Underground Workshop: Youth Lobby(ists): profiles of student climate activists

Lily Terry, center, and Jenna Hirschman, second from left, speak about climate change at the Vermont Statehouse last May. Photo by Mariah Keagy

Anna Hoppe is a student at the University of Vermont working with the Underground Workshop, a network of student journalists partnering with Community News Service.

Every year, hundreds of students fill the Statehouse lawn in May to advocate about climate change.

 “Just being able to see that people will show up is really amazing,” Jenna Hirschman, a member of Youth Lobby, said. Hirschman and other Youth Lobby activists not only keep showing up, but they are also creating opportunities for others to join them.

Youth Lobby is a group for youth from around Vermont that advocates for climate change-related legislation. Youth Lobby is run by VEEP, the Vermont Energy Education Program. 

This year, Youth Lobby has held multiple Lobby Days at the Vermont Statehouse. They’ve advocated for a group of bills called the Common Agenda, which are promoted by multiple statewide environmental organizations. 

Hirschman, a 12th grader at Essex High School, spoke about Youth Lobby’s goals for the first Lobby Day of the session, which occurred in January. About 15 students attended.

“It was [about] reminding legislators that we were there and listening to what they were doing,” she said. “And we also did advocate a little bit for a couple of bills such as Make Big Oil Pay, [the climate superfund bill].”

This year, Youth Lobby advocated for an update to Vermont’s Renewable Energy Standard and the Bottle Bill, as well as bans on toxic chemicals like PFAS and flood relief measures.

Hirschman emphasized the importance of being present in the Statehouse to advocate for these policies, and added that it’s less intimidating than people may think.

“It’s a very neighborhood-ly situation where they’re doing it because they want to help a community, which is the same thing we’re doing,” she said. “I also know my personal legislators pretty well. And there’s a lot of people who have a family friend or a family friend’s friend … in the Statehouse.”

Similarly, people in Hirschman’s school community drew her into activism. She first joined an activism-related club in 9th grade because the teacher advisor was her favorite teacher.

“Around the same time, I joined the Vermont Anti-Racism Network where I met a student who was a junior at the time, who then introduced me to like 18 different clubs and organizations, including Youth Lobby,” she said. Hirschman also now runs multiple clubs at her school.

Hirschman was a youth fellow for much of her time working with Youth Lobby. She received a stipend for administrative work like sending emails, working on social media and planning meetings. Now that she’s no longer the youth fellow, she describes her role as more “relaxed,” but she’s still involved with planning and social media work.

She’s most proud of Youth Lobby’s annual Rally for the Planet event. Last year, she had a bigger role planning that event.

The Rally for the Planet is planned and held at a busy time for students, when they’re taking AP tests and have other school events, Hirschman said.

“It’s always difficult to get people that want to plan events. And so being able to pull that off obviously, is amazing,” she said. “There’s definitely things that can be improved, but for an event [mostly] planned by like five teenagers [I] think it was pretty cool.”

These events have inspired Hirschman to continue her work.

“[In 10th grade,] like 800 students showed up, and being able to look out and see 800 students attending an event that exists because students are passionate about climate change and advocacy is really, really inspiring,” she said. 

While Rally for the Planet motivates Hirschman, it can also be a source of frustration for her.

“Everyone wants to attend the event, but nobody wants to plan it,” she said. “It’s difficult when you and one [other] person are the only ones who show up for a meeting. It makes it hard to want to continue because it takes a lot of energy to be an activist.”

She acknowledged that a lot of people who care and show up for events are “completely maxed out” and can’t spend more time on activism, but that it makes it hard for those who are consistently engaged. 

“Something we have that’s amazing, that I love about Vermont, is that you can make a difference because of how small we are,” she said. “Legislators really want to hear from people… [But] it can be hard, especially when you are so passionate about something, to take a step back.”

School comes first for Hirschman, but she has also “learned a lot” from activism. It’s how she decided that she will be studying political science at American University in Washington, and how she gained skills like meeting facilitation and speech writing that she plans to keep using throughout her life.

“I’ve learned that you’re able to make a change, even if you’re just one person,” she said. “At 18 years old, at 15 years old, at 21 years old. It doesn’t matter. You can still make a difference. Even with not very much time.”

Tasks like text-banking and phone-banking, where you text or call people about supporting legislation or otherwise supporting an organization, can be very impactful without taking a lot of energy, Hirschman said.

“[We’re taught] that your worth is dependent on how much you do, how well you do, how much effort you put into something. And that just isn’t true,” she said.

Hirschman has learned that her worth as an activist doesn’t solely rely on how much time she spends. Instead, she focuses on where she can have an impact.

