Student Ambassadors

Silicon Valley Youth Climate Strike (SVYCS) and California Youth Climate Strike (CAYCS)

As an outreach lead on the SVYCS, my team and I created a program called Student Ambassadors (previously called strike ambassadors) where we teach members how to conduct outreach effectively and efficiently.

We initiated and started this program back in February of 2020. At the beginning, there were little to no sign-ups. Then we started to change our strategy by creating graphics, spreading the message on our platforms, and first-handedly recruiting members. By doing this, for the first couple of days, about 10 students signed up. We realized that we were doing the right thing and after consistently applying this strategy, we got more than 25 students from all over the Bay Area! We were ecstatic! In order to take care of logistics and to make sure everything runs smoothly, we had daily calls to plan ahead and manage this team. After creating this program, we pitched our idea to the national team (United States Youth Climate Strike [USYCS]), and it became widely used in every state/region.

Because this program was initiated in February, we were still planning to have in-person strikes. However, that was the case due to the COVID-19 shutdown. Immediately, we restructured and change the focus from “strike ambassadors” to “student ambassadors.”

At first, this program was hard to manage. It was hard to keep track of everyone, and to make sure no one was missing out on anything. Of course, there were unresponsive members, so I contacted our national director of USYCS to see how to combat this issue. This is when we came up with the idea of “Appointment Day.” Like how a doctor meets up with different people, the outreach team and I all had “appointments” with the different teams we assigned. This caused the members to feel more obligated to come, which helped reduced absences a lot.

Throughout this experience, I learned how to effectively reach out, manage a team and how to manage unresponsive users. I also realized the importance of reaching out to other people and the power of learning from your peers, as communication is a key in running a team. Communication however comes with observation. You want to observe, and then execute efficiently since you don’t want to work busily for no reason. Last but not least, difficulties are in the nature of starting a new team, and when you’re determined to do the right thing, the most important thing is to never give up and to never give in even with difficulties.