Climate Solutions Innovation Forum The FES Effect: Youth Leadership with Lasting Impact
Event Details
In an era of evolving environmental and social challenges, how do visionary organizations like Finance Engage Sustain (FES), a youth-led and youth-serving organization, emerge as powerful leaders? And what can they teach both aspiring and established environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs)?
This panel dives into the story behind FES—not just what they do but how they got here—providing insights into their journey from a grassroots initiative engaging 500 schools, 400 towns, and 100,000 youth in Indigenous, rural, and remote areas from 2016 to 2020, to its new era as a youth-led support structure that has provided $1.5M to support the scaling and implementation of over 151 youth-led projects, leveraging an additional $4.5M through training and wrap-around support. Throughout its years, FES has maintained its youth-led nature and community roots.
Hear from FES youth leaders as they reflect on key milestones, share strategies for establishing trust with the communities they serve, and discuss the delicate balance of scaling impact without losing sight of grassroots values. Attendees will gain practical insights on founding and sustaining a mission-driven organization, from recruiting allies and board members to developing robust feedback mechanisms. Whether you’re starting out, scaling up, or reimagining your organization’s impact, this session offers a roadmap to redefining environmental leadership and fostering meaningful change.
The Climate Solutions Innovation Forum is a multi-year program that highlights newer innovative environmental nonprofits who share the story to inspire emerging leaders and/or to expose seasoned leaders to new ways of affecting change and reaching new audiences. CSIF shines a light on less traditional policy-oriented NGOs, youth led organizations as well as recently emerged culturally-focused ENGOs mostly at the fringes of the mainstream.
We thank the Ivey Foundation for their funding support of this series.
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