“Climate Cardinals isn’t just about a singular mission, but equipping and empowering others with the knowledge to tackle the unique climate problems all around us.”
~Quincy Alberhasky, Director of Communications at Climate Cardinals and Brown University environmental science student
Typically, the person featured in our newsletter answers a series of questions provided by the Global CO2 Initiative (GCI). However, the format for this feature on Quincy Alberhasky and Climate Cardinals is a little different.
Climate Cardinals is a an international youth-led nonprofit working to make the climate movement more accessible to those who don’t speak English. GCI is a non-profit working to advance carbon capture and utilization as a mainstream solution to climate change. In order to facilitate more dialog between youth-led climate focused nonprofits and academic or technical nonprofits, we each interviewed each other.
GCI’s questions for Quincy are first.
Can you describe Climate Cardinals? How is it unique compared to other youth-led sustainability organizations? Do you have a favorite success story that you’d like to share?
Our founder Sophia Kianni first envisioned Climate Cardinals in middle school on a trip to Iran to visit family. She was shocked to find that she could not see the stars in the sky at night due to excessive pollution. When she spoke to her relatives about this, they were unaware of the environmental problems causing the issue.
So, Sophia looked for articles to show and explain to them the concept of pollution and climate change but needed to translate all of them due to a lack of information in their native language, Farsi. Further digging led Sophia to realize that a vast amount of scientific information, including that related to climate, was only available in English, even though many people who are affected by climate change are not native English speakers. Thus, she created Climate Cardinals (while still in high school!) to translate climate articles.
Sophia’s initial vision for Climate Cardinals was to translate climate information to expand accessibility to those who don’t speak English. Currently, we work in collaboration with Google and Translators Without Borders to produce translated documents, including documents from Yale Climate Connections, UNICEF, UNESCO, and many other organizations.