Youth Climate Summits

Aryaana Khan

Aryaana Khan was born and raised in Bangladesh, a country annually submerged underwater as a result of climate change. Shortly after emigrating to New York, she began doing climate advocacy and organizing with various non-profit organizations— and used spoken word poetry to shed light on issues she cares about. She competed at the renowned Apollo Theater, received a spot on the Urban Word slam team, and represented New York at the 2019 Brave New Voices International Poetry Festival. As a 2020 Federal Hall Fellow and Youth Poet Laureate Finalist, she also performed at the New York Historical Society— and started her journey as a teaching artist shortly after. Currently, she is completing her M.A in Environmental Sustainability & Decision Making at St. John's University— while also joyously honing her creative voice!

Center for Environmental Education/PNW BOCES

Center for Environmental Education (CEE) has been a leader in providing unique, cost-effective, and innovative programs to school throughout the Hudson Valley for over 40 years. CEE works with K-12 students and adults by:

• Delivering programs at schools (indoors or outdoors), local parks, or the PNW BOCES campus

• Offering programs to enhance the teaching of the environment, science, social studies, sustainability, and team-building skills

• Facilitating team-building work with students and adults

• Supplying captivating instructional support materials, including live animals and rare artifacts

• Providing dynamic, experienced staff who specialize in classroom-based instruction for ALL children

• Utilizing flexible scheduling to server small or large numbers of participants

Coulter Young Gallery

Coulter Young is a multifaceted artist, illustrator, curator, and educator based in Beacon, NY. Coulter's diverse experience includes illustration, set design, oil painting, assemblage, art curation, and leading community-based art projects. As a member of the Garrison Art Center and an art educator teaching Pre-K through 8th grade at the Garrison school, Coulter actively contributes to the art community. Coulter has also shared artistic insights as a guest lecturer and visiting artist at The Harvey School in Katonah, NY, and as an artist-in-residence at Covenant of the Sacred Heart in Greenwich, CT. Coulter's work has seen the pages of numerous publications, including the American Spectator, Blue Ridge Outdoor Magazine, and Chronogram. Coulter's artistic footprint extends to collaborations with the Latin Grammys, moe., Sony 550, and TransWorld Snowboarding, among others.

Desmond Fish Library

It is the Mission of the Alice Curtis Desmond and Hamilton Fish Library to provide access to the world of social and cultural ideas to the Community by offering a wide variety of materials and programs. The Library has a special mission to young children and their parents to encourage a love of reading and learning. The Library is committed to preserving the integrity of the collections of the Curtis Desmond and Fish Families.

Earth Friends

Earth Friends empowers young children by providing a foundation of education, love, and understanding for our planet and everything it provides us. We support educators with resources, community and collaboration to help young children gain a deeper connection to nature, understand their impact on the world around them, and become empowered to make decisions. The Earth Friends Program, designed for children ages 3-8, builds an infrastructure of environmental literacy that will prepare young children to love and respect our natural and built environments, other people, and their own health and well-being.

Greenburgh Nature Center

The Greenburgh Nature Center’s mission is to inspire passion, curiosity, respect, and action for our natural world. Our 33-acre property includes a woodland preserve with hiking trails, an organic garden, a nature’s discovery playground, a native wildflower meadow, a butterfly arbor, and over 100+ animals. The Greenburgh Nature Center is located at 99 Dromore Rd Scarsdale, NY 10583. 

HDR

Madeline Julian will be joining us to teach about sustainability in the field of architecture. She represents HDR, who specialize in engineering, architecture, environmental and construction services. While HDR is most well-known for adding beauty and structure to communities through high-performance buildings and smart infrastructure, they provide much more than that. They create an unshakable foundation for progress because our multidisciplinary teams also include scientists, economists, builders, analysts and artists. Their employees, working in more than 200 locations around the world, push open the doors to what's possible each and every day. HDR believe that the way they work can add meaning and value to the world. That ideas inspire positive change. That coloring outside the lines can illuminate fresh perspectives. And that small details yield important realizations. Above all, HDR believes that collaboration is the best way forward.

Hudson Highlands Land Trust 

The Hudson Highlands Land Trust is a community-based non-profit land conservation organization devoted to protecting the natural resources, rural character, and scenic beauty of the Hudson Highlands in New York State's Hudson Valley. Over the past thirty-five years, we have permanently conserved thousands of acres of critical habitat, natural landscapes, and unsurpassed scenic resources in our mission area. Protecting and stewarding land is the heart of our mission. The Hudson Highlands Land Trust has also made great strides in public policy/planning, outreach, and education. We have worked closely with the towns of Philipstown and Putnam Valley as they have revised comprehensive plans and zoning codes. We have worked with the Towns of Cornwall and Blooming Grove to facilitate natural resource and open space inventories. HHLT has also expanded its outreach efforts to include events and programming to inform and involve the greater community in our mission. 

• Today" (May 17), students had the opportunity to join HHLT staff in learning how and where wildlife is migrating through the Hudson Highlands, the barriers that hurt safe passage, and how we can protect them. 

Homestyle Bakery

Proudly serving our community for over 50 years. Desserts ranging from Italian pastries, cookies, pies, cheesecakes and more.Enjoy food from their food truck during the evening event!

Juanitas Kitchen

Abuela's cooking authentic Mexican cuisine for the whole family. Enjoy food from their food truck during the evening event!

La Vie Après L'amour

La vie après l’amour is women-owned upcycled clothing company focused on keeping clothes out of landfill & keeping you chic. The most sustainable piece of clothing is one that you already own, the next best option is pre-loved clothing. All of our clothes are thoughtfully curated secondhand, upcycled, mended, reimagined, and given a new life. Sustainable living is at our core and we want to inspire others to consume thoughtfully, live mindfully, and treat our Earth with respect, all while looking and feeling amazing. We believe in second chances, and more importantly we believe our world deserves better. Based in the Hudson Valley, NY, we are constantly inspired by the nature around us as well as Parisian style.

