Fired Up Media

Richard Graves, Founder, is a climate activist, social entrepreneur, and online journalist. He currently serves as Editor for It’s Getting Hot in Here – Dispatches from the Youth Climate Movement and served as Program Director for Americans for Informed Democracy, communications coordinator for the SustainUS youth delegation to the UN climate negotiations in Bali, and New Media Fellow for the Energy Action Action Coalition. He helps over a hundred youth leaders from around the world tell their stories in the fight against global warming and for a more just and sustainable world. He is a member of the international committee of the Online News Association, as well as the Society of Professional Journalists, and contributes to numerous online news outlets. He launched the Climate Netroots Project, as well as assisted in the launch of the Roosevelt Institution and the Genocide Intervention Fund. He is a recipient of the International Youth Foundation’s Global Fellowship for 2008, was a semi-finalist for Echoing Green, and recieved the Project Slingshot award. He graduated from Macalester College with a B.A. in Asian and Environmental History, after founding the student group MacCARES and winning campaigns around green building, renewable energy investment, and energy conservation. He thinks that young people can use new media to create the revolutionary change necessary to solve global warming and has told people that at the World Bank, UN, CNN, and other stuffy institutions.

Shadia Wood, New Media Director, began at age seven as an advocate for justice and the environment, in an eight-year campaign to pass state legislation to take responsibility and act against the cancer clusters and deaths in her community. In recognition of her efforts, she received the Yoshiyama Award from the Hitachi Foundation and the Brower Youth Award from the Earth Island Institute. At age fifteen, She attended the World Summit on Sustainable Development, joining the youth energy caucus’ efforts to create the Official Global Youth Energy Policy Statement. Months later, Shadia attended the Second National People of Color Summit and there she helped create the Environmental Justice Youth Platform. She is a member of the Environmental Justice Climate Coalition Youth Committee and is on the Kids Against Pollution National Board of Trustees. Shadia graduated from West Canada Valley High School and has worked for the last two years as a leader of the Youth Climate Movement. A budding photojournalist, she will attend the American University of Beirut next spring and study Arabic and Photography. She is also a contributing editor for It’s Getting Hot in Here – dispatches from the youth climate movement.

Juan Hoffmaister is currently a Watson Fellow and is researching community-based adaptation, response measures to extreme weather events and international aid for disaster preparedness in the South Pacific, South East Asia, and Africa. He is publishing updates from his travel and research at ChangingClimates.info and is a contributing editor for It’s Getting Hot in Here – dispatches from the youth climate movement. Originally from Costa Rica, Juan is devoted to improving global climate policy to protect vulnerable communities. Juan has a BA Human Ecology with emphasis in Environmental Health and Policy from College of the Atlantic, where he studied as a Davis Scholar. Juan believes in an interdisciplinary approach to solving the climate challenge. He has published work in the UN Chronicle and has served as North American representative to the UNEP – Tunza Youth Advisory Council.

Juliana Williams grew up in Bellevue, Washington and graduated from Whitman College in 2007 with a degree in geology. Juliana began organizing in 2004, working to get her campus to purchase renewable energy. As a youth delegate to the UN Climate Negotiations in Montreal in 2005, Juliana became involved in the global youth climate movement and has been hooked ever since. During college she volunteered with the Sierra Student Coalition for three years and co-organized the first Northwest Climate Justice Summit in 2007. She was one of the lead organizers for the SSC’s March to ReEnergize Iowa, a four day march from Ames to Des Moines calling for smart national action on global warming. She currently works for the SSC as their Midwest Campus Organizer, supporting amazing students in MN, WI, IA, IL and MO working on global warming campaigns on the campus, city, state and regional levels. She was a finalist for the Brower Youth Award in 2008.

Robert vanWaarden, Photographer, Robert vanWaarden is an award-winning international climate change photographer, travel photographer and editorial photographer. A professional photographer, his commercial work has taken him around the world. Although Canadian, he is based near Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Contact him for magazine and commercial jobs in Canada, Holland and around the world. Examples of his recent projects include the United Nations Climate Change Conference and the Cape Farewell Youth Expedition for the British Council.

Christine Irvine, Videographer/Photographer, Christine became an organizer within the youth climate movement after spending the summer of 2006 in the Greenpeace Organizing Term. She spent her sophomore year at Elon University running a successful Campus Climate Challenge campaign for carbon neutrality as a Sierra Student Coalition Building Environmental Campus Communities Fellow. In the summer of 2007, she worked as the New Media Fellow of the Energy Action Coalition. By the fall, she’d decided to leave school and dedicate herself to the movement full time. She worked with students throughout North Carolina organizing the North Carolina Student Climate Coalition and spent time in DC with Energy Action coordinating multimedia production for Power Shift 2007. Christine also worked as the Tennessee Campus Organizer for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and the Southern Energy Network.  She looks forward to helping build youth power for clean, safe, and just solutions to dirty energy and climate chaos. Christine is also a photographer who enjoys documenting youth climate events: www.flickr.com/christineirvine

Madeline Kovacs is a Fired Up:Youth Report Assistant Producer and Correspondent for Fired Up Media on Brazilian and Pacific NW youth and social movement activities as they relate to climate change. She graduated from Macalester College in May 2008 with a degree in Political Science and a minor in Environmental Studies. Madeline attended her first youth climate conference in the spring of 2006, and has since been an active member of MacCARES (Macalester Conservation and Renewable Energy Society), and the youth climate movement. A summer 2006 Lilly research grant on labor and the environmental movement in the Twin Cities sparked an interest in sustainable development and environmental justice that has informed much of her work ever since. Madeline also interned with the United Auto Workers Local 879 as part of the Alliance to Re-Industrialize for a Sustainable Economy (ARISE), and with Minnesota State Senator Ellen Anderson. During her junior year, she studied abroad in the Brazilian Amazon with SIT Brazil: Amazon Resource Management and Human Ecology. Lastly, she co-organized the Macalester campus 2008 Focus the Nation event, earning the Dean’s Award for outstanding commitment to the campus community. Her other interests include book-making, science fiction, yoga, and hiking.