Skills development and career considerations for young adult climate activists in Cape Town and Philadelphia

• In Event: The climate crisis and learning and development: some global perspectives

Proposal

This paper interrogates the relationship between learning and climate change through the experience of young adult climate organizers, based in two research sites: Cape Town (South Africa) and Philadelphia (USA). Based on semi-structured interviews with 20 young adult climate activists (YACA) in each city, this study uses the context of learning within social movements to contribute to the research on skills development and professionalization outside formal learning spaces such as schools and universities.

Drawing on 40 semi-structured qualitative interviews with YACA who hold a variety of positions (full-time staff, interns, and volunteers) across over 20 climate-change focused organizations, this paper examines two core research questions:
How have experiences with climate organizing shaped young adults’ ideas around professional identity, skills development, and career pathways?
What place-based distinctions and similarities emerge in these two globally connected cities?

Interviews were conducted with participants between 18 and 35 years old who had lived in their city for at least 1 year and been actively involved in some form of climate activism or advocacy for a minimum of 6 months since 2019. Not all organizers were primarily employed in sustainability or environmental work. Cape Town and Philadelphia were selected as research sites because of the authors’ existing access to social movement communities, as well as the cities' comparatively similar rankings across four waves of data analyzing 700-plus cities’ global influence within a World Society Theory framework. Interview data is supplemented with questionnaire data detailing participants' socio-economic positions, voting behavior, and educational and residential histories. These additional variables reveal a level of heterogeneity, particularly across categories of class and the types of educational institutions that participants have attended. In doing so, this work contributes to our understanding of youth social movement involvement in a manner that goes beyond the common conflation of “youth activists” and “student activists.”

Preliminary findings suggest that while the existential nature of the climate crisis is a strong motivator in the career decisions of Philadelphia-based organizers, organizers in Cape Town express a much less issue-specific orientation to solidarity and environmental justice, with career decisions being guided primarily by economic opportunities and constraints. A second finding points to the importance of organizing experience, particularly for young adults with non-traditional K-12 educational trajectories, for participants’ decisions about a) their decision to continue education (or not), and b) the types of careers they are likely to pursue. While many organizers’ experiences support the conventional wisdom that views the university/college experience as a critical precursor to political advocacy and activism, participants in both cities describe how out-of-school-based climate organizing shaped the development of critical writing, communication, and community engagement skills that inform decisions about, and access to, career opportunities. A final preliminary finding indicates that, among those who stay in activist roles long term, patterns indicated that the existence of professionalized organizing or advocacy opportunities, together with the social relationships formed through movement work, made more of a difference in their commitment to stay involved than direct exposure to, or experiences of, climate harms.

Author

• Rehana Odendaal, GSE, University of Pennsylvania