Earth Island Institute Announces the 2024 Brower Youth Award Winners

Prestigious Environmental Prize Honors Six Youth Leaders

BERKELEY, Calif., Sept. 10, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Earth Island Institute's New Leaders Initiative announces the six recipients of this year's Brower Youth Awards. Awarded annually through a competitive process, the prize uplifts the impact of youth leaders between the ages of 13 to 22. Now in its 25th year, the Brower Youth Awards is the leading environmental youth award in the country.

From ecologically-informed art murals in public spaces to coral reef restoration in Latin America, this year's awardees are solving some of the biggest environmental challenges of our time.

"Earth Island Institute is committed to serving as a platform for the next generation of leaders who are helping us address the many ecological challenges we currently face. We have much to learn from the intersectional lens today's youth bring to their problem-solving, and are incredibly inspired by the determination, focus, and motivation of this year's winners. Their impact is felt every day in their communities and beyond," said Sumona Majumdar, chief executive officer of Earth Island Institute.

Since 2000, the New Leaders Initiative engages and supports the next generation of environmental and social justice youth activists to foster change in their local communities and beyond. Every year, six young people based in North America, including US territories, are each awarded a cash prize of $3,000 celebrating their individual and collective efforts.

This year's winners are:

Raina Maiga, 16
Indianapolis, Indiana
Empowering youth to push for policy change.

As an asylum seeker from Burkina Faso, Raina Maiga has firsthand experience of how people often feel they have no power to influence policy decisions. Which is why she works to ensure that young people's voices are included in the legislative process. Maiga is the executive director and director of legislative affairs for Confront the Climate Crisis, a youth-led organization focused on environmental issues in Indiana. Under her leadership, the organization co-wrote and lobbied for two state bills in 2022 and 2023 aimed at creating a statewide climate solutions task force that would help develop a comprehensive climate action plan for Indiana. Additionally, she secured $20,000 in yearly grants to support high school students' participation in annual events at the Statehouse in Indianapolis to educate youth, especially from under-represented populations, and facilitated discussions with legislators. Confront the Climate Crisis is also supporting student efforts to connect with their city councils to enact local climate resolutions.

Asa Miller, 17
NY, New York
Helping restore Cuba's coral reefs.

In 2022, Asa Miller, an aspiring marine biologist with deep roots in Cuba, first read about efforts to restore coral in the country's Matanzas Province. While coral loss is a global crisis, developing countries like Cuba are disproportionately affected and often lack the resources to address it. In 2023, Miller launched ¡Viva el Vivero!, (Long Live the Nursery!), an international campaign to help restore Cuba's stunning coral reefs that has since won multiple conservation awards.

Miller conducted extensive interviews with Cuban divers and scientists to document their efforts, helped analyze data to determine which of their coral nurseries had the highest survival rates, and drafted detailed maps of the restoration project. Back in New York, He founded a marine biology club in his high school to help raise funds to purchase tools to plant coral fragments grown in the nurseries back into reefs, produced a short documentary about his team's restoration methods to serve as a primer for other developing countries interested in doing the same, and won multiple awards at film festivals worldwide.

Yuki Qian, 17
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Helping with radon remediation in Pittsburgh.
Yuki Qian lives in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area, a region that, has extremely high levels of radon, a colorless, odorless, radioactive gas that is responsible for 21,000 deaths a year in the United States. (The average home in Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania has double the safe level of radon.) Many of these deaths can easily be prevented if adequate awareness and mitigation measures are implemented. That is why she tries to address one fundamental question through her work: How can technology and already-found knowledge surpass socio-economic and political barriers to help those most in need.

In 2023, with support from Youth Climate Advocacy Committee at the Pittsburgh Phipps Conservatory, Qian founded RadONRadOFF, a project that distributes free radon test kits, information about low-cost remediation methods, and safety education to local communities, especially in lower-income and highly-impacted areas. The test kits are distributed through partnerships with state authorities, local radon mitigation companies, and YMCAs. Additionally, Qian is also working with state officials to pass radon mitigation policies that will help close this public health and environmental disparity gap.

