| Richard Graves Madeline Kovacs Shadia Wood Robert vanWaarden |
Richard Graves by Christine Irvine
Richard Graves, Founder and Director,is a climate activist, social entrepreneur, and online journalist. He served as the blogger/online campaigner for the Global Campaign for Climate Action, the Editor for It’s Getting Hot in Here – Dispatches from the Youth Climate Movement and served as a Program Director for Americans for Informed Democracy. 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 is a recipient of the International Youth Foundation’s Global Fellowship for 2008, was a semi-finalist for Echoing Green, and received the Project Slingshot award. He graduated from Macalester College with a B.A. in Asian and Environmental History. 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, Program Director, Project Survival Media, 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.
Madeline Kovacs, Program and Development Associate, graduated from Macalester College in May 2008 with a BA in Political Science and a minor in Environmental Studies. She attended her first youth climate conference in 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 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. Her junior year, she studied abroad in the Brazilian Amazon with SIT Brazil: Amazon Resource Management and Human Ecology. She co-organized the Macalester campus 2008 Focus the Nation event, and served as the Midwest Outreach Coordinator for the 2009 National Teach-In on Global Warming Solutions. She presently also works part-time as a communications consultant for Our Task. Her other interests include book-making, science fiction, yoga, and hiking.
Robert vanWaarden, Photographer, 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.
Project Survival Media also has a list of team leaders, that can be found here.
I am trying to get hold of Juan Hoffmaister. My organisation is working on climate change adaptation in the southern africa region with a particular slant towards water/health/food security and energy.
We would like to make contact with Juan and derive value in some of the stories from areas that he is visiting in Africa. We are based in Cape Town, South Africa.