Dear Community Members,

As 2024 comes to a close, we feel incredibly grateful for this community and all we’ve accomplished together. This year, we celebrated 5 years since the founding of SUTE. What started out as a grassroots campaign led by a small group of youth has now grown into an impressive coordination of over 30 youth working across the country to advance intersectional environment and climate justice alongside the support of a dedicated community of tens of thousands of everyday citizens. It’s inspiring to reflect on all of the social justice wins that have happened in the last 5 years, and I’m proud of the role that SUTE has played in helping to advance them.  

As a co-founder, I’ve worn many hats in the organization – campaigning to promote informed voting ahead of the 2019 federal election, creating accessible online resources on political, environmental and social justice issues, directly co-leading our engagements in the Sue Big Oil and Youth Climate Corps campaigns which SUTE partnered on in the last year, leading our highly successful pilot program to connect youth with opportunities to engage in more coalitions, networks and collective actions to advance climate justice local to them (called Shake Up Your Community) and most recently overseeing our over-$100k annual organizational budget as the Chief Finance Officer. It is with great excitement that I share my transition to our Board of Directors as Treasurer as of January 2025, where I will continue to support the incredible work of this organization, particularly during a time of great growth. Throughout this experience, I’ve been most proud to see the collective power of youth coming together to advocate for their right to thriving, livable futures, despite the challenges they face in access to funding and representation in decision making spaces. As an Indigenous youth myself, of Simpcw First Nation, I’m also incredibly proud of climate justice progress that has resulted from Indigenous-led land defense efforts, and I’m proud of our intercultural, multi-faith and ethnically-diverse team at SUTE for continuing to find pathways of solidarity, allyship and connection to champion the work of Indigenous leaders, alongside other marginalized communities’ work in this space.  

This transition has given me time to reflect upon my founding journey with SUTE, and the incredibly meaningful twists and turns that have led us to this joyous 5-year mark. In 2019, my fellow co-founders and I were having conversations upon our fears ahead of the upcoming federal election. We were tired of the political spin and disinformation that was contributing to polarization and hyperpartisanship, and simultaneously we were alarmed at the increasing lack of civic engagement and desire to get involved in community organizing. At the core of our views was the belief that upholding democracy requires everyday citizens to view it as their responsibility to care for what is happening in their communities, societies and environments. This, alongside helping to increase civic engagement through collaborative, community-led actions, we wanted to create something that was inclusive of people from all backgrounds and political ideologies– an antidote to the divisive rhetoric spun by populism and other us-vs-them partisanism. These were the underlying values of our first get-out-the-vote campaign in 2019, and these same values continue to inform our work ahead of the upcoming federal election in 2025. 

Many of our founding team members’ origins were in community organizing efforts addressing poverty and wealth inequality, using intersectional feminism approaches towards gender-based violence and health inequities, as well as supporting sustainable agriculture and food security efforts. My fellow co-founder Manvi and I had been organizing together for a variety of social justice issues years before SUTE’s founding. We designed and oversaw many impactful campaigns, and we clocked many, many hours tabling and canvassing where we developed and practiced the skills needed to effectively engage community members across the political spectrum. These are the skills we hope to continue to foster amongst the emerging generation of young activists. Throughout all of this work, Manvi and I would also make time to champion campaigns to support community-identified needs, such as menstrual product drives for our local women’s shelter, or hosting awareness-raising events such as the health inequities conference we organized in 2019, which we featured speakers such as Dr. Karen Hill (Six Nations), who spoke on the intergenerational impacts of settler-colonialism upon the health and wellbeing of Indigenous communities. Moving beyond direct action, we simultaneously worked to address change at a more systemic level– such as by scheduling meetings with our MP to discuss efforts to support the advancement of opportunities for women, particularly newcomers, in STEM careers. All this to say, our experiences in organizing have spanned many social issues, and as a result, we have always seen environmental issues as interconnected with deeper systemic inequities. Given this, one of our goals throughout this process has always been to leverage our experiential knowledge to help shift the environmental movement’s narrative away from single-issue environmentalism, and instead towards intersectional, anti-colonial environment and climate justice.

At SUTE, we offer infiltration points for youth to get involved in climate justice advocacy, but evermore increasingly youth engagement is restricted by the affordability crisis (for example, a record breaking 2 mill. people visited food banks in Canada in March 2024, 33% of which were youth). In the face of an uncertain future, many of us feel like activism isn’t a choice but a necessity. While there is a growing new wave of “climate philanthropy” in so-called Canada (for example, the Canadian Philanthropic Commitment on Climate Change and the Climate Champions Initiative), youth-led climate justice work is still largely underfunded (less than 1% of climate change mitigation funding goes to youth). Without sustained and equitable funding, youth are being forced to choose between present day survival (i.e., working part time to afford food today) and future survival (i.e, volunteering their time to advocate for a livable planet).

The SUTE team is excited to share that in the coming years, we will be able to continue acting on our commitment to providing youth with the opportunities and mentorship needed to engage in non-partisan, community-centred, evidence-informed climate justice advocacy thanks to a generous grant of $450,000 over 3 years from McConnell Foundation. McConnell Foundation has made good on their promise to invest in climate resilient futures for youth, and we’re calling on other members of the Canadian philanthropic space to do the same. To do what we need to do, at the scale we need to do it, there is no question that we continue to need large influxes of funding support above and beyond what is presently available. Young people are ready to fight for their futures, but we need those with the resources to help scale this movement to step up and walk the walk during this most critical window for our healthy, sustainable, thriving futures.  

To find out how we’ll be using these funds to continue to scale up our high-impact work, you can subscribe to our newsletter. And, if you’re able to, we invite you to donate to support our work which will be incredibly important in an election year. Right now, donations over $10 for SUTE via the Small Change Fund platform can receive charitable tax receipts.

Thank you to everyone that has supported SUTE these last 5 years. We’re excited to continue our work in fostering safe and enriching spaces for youth to build thriving, equitable, climate resilient futures over the years to come.

In solidarity,

Taro Halfnight (he/him)

Chief Finance Officer and Co-Founder of Shake Up The Establishment