Vishruth Dinesh, 16
Fremont, California
Empowering youth to achieve self-sustainability through gardening.

Vishruth Dinesh wanted to get involved in climate activism when he was eight years old. But whenever he asked what he could do he was given suggestions like buy an electric car, which small children and teenagers, who make up the majority of the global population, cannot implement.

So, in 2022, Dinesh created The Green Therapy, an organization dedicated to anchoring young people in the climate movement via sustainable gardening, which not only helps reduce food waste, preserve native biodiversity, and combat pollution, but is also affordable and universally accessible.

The Green Therapy works directly with schools, helping them set up environmental courses and garden-based educational programs that pave a path for youth to become rooted in nature. Currently, the nonprofit is collaborating with 14 schools all across the San Francisco Bay Area. It has worked with and equipped over 2,500 students with the knowledge and skillset to protect the health of the planet by practicing sustainable, native-friendly gardening at and beyond the school environment. The Green Therapy will continue building its school garden network even after its current members graduate.

Austin Picinich, 19
Kirkland, Washington
Saving Salmon through art.

In 2021, Austin Picinich created Save Our Salmon through Art (SOS), a nonprofit that creates public arts projects that educate, engage, and empower communities to be better stewards of local salmon-spawning streams. Many of Seattle's urban streams are hidden under culverts or flow below paved roads, which prevents salmon from returning to their natal streams to lay eggs. Picinich's campaign was inspired in part by Juanita Creek, a stream less than a minute from his home where only three salmon returned to spawn in 2021.

As part of this work, Picinich hosts interactive mural painting events. He designs, outlines, and color-codes salmon-themed murals onto blank walls. Then, during "SOS Community Days," volunteers work with attendees, who each get their brush and cup of paint, to complete a mural. So far, Picinich has led nearly 750 volunteer painters in the Greater Seattle area. The events have had more than 3,000 attendees and raised more than $28,000 for stream restoration. In all, SOS has reached about 980,000 people through its awareness efforts.

Amelia Southern-Uribe, 21
Fayetteville, Arkansas
Supporting equitable climate education.

In 2019, Amelia Southern-Uribe founded the first Arkansas chapter of Zero Hour, an organization dedicated to environmental justice. The chapter, in Fayetteville, AR, created a model for the growth of chapters in nearby Bentonville and Conway, putting Arkansas on the map for climate activists in the US South.

However, Southern-Uribe wanted to do more to combat Arkansas's low rankings in education (49th in the nation), knowing that racism, injustice, and environmental neglect are all exacerbated by the educational disparities faced by youth in marginalized communities. So, in 2022, they co-founded Roots magazine, which disseminates regional and generational environmental knowledge and amplifies the voices of BIPOC Southern individuals. Roots, which has since published two editions, also provides free art supplies to writers and artists to help them translate their stories into mediums such as visual art, music, essays, and recipes. Within its pilot year, Southern-Uribe raised more than $7,800 to distribute free copies of the magazine to students, changemakers, and community members across the state. 

While the Brower Youth Awards is the New Leaders Initiative's most well-known annual event, the program's core goal is to support emerging environmental activists throughout the year. New Leaders Initiative provides youth with several programs, including fellowships, microgrants, workshops, and events, including both in-person and virtual.

Find information and tickets to the October in-person awards ceremony at the Freight & Salvage in Berkeley, California. Learn more about the New Leaders Initiative.

About Earth Island Institute
Earth Island Institute is an international environmental organization and fiscal sponsor to more than 75 projects working in the areas of climate change solutions, conservation, environmental justice, Indigenous communities, wildlife protection, women's environmental leadership, sustainable agriculture and food systems, community resilience, and more. The organization also includes a legal division, Earth Island Advocates; New Leaders Initiative; and an award-winning magazine, Earth Island Journal. Founded in 1982, Earth Island Institute is one of the leading environmental activist organizations in the United States.

Images, video clips, and interviews of the winners are available upon request.

SOURCE EARTH ISLAND INSTITUTE