By IOF alum, Katie Stabb
I recently had the privilege of being a delegate to the US Local Conference of Youth, or LCOY, in Phoenix, Arizona. Also representing It’s Our Future (IOF) were Carissa Chen, Chloe Zhu who will be attending COP 29 in Azerbaijan, and Danica Sun who was with me in Dubai for COP28 and was one of the organizers of LCOY this year. It was great to be with IOF peers in this setting.
At LCOY, over 100 young climate advocates convened to write the annual National Youth Statement on climate change, which is shared at the global COY and ultimately at COP, the UN Climate Summit. The collected LCOY statements are merged into a youth statement submitted to COP leadership.
As a participant in the Reducing Emissions track, I contributed to the crafting of our top demands regarding the US’s role in climate mitigation on both a domestic and international scale. It was nice to participate as one of the younger delegates, as there was no pressure or expectation on me to have the best policy proposals. I felt free to throw out ideas and see what stuck, learning a little and becoming a little more confident each time. I found that I was most helpful in identifying similarities between our asks, since we sometimes had to combine ideas to limit space and total number of demands.
I gained valuable experience working with policy language, as well as with consensus-building within the group. But above all, I got a chance to meet with interesting and insightful advocates from across the country. It was incredible to meet so many like-minded youth and hear both how climate change impacts their community and what work they are doing in their schools or organizations to combat it.