Meet Katie Eder, the 19-Year-Old Coordinating a Powerful Wave of Youth-Led Climate Action

“Activism in general was always just sort of a part of how I grew up,” said 19-year-old Katie Eder. “My upbringing was steeped in the Jewish faith, and there's this phrase in the Jewish community called ‘tikkun olam,’ which basically means ‘repairing the world’, and that was a central concept for me growing up: that we have an obligation as people to help other people.”

The week of September 20, people all over the world will be mobilizing to demand transformative action be taken by the world’s governments to address the climate crisis. The US Youth Climate Strike Coalition is calling on adults to join young people in striking, and organizers expect it to be the largest day of climate mobilization in US and global history. As the executive director of the Future Coalition, Katie is playing a big part in this.

To understand the US Youth Climate Strike Coalition, the Future Coalition, and Katie Eder, we have to back up a little bit.

For the past six years, Katie’s been active in the space of youth organizing, starting in her hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At 13, she founded a not-for-profit, Kids Tales, to bring writing workshops to kids who don't typically get writing experiences outside of school. In 2018, she organized 50 Miles More, a nationwide campaign to engage with elected officials to end gun violence. Now she’s living in Los Angeles, taking a gap year to focus on activism before attending Stanford University in Fall 2020.

To Katie, youth organizing can be thought of in terms of what was before March For Our Lives and what came after. After all, the movement led by survivors of the Parkland shooting was hugely influential for youth-led action, and it helped inspire several other movements to take shape and demand their own kind of change, Katie and 50 Miles More being one of them.

But with all of those youth-led groups -- whether newly formed or newly energized -- how would they work together to maintain the momentum of youth protest? Enter the Future Coalition.

“We just realized that there was a pretty big gap in the youth organizing space. There were all these amazing youth-led organizations doing all this really awesome work, but nobody knew each other, and nobody was talking to each other, which was preventing us from collaborating and making the biggest impact possible.” Katie said. “The idea of the Future Coalition came about initially to provide a connective tissue between youth-led organizations and young people making change in their communities, and also provide resources that traditionally have only been available for adult organizers.”

As a trial-run for the organizing power of the Future Coalition, the group set out for an ambitious goal: to mobilize thousands of young people to walk out of their classrooms on Election Day and show up in huge numbers to vote in the 2018 midterms.

And on November 6, 2018, they did exactly that.

Today, over 30 organizations are members of the Future Coalition, including March For Our Lives, Sunrise Movement, and Zero Hour. As executive director, Katie is spearheading the coalition’s latest project, which started with the call for Global Climate Strikes on September 20.

“We were involved in the March 15 climate strikes. When the strikes were announced for September, it was pretty clear that it was going to be a different scale and size than strikes had been in the past, and the energy from adult-led organizations and youth-led organizations alike was a lot greater,” said Katie. “Because it comes three days before the Climate Summit at the UN in New York, it was also clear that all eyes were going to be on the US. The Future Coalition team knew that a lot of the youth climate groups specifically have worked very siloed from each other and really haven't had space for collaboration."

"We knew it was going to be really important for young people to be unified for this to have the greatest impact possible. We needed our collective power for this to be as powerful as we want it to be.”

With this in mind, the Future Coalition created an extension to their organization, the US Youth Climate Strike Coalition, dedicated to creating and executing a cohesive message and vision for the September 20 strikes in the US.

One of the things that Katie and her fellow organizers wanted to avoid was adult-led organizations co-opting the movement (along with a phenomenon they refer to as “adult-splaining”). Climate action in the past few years has been decidedly youth-led, and the coalition wanted to ensure that the demands continued to come from young people.

That doesn’t mean that the Youth Climate Strike Coalition is acting alone. It’s actually doing something a little different when it comes to intergenerational collaboration.

“Up until now, I think there's sort of been two lanes of the climate movement. Over the past year, with the strike movement in the US and the rise of the Green New Deal, there's been this new energy around climate,” Katie said. “But there's also been the space that's been taken up over the last many decades by organizations like NRDC and Sierra Club and more of those traditional environmental groups. And those two lanes had really not come together.”

That is, until now. The Youth Climate Strike Coalition works with many adult-led organizations to collaborate on everything as it relates to the strikes. From social media and public relations to data and creative engagement, working committees are headed by both youth and adult representatives -- a unique intergenerational approach that still places young people at the forefront of these conversations.

“We're using September 20 as an opportunity to match the energy and passion and media spotlight that young people have in the climate movement right now with the infrastructure and foundation that so many folks have been laying down over the last many many decades so that we’re creating the most powerful movement possible,” Katie said.

“We're really looking at September 20 not just as a culmination of all the work that's already been done but really as a launch for all the work that is going to continue to be done until we see the solutions that we need to save the planet.”

And the Youth Climate Strike Coalition isn’t afraid to do things a little differently than their predecessors. For one thing, Katie hopes the September 20 strikes serve as a start to diversify and open up the climate movement. The member organizations are working locally with groups like Black Lives Matter Youth and the International Indigenous Youth Council to make sure that as the movement works towards solutions, people who are disproportionately affected by climate change have a seat at the table.

“I think young people are very innovative in their ways of thinking and in their ideas for change. That really is where the power lies -- young people see solutions over problems,” said Katie.

“As bad as the world is, and as bad as the world can get, young people still have that hope and that fight in them. I think that allows us to be the drivers of change in a way that adults might not always be able to.”

So what are the solutions that the Youth Climate Strike Coalition is proposing? Their demands include the passing of a Green New Deal, respect of Indigenous land and sovereignty, and justice for communities displaced by the climate crisis.

“September 20 is a choice, right? Are we going to choose money and power, or are we going to choose us? Are we going to choose the kids? Are we going to choose the future?” Katie asked. “Every single person, whether you're an individual, an elected official, or an executive at a company, you have a choice to make, and September 20 is the invitation to make that choice.”

(Find events, read demands, and connect with the US Youth Climate Strike at #strikewithus. Find global information at Global Climate Strikes.)