ACE has a mission to educate, inspire and support young people to lead the fight for their future. We ensure they have everything they need to understand the science and advocate for solutions to the climate emergency.
We achieve our mission by reaching tens of millions of young people with our programs each year, training a new generation of leaders, amplifying youth voices to shift the narrative, and increasing diverse youth participation in our democracy.
ACE was founded in 2008 with the visionary (and at the time fringe) belief that to halt a global crisis, the climate movement needed the engagement of youth. Back then, we were told again and again that young people were not a priority because they couldn’t or wouldn’t vote, and couldn’t be organized. How times have changed. With the failure of our leaders to act and an explosion of youth activism and visibility within the movement, our outlying belief in the power of youth is now common knowledge—and to many, our best source of hope.