Katie & White House Advisor Call Joe Manchin

Katie, 16-year-old climate leader Alexandria Villaseñor and 19-year-old White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council member Jerome Foster call Senator Joe Manchin and ask him to stop blocking the Infrastructure and reconciliation bills.

At the age of 13, Alexandria Villaseñor () cofounded the U.S. Youth Climate Strike movement, part of the youth led international Fridays for Future movement. Now, at the age of 16, Alexandria has become an internationally recognized environmental activist, public speaker, author and founder of several more initiatives, including the climate education focused nonprofit, Earth Uprising International. She has addressed the Democratic National Convention, the United Nations and the World Economic Forum. She is a contributing author to All We Can Save, an anthology of women climate leaders, and a child petitioner for the groundbreaking international complaint to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, Children vs. Climate Crisis. Alexandria serves on the advisory board for the national climate policy platform Evergreen Action, is a youth spokesperson and advisor for the American Lung Association, and she is the youngest Junior Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences. For her work, Alexandria has received the Earth Day Network Youth Leadership Award, The Rachel Carson Environmental Justice Award, the Common Good American Spirit Changemaker award and was included on Politico’s top 100 people influential in climate change policy list.

Jerome Foster II () is an environmental activist, voting rights advocate, and emerging technology programmer. He was elected as the youngestever White House Advisor in United States History in 2021, now serving on President Joe Biden’s White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. Based in New York City, but born and raised in Washington DC, he served as an intern for the late Honorable Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis and served as Board Member for the Washington DC State Board of Education throughout his high school years. As a voting rights advocate he is the Executive Director of OneMillionOfUs which educates and mobilizes young people to register and turn out to vote.

With regards to his educational background: Jerome Foster II studied International Environmental Governance, Policy, and Social Justice at Harvard University and was invited to speak at the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights for his research on the link between Human & Environmental Rights. Jerome helped to pass the Clean Energy DC Act of 2018 (one of the most comprehensive decarbonization bills being implemented in the nation). He is one of the lead organizers of the Fridays For Future youth climate strike movement holding weekly climate strikes in front of the White House and Harvard University for over 80 weeks. For the first climate strike in February 2019, he mobilized 400 students from his school and took a citywide leadership role in organizing climate strikes and speaking out about climate justice issues in rallies and town halls. Later on, he began working alongside Jane Fonda to kickstart Fire Drill Fridays in front of the U.S. Capitol and also rallied Harvard University to divest from fossil fuels which they announced in September of 2021 that they will be achieving.

His experience in climate activism extends further via his work with National Geographic, where we journey across the island of Iceland as a Climatology Researcher and Virtual Reality Developer. Before his time as an activist, he coded civic-based 3D Virtual Reality Environments. Later in his 9th-grade year, winning the World Series of Entrepreneurship for creating a civic-based virtual reality organization called TAU VR.

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