Climate Cardinals (CC) is a global youth-led nonprofit working to make the climate movement more accessible to those who do not speak English. We aim to educate and empower a diverse coalition of people to tackle the climate crisis. We have 13,000+ volunteers translating and sourcing climate information into over 105 languages. To date, this international movement has reached millions of people across 80+ countries. We have leveraged the power of artificial intelligence to translate over a million words of climate information to date in partnership with Google, Translators Without Borders, The UN, and more.
While our manpower has grown exponentially, our organizational technology has failed to keep up. The Climate Ride grant would help scale CC and continue to fund our partnership with Translators without Borders (TWB), where we have translated over a million words in the last year alone. The backbone of CC lies within our staff, mainly youth volunteers who are full-time students simultaneously, resulting in tight deadlines and stress. To counteract this, we aim to streamline communications between CC and TWB using TWB’s translation API in conjunction with Google’s AI hub. These services allow us to congregate all communications and storage into one CC-dedicated portal, increasing efficiency and output. However, these services come at a great cost—in an effort to sustain our translation efficiency and volume, this grant will allow for greater funding into translation APIs