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Lily Terry, a 12th grader at Hanover High School in New Hampshire, is another student involved with Youth Lobby. She has also been a student representative on the Vermont Climate Council since 2022. 

The Vermont Climate Council was established by the state legislature for the purpose of creating the first Climate Action Plan by December of 2021 and every four years after. They are currently working on the next version of the Climate Action Plan.

“My role is to make sure that the youth voice is heard and represented in the discussions that we have as a council,” she said. 

Terry thinks that the Vermont Climate Council is important for keeping climate change as a focus for the state government, particularly by passing recommendations on how to cut greenhouse gas emissions. 

“Without the Climate Council this is an issue that would probably be set aside within the legislature,” she said. “Especially right now, climate change should be at the forefront of everyone’s thoughts…and there’s a lot of legislation that still needs to be passed.”

The Vermont Climate Council is made up of people with a wide range of expertise, from energy to agriculture. 

“A lot of the conversations are co-opted by a small group of people,” she said. “There are a lot of people whose voices are mainly heard through votes.”

While she thinks it’s good to try to include a wide range of opinions and sectors, she also acknowledged that it makes it harder to include everyone in all conversations. A lack of technical knowledge can be a barrier to engaging in a discussion. However, the Vermont Climate Council is working to provide more support for the youth representatives by pairing them with people who have technical experience.

Terry’s work in agriculture has given her first-hand experience of some of the threats that climate change poses to the state.

“I think that that really helps remind me why I’m doing this,” she said. “[The flooding last summer] caused so many farmers to lose their crops, and they lost so much money, and being able to witness that firsthand has just really motivated me to keep doing this even when it’s hard and doesn’t really feel like we’re gonna get any work done.”

Terry has been passionate about climate activism since middle school, and she applied to the Vermont Climate Council after her mother saw an article in Seven Days.

“[In] middle school, my teacher gave a presentation to my class on the ways that climate change is impacting the world. And it really [was] alarming to me,” she said. “And nobody else seemed to care, which made me really mad. So this is like something I’ve been really passionate about since then.”

Before joining the Vermont Climate Council, she attended Youth Lobby’s annual Rally for the Planet and organized a rally of her own in 8th grade.

“Some of the schools around us were taking kids to the big march in Burlington or to marches in Boston, and my school wasn’t really doing anything. So I decided that I was going to organize a walkout,” she said. “That was probably my first step into climate activism.”

Through the Vermont Climate Council, she got connected with other opportunities at the Vermont Energy Education Program and Youth Lobby. 

“I would say that [Youth Lobby] takes most of my activism time at the moment,” she said. “We’re in the process of organizing this year’s Rally for the Planet, which is on May 23.”

Seeing people show up for events like Rally for the Planet or the Lobby Day that Youth Lobby planned on March 29, which was attended by 50 students, is the most rewarding part of activism for Terry.

“If we could engage more students, it would be amazing because the main feedback that we hear whenever we host these events in the State House is that seeing the students really influences legislation,” she said.

Terry said that it’s “very easy” for students to get involved.

“You don’t have to be a part of an organization, you can also just get started in your community,” she said. “I have also been a part of my town solid waste commission, where we tried to help increase knowledge about town recycling. And I think things like that are really accessible to students. They’re always very happy to see someone young and someone that cares about these issues.”

She has also found a way to balance activism with other parts of her life.

“I’m someone who really likes to be busy, but I’m also a pretty organized person,” she said. “I make time to hang out with my friends while also scheduling meetings after sports during the week. I think that [it’s also helpful that] a lot of the work I’m doing for Youth Lobby is stuff I can do on my own so I can really kind of fit it in when I have free time.”

Terry plans to continue being involved in climate activism and study soil science in college in order to learn about land-based solutions to climate change. 

“I definitely want to focus more on physical science…versus the policy,” she said. “As much as it is interesting, it’s also pretty frustrating sometimes. 

The slow speed of the government at a state and national level has frustrated Terry. 

“There’s so many policies that could have been passed if people stopped prioritizing money over the well-being of us and our planet, and that makes me really mad,” she said.

Terry has turned that frustration into motivation.

I see that there’s still so much that needs to be done,” she said. “And it really keeps motivating me to push to get legislation passed and just to make our world a more sustainable and better place.”

While Terry is leaving the Vermont Climate Council, she’s excited to see students take her place. She spoke at the Youth Environmental Summit in Barre this fall and was “really excited” after hearing how much younger students care about climate change.

“It’s great to see that the people in my class who are graduating now won’t be the last people to talk about this,” she said. “There are people who are going to keep fighting after us.”

This story, one in a six-part package on student activism, was produced during the recently completed school year.