialized translation hub devoted to promoting multilingual education. The upcoming vision for our work is to leverage AI/ML tools to further eliminate language barriers and democratize access to important information. Our success would be measured by the reach and impact of the translated resources. In 2-3 years, we aim to expand our language portfolio: We've already translated resources into 100+ languages, but there are over 7,000 languages spoken worldwide. Our goal is to include more languages, especially those spoken by marginalized communities who are often overlooked in global dialogues. Increase the volume of translated words: We've translated over 1,500,000 words so far. In 2-3 years, we hope to have translated millions more words, making vast amounts of crucial information accessible to non-English speakers. Enhance our partnership network: We're proud to have worked with esteemed global organizations from Yale to the United Nations. We aim to partner with more organizations in various sectors, ensuring their valuable resources are available to a wider, multilingual audience.

• 1 full time employee

• 10+ executive members

• 60+ team members

• 16,000+ international volunteers

Climate Cardinals was established on May 24, 2020, which means the team, alongside the founder, has been working on the organization for nearly 4 years.

From a leadership standpoint, we are a wholly youth-led organization that primarily has BIPOC and women in executive roles. Our leadership reflects the communities we serve, with 65% women and 70% people from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. Moreover, our median director age is only 19, encouraging cross-generational cooperation. Despite our age, we have been featured in Business Insider, NPR, and The Washington Post. We have partnered with other leading organizations like WEF and UNICEF, allowing us to reach a worldwide audience. This dedication to diversity improves the authenticity and applicability of our translations, enabling marginalized populations all around the world to receive climate information. By ensuring that all voices are heard and appreciated in our goal, we promote genuine change through our structure, representation, and inclusivity. Through our incredible youth leadership, we focus on the global community, but we primarily target getting our information to our stakeholders: youth and marginalized groups. To do this, we have developed an international chapter system with a network of 16,000 youth volunteers in all 6 habitable continents.

Full Business Plan: https://docs.google.com/docume...

Climate Cardinals has achieved its current impact through the power of unpaid, part-time student volunteers, but as our organization expands beyond our signature translation program, we recognize the compelling need to restructure to include paid, full-time employees. Through our partnership with Google, we recently welcomed a Chief Operating Officer as the first full-time employee. Looking forward, Climate Cardinals seeks to fund a full-time Chief Executive Officer, Chief Partnerships Officer, and Chief Programs Officer to oversee the multiple (and growing) climate volunteer programs we are launching. Our organization seeks funding to accommodate five full-time staff members (Chief Executive Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Relations Officer, Chief Programs Officer, and Chief Development Officer) for the next two years, as well as additional funding for part-time staff, contractors, and interns (Director of Climate Calling, Director of Chapters, Director of Translations), amounting to 2 million USD. On average, our volunteers spend 10 hours on Climate Cardinals per week. We estimate each full-time position will scale an individual volunteer’s current capacity times four. By funding these projects and additional positions, Climate Cardinals will be able to scale all of our operations and further execute our mission to make climate education more accessible to everyone, everywhere.

Since its inception, Climate Cardinals has existed on an extremely lean budget, with only enough funds to pay for necessary subscriptions and services and modest yearly $500 stipends to the student directors. In partnership with Google, we were able to kickstart our professionalization with 400,000 to hire a Chief Operating Officer starting in February 2024. 

Prior to our partnership with Google, we received grants through Loreal, Twitter, and the Inkey Foundation. We remain fiscally sponsored by the March On Foundation.