Recognizing Youth-Led Initiatives

At the heart of the award is a simple question:

Does this person or team, through their actions, demonstrate or help bring into being some aspect of a more just, sustainable, regenerative, peaceful, and cooperative future?

The Planet Project is particularly interested in recognizing young people who are prefiguring the future—not only responding to problems within existing systems, but experimenting with, creating, or strengthening the relationships, practices, technologies, institutions, communities, and ways of working that a better future will require.

Recipients may demonstrate this contribution in many different ways, including:

• Making an Impact — Turning concern and vision into tangible positive change for people, communities, or planet.
• Stepping into Leadership — Taking initiative, accepting responsibility, mobilizing others, and turning ideas into action.
• Building Partnerships — Working collaboratively, building bridges, and connecting people across communities, cultures, disciplines, generations, or organizations.
• Learning and Growing — Seeking knowledge and guidance from others and applying that learning to become a more capable changemaker.
• Acting with a Larger Purpose — Connecting individual or collective action to the broader transformation toward a thriving planetary future.
• Prefiguring the Future — Demonstrating through action what new systems, relationships, institutions, technologies, or ways of living and working might look like.

Recipients need not exemplify every one of these qualities. The award recognizes the many different ways young people can make consequential contributions to the Great Transition.