By having friends and family sponsor them in this activism, participants are raising money for the YEA Camp Scholarship Fund. The scholarship fund is a core tenet of the mission of YEA Camp. It makes camp accessible for all who want to be there. In the past decade, we have trained over 1,000 activists. None of that would be possible without the support of our donors.

This summer alone, YEA Camp gave financial aid to 51 of the 100 participants to a total of $66,400 worth of aid!

Triple the Impact

This year’s Volunteer-a-Thon is an opportunity to pay that gift forward. By giving to YEA Camp, you give a young person the gift of camp. You allow us to activate them with the knowledge, skills, confidence, and community that they need to make a bigger difference in this world. By participating in or donating to the Volunteer-a-Thon, you become a champion for someone’s activism. 

Thanks to two generous donors, we are making your dollars walk a little farther this year. From now until the end of the year, all Volunteer-a-Thon donations will be TRIPLED. Where else can you invest $20 and see $60 raised to support young changer makers?

Sometimes, though, it’s hard to quantify what that looks like. That’s why we’ve invited two time YEA Camper and Volunteer-a-Thon participant, Mia Jay-Pachirat to share her story. 

What YEA Camp Means to Mia Jay-Pachirat

Hello! My name is Mia. I’m 17 and have gone to YEA Camp for two years now.  I love it. Last year, my Issue of Importance (IOI) was climate change, and my action plan was to create an art zine, all based around solutions to climate change based in New York City, where I live. (Note: A zine is a small-circulation self-published work of original or appropriated texts and images).

Through the Volunteer-a-thon, I have been working on this zine, and I’ve started to plan out the skeleton of it. I am hoping that next month I can start making it! I am thankful for YEA Camp for giving me this opportunity to pursue my passion because otherwise, I wouldn’t have the knowledge and the community to effectively pursue what I wanted to do.

YEA Camp has allowed so many kids to learn how to fight for the world we live on. This is so important because currently not a lot of adults in the government are fighting for what the youth is going to have to live with for many years to come. I think YEA Camp allows youth to make sure that they have the tools themselves to change the world and to right the wrongs that adults have made and continue to make.

I know, personally, that through YEA Camp I have become a much stronger and passionate activist than I ever was before. I’ve learned how to talk to people I don’t know about issues that concern me and how to do that in a positive, helpful way. Additionally, the friends you make at YEA Camp are the best friends you will ever make. YEA Camp friends care about issues that you care about, and they understand what it’s like to struggle with explaining yourself to others that don’t think the same way.

Mia’s Project

So on to my zine! My basic idea for my action plan was to start creating a zine, mass-produce it, and then hand it out on the streets of New York. That didn’t work out because of school and schedule conflicts with my going through the college process. But after talking to my art teacher and making up a plan with her, she’s allowing me to do my zine in art class during the school day. I’m going to start producing a magazine next week. I have everything planned out and I am super excited.

By donating and creating a page for the Volunteer-a-Thon you’re helping so many kids have the opportunity to come to the wonderful, wonderful YEA Camp. Please, if you can donate, share a page. or even create one that would mean the world! To learn more about my project, click here.

Support YEA Camp

To support Mia and the other members of the YEA Camp community, click here. You can read more about her project and others or even create your own page. 

If you are able, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to YEA Camp this year. Your dollar will go three times as far thanks to our generous matching donors.

Interested in joining us at camp next year? We recently announced the dates for YEA Camp 2020 and are currently running an Early Bird special. Register by the end of the year to receive $250 off your registration. Do you know someone who would be great for camp? Nominate them here!

• Youth Camp: in Ventura, California (July 5 – 12) and Charlton, Massachusetts (August 1 – 8)
• Adult Camp: in Lanoka Harbor, New Jersey (July 18 – 24)

The post YEA Campers Triple Impact through Volunteer-a-Thon appeared first on YEA Camp.

I began September’s Climate Strike at a church packed with teenagers and their chaperones, and wondered if I was the only non-religious person there. St. Paul’s Chapel of Trinity, a quick walk from Foley Square, opened their space, gave free breakfast and paint and cardboard to all of us. I met up with a dear friend and some teens she was chaperoning from her church. She was busy fulfilling her role as a family minister, referring to everyone present as “Friend.” I was busy making small talk with some folks in collars, wondering if they could sense my unbelonging. 

