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The Listen Project: Profiles From the Front Lines of the Youth Climate Movement
ADVOCACY AND MOVEMENT BUILDING
Photo credit: Phoebe Little
In movement building, like other efforts that require creativity and sustained attention, young people are the future. And though they’ve been handed a divided world wracked by climate change and destructive policies, young people are stepping up to these challenges and working to leave the world better than they found it.
How do we know that’s true? Because the Listen Project’s in-depth research shows us.
Supported by the Onion Foundation, the Barr Foundation, and the Broad Reach Foundation, the Listen Project is a research endeavor created by youth for youth, led by the Maine Environmental Education Association (MEEA) and Maine Youth for Climate Justice.
Over the course of more than a year, these researchers gathered insights on the current state of the youth climate movement ecosystem, culminating with an interactive data story map that outlines their key findings. Here’s a close look at the project and the young climate advocates who developed it.
About the Listen Project
The Listen Project team surveyed 123 young people (defined as 14-30 years old) and interviewed an additional 22 who are involved in the climate movement in Maine. With a second survey and series of interviews specifically with youth leaders of climate nonprofits, the researchers dove deep into organizational practices and challenges. They uncovered key aspects of the youth climate movement, including:
- How young people are currently engaging in the movement
- The barriers they’re experiencing to getting involved
- The news sources they’re using to get information on the movement
- The advocacy training opportunities that are available to them
- Organizational details, such as budgets and counties served
These key insights from the research offer a broader view of how young activists are shaping the climate movement and, more importantly, what support they need from Maine organizations.
Three Activists Leading Maine’s Youth
Phoebe Little, Co-Director of Maine Youth for Climate Justice
As a representative for Maine Youth for Climate Justice, Little joined the Listen Project’s working group to help design the survey, synthesize the collected data, and share results.
What were the working group’s primary responsibilities?
Little: We created a plan to circulate the survey to reach young activists across the state. This process included leveraging our personal networks to make sure the survey was able to reach a wide variety of activists involved with a variety of organizations and spanning a large geographic area. Since the publication of the Listen Project’s results and story map, I’ve also worked with members of MEEA’s staff to present our findings at various events and conferences.
How would you describe your experience throughout the project?
Little: It was really interesting to examine quantifiable data against knowledge that I held anecdotally. It was also a great opportunity for young people to design and execute a research project like this. The work strengthened our cross-organizational relationships. One of the main takeaways of the Listen Project was that the youth climate movement needs more collaboration, and our working group felt like a little experiment in what that collaboration might look like.
Did any findings surprise you?
Little: The results showed that 49% of participants self-identified as queer, 20% identified as coming from a racially diverse background, and 14% as disabled. This is important information that should guide how we engage the Maine youth climate movement.
Young people are growing up in an increasingly changing climate. Our world looks different from that of our parents, let alone our grandparents. We’re more powerful as a wide movement of changemakers rather than working individually in a vacuum. The Listen Project allowed us to see where our movement can be strengthened. Hopefully, good will come out of that data.
Laura Bither, Director of JustME for JustUS
In addition to being interviewed for the project, Bither served on the Listen Project’s advisory committee, a board tasked with providing feedback during the survey creation process.
Why do you feel young people’s perspectives are vital to larger climate and environmental activism efforts?
Bither: Young people are closest to both the challenges and the solutions in their communities. Not only do they have the most at stake by decisions being made now, but they’re also deeply underrepresented in decision-making spaces. Young people have the imagination, creativity, and energy to make things happen that older people come to believe are impossible. Young people are leaders of culture change work. We need that desperately when, clearly, what we’ve done up until now has not worked.
Which findings affirmed your understanding of the movement?
Bither: That two of the top issues youth experience are burnout and imposter syndrome was affirming, based on our work. We consistently find that advocacy language is exclusionary for young people without some kind of experience or familiarity with it, and, working in rural Maine, we are so intentional about trying to reach people with plain language who aren’t already participating in the climate movement.
What kind of impact do you think research like this has on climate activism?
Bither: The youth climate movement should be leading discussions on how to change the systems and structures that have gotten us here. I hope this research establishes how under-resourced yet vibrant our movement is, and how much we could achieve with sufficient resources.
Phoebe Dolan, Co-Director of Maine Youth Power
Dolan is a rural climate activist and committed member of Maine’s climate movement who co-founded Maine Youth Power in 2020. She served as an interviewee for the Listen Project, providing insights from both her personal and organizational perspectives.
Tell us a bit about Maine Youth Power.
Dolan: We’re a power-building organization, and our goal is to build power to win human dignity, equity, access, and a livable future across rural Maine. We work in and around elections with young folks to ensure they’re educated and voting. We also have a PAC through which we endorse candidates whose voices we believe will uplift young people’s perspectives and needs. We run radical book clubs, statewide membership meetings, educational opportunities, and communities of practice.
Why do you think it’s important to mobilize young people around climate issues?
Dolan: So many social movements have been led by young people. We know that is a tried-and-true method. Young people will inherit the state, but they leave Maine more than their peers in other states. There’s an effort — and a necessity — for young people to be studying what would make Maine a good place for all of us to live. Young people feel the incredible weight of climate change and the danger of the rise of fascism, so we have to organize young people in order to set the agenda for Maine.
What role does research like the Listen Project play in mobilization efforts?
Dolan: This question has really been on our minds recently. In rural Maine, young people have a clear sense of their experience of what is bad — climate issues, public transit, Palestine, housing. Surveys capture those experiences on a granular level, setting the stage for endorsing candidates that align with those perspectives. We listen to the trail of the data, and we understand the relevance of it to the future of Maine. Then the question becomes, how do we show up and highlight these things as priority issues? How can we use our lane to provide solidarity?
We’ve learned that strategic coalitions are how you win. I want everyone to have the data on what works so we can all understand how to move forward together.