NexTrex

Trex Company turns millions of pounds of recycled and reclaimed plastic film and scrap wood each year into composite decking products.  The plastic raw materials come from recovered plastic grocery bags, stretch film, overwraps, mailer bags, and other polyethylene films.  We are proud to partner with many of our retailers to purchase these films from operations and from customer facing collection streams!  In 2023, Trex purchased over 300 million pounds of scrap polyethylene films and an equal amount of hardwood sawdust for our manufacturing plants based in the United States.

New Yorkers for Clean Power

Samrat Pathania grew up in India. His childhood love for science and mathematics culminated in a degree in mechanical engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Jamshedpur (India). After working several years as a software engineer with various multinational corporations, Samrat became a teacher and currently teaches at Wallkill High School. Samrat is the former chair and coordinator of the New Paltz Climate Action Coalition. He is also a Climate Reality Leader and has served as co-chair of the Hudson Valley/Catskills chapter of the Climate Reality Project. Samrat has helped scores of individuals make their first electric vehicle purchases through the energy coaching program of New Yorkers for Clean Power. He lives in New Paltz with his family in a net-zero home.

Octavios

They have all the food truck classics and gourmet specials every day.  Enjoy food from their food truck during the event!

Putnam History Museum

The Putnam History Museum preserves and interprets the history of Putnam County and the Hudson Highlands. Located in Cold Spring, they engage the community with the vibrant history of our region through exhibitions, programs, and events. Their current exhibition, Indigenous Peoples in Putnam County, explores Lenape and Wappinger culture in Putnam County, with a special focus on the Woodland period when these cultures flourished in the Hudson Valley.

Rosemary and Moss

Our most defining characteristic and what sets us apart from everyone else is that all of our designs are printed on THE MOST COMFY apparel that we can get our hands on. No $1.00 t-shirts...this stuff is soft, snuggly, and comfy. Something else that is very important to us is the environment. We use 100% compostable packaging and we strive to be as sustainable as possible.

Sharon Audubon

Through land stewardship, science, education, and advocacy, our network works across the state to preserve habitat and protect bird species that are of state, national, and global concern; and we identify and support Important Bird Areas (IBAs)—a hallmark of Audubon’s efforts worldwide.

Soul Fire Farm

A farm and nonprofit that uses Afro-indigenous farming practices, such as agroforestry and silvopasture, to regenerate 80 acres of mountainside land, producing fruits, plant medicine, pasture-raised livestock, honey, mushrooms, vegetables, and preserves for community provisioning, with the majority of the harvest provided to people living under food apartheid and targeted by state violence. Soul Fire Farm’s ancestral farming practices build topsoil, sequester soil carbon, and increase biodiversity. Using land as a tool to heal from racial trauma, we work to reverse the dangerously low percentage of farms being owned and operated by people of color and increase the leadership of people of color in the food justice movement.

Sustainable Harvest International

A nonprofit with over 27 years of experience partnering with sustainable family farmers in Central America. Sustainable Harvest International (SHI) supports low-income farmers by providing local, long-term technical assistance and resources as farmers transition from conventional agriculture to regenerative practices. 30-40% of deforestation worldwide is the result of small-scale farmers. Yet, the same farmers are unable to provide their families with the modest food and income they need to survive. Lacking access to formal education and unaware of any other way, farmers rely on destructive practices such as slash-and-burn agriculture. Through SHI’s program, farmers learn how to restore soils and forest ecosystems through agroforestry. Farmers also learn how to sustain the land for future generations, halt tropical deforestation, and build strong, self-supporting communities through agribusiness. 

The Years Project

You know the director James Cameron, who did Avatar? We did his TV series on climate, the first ever on the topic. It was called Years of Living Dangerously and won the Emmy on Showtime and NatGeo. Now we have one of the largest following in the climate movement (700 million, including Oprah!), and have been using our Hollywood prowess to help with grassroots and frontline climate campaigns in different places, like with indigenous Hawaiians, the Hopi and Navajo, the fight against the Mountain Valley Pipeline, and more. We are expert storytellers, and a team that works together frequently. Maya Lilly is an unscripted TV and feature doc producer on staff with The Years Project, and Liam Lee is a Director of Photography who did Showtime's The Circus. He frequently films for mainstream news events. Maya and Liam frequently work together, and most recently did a short doc together about the Ohio vinyl chloride train derailment that exploded over a small town. 

Understory Market

Our mission is to provide our community with a welcoming low-waste market that high-lights local, ecological, and accessible dry goods. We're learning how to collectively reduce our environmental footprint as we source basic pantry dry goods and household items in a more local, direct and environmentally conscious way. We carry low-waste bulk pantry foods, snacks, home goods, home cleaners and personal care goods, as well as handmade sustainable goods & gifts. We seek out brands with social & environmental justice at the heart of their work, and highlight local makers in our community, whenever possible. We live in a beautiful natural landscape with lots of outdoor resources and tourism, and we carry products that encourage stewardship of the environment, along with fun, flavor, and nourishment!

Westminster Woods

Westminster Woods Camp and Conference Center is located on 200 acres of redwood forest in the coastal hills of Western Sonoma County, California. During the school year, we provide single day and residential overnight environmental and science education as well as character development on our challenge course for students primarily in grades five through eight. Our environmental programing focuses on coastal redwood ecosystems, stream ecology, marine ecology, and stewardship. We aim to support Social Emotional Learning in every student and staff member. Our School Program’s mission is to foster the development of character, community, and science literacy in students through experiential outdoor education.