Youth rally at the 2019 Climate Strike in New York City

I have always been fearful that in religious spaces people are able to immediately pick up on my lack of faith, a non-believer in their midst. Yet as I carried this grain of insecurity with me, I had to stop and consider that a protest and a service aim to achieve the same goals. A protest unifies, as any service aims to do. A protest reminds us what we have to fight for, and why it matters. The environment that can get our otherwise isolated selves to wish peace on our neighbors is the same one that has us teaching and learning new chants and showing the 6 year-olds how to use a megaphone. A protest grounds us, pushes us to construct the world we want to be part of.

As I reflect on that day, I can not help but realize that the climate strike restored my commitment to compassion in the face of uncertainty.

And that feels a lot like faith to me. I’ve never been to a church service that I connected with, that is, until I attended the climate strike. Beginning my day at church set the tone but since that day I have been thinking a lot about the holy nature of direct action.

Thousands of people marching for their future in New York City

I do not mean to assign strict religious meaning or symbolism to the dedicated organizing of these youth. I mean only to say that they reoriented my own thinking, and helped me to remember that the affiliation or community we may lack within a particular faith can be found in movement organizing, and the unifying force of a cause worth fighting for. 

What I found particularly impactful is that the youth do not hesitate to be honest.

While the truth of the climate crisis is without a doubt overwhelming, I’ve found that adults respond to it by thinking within our systems, retreating it always seems, to market-based solutions. Constrained by what is in front of us, what we understand, sometimes it can feel like adults lack the imagination to tackle a problem so large. But these teenagers, they believe in what they do not yet see. They believe in the possibility of a new, different, and just world.

Youth, whether because of their lack of formal status within larger systems, or because of the sheer uncertainty of their futures, give us all the permission to think outside of the system. Whereas all too many adults look to the market to correct what the market has bore, the children are thinking differently. Their ears are to the ground, and the sky, to the forest floor and the sidewalk, they are listening to the environment, not the invisible hand. Their minds are not constrained to the market, and to face this problem, our minds must not be constrained to the market either.

We should watch closely as the children believe in a world system they can not yet see, and take this as a lesson in applied faith. 

Greta Thunberg, speaking at Battery Park said, “This is the biggest climate strike in the history of the world.”

As an activist, I have often been intimidated away from action by my own perceived lack of knowledge. When I let fear control my actions, I never end up acting, I stay quiet and convinced I do not belong. I would bet most of us feel this way from time to time. Yet, on that Friday, only a year since Greta Thunberg began striking, alone, outside of the Swedish Parliament, between 6 and 7 million people worldwide joined her. We alone are fearful, but together we are certain. What the youth reminded me was that expertise is not a substitute for emotion. Facts do not always convince us the way that fear does.

The voices of the youth are clear — they do not get a future if we do not change our world.

NYC public school students (1.1 million of them) were excused from classes on Friday to participate in the Climate Strike.

And this month, I was honored to stand amongst them, when chanting carried the weight of hymnal, and we were all invited to imagine a different future. 

No one here had to be a scientist to become a leader. We only had to understand that the climate crisis will unify us, whether it be as quiet victims or as rising activists. It is not the responsibility of the youth to lead us, or present us with solutions. But we may all be better off by observing their abandon, the force of their determination, their willingness to show up, as experts or not. And we will all be better off by realizing that the community we seek may be right in front of us, on the picket line, or the school strike. That the collective imagining of a just world is a worthy, and holy project.

The children and teenagers at the climate strike push us to think outside of our worlds, breaking down the walls of an economic system that works for so few. The children and teenagers of the climate strike push us to turn to our neighbor, and wish for peace in the form of a call to action. 

About the Activist:

Maggie Berke is a postpartum doula invested in the fight for comprehensive reproductive justice. She has a background in LGBT+ advocacy and education, and lives in Brooklyn. In her free time, she is writing poetry or participating in theatre projects. You can find her @goldenhourpostpartum and @maybemaggiewill on Instagram. 

Maggie attended YEA Camp for Adults in Summer 2019. We are so grateful she joined us.

Maggie is one of many former campers and staff members to partake in the 2019 Climate Strike. Check out this recent blog post about other YEA Camp Alumni who lead Climate Strikes in their communities. We are so proud of every camp member who takes what they learn at camp and uses it to make a bigger impact in whatever way makes sense for them.

If you’d like to learn more about how to advocate for environmental justice and other causes you care about, join us at YEA Camp for teens or YEA Camp for Adults. We will be announcing our 2020 summer dates soon. Looking to add to your activist tool belt in the meantime? Click here to download our free ebook, The Beginner’s Guide to Changing the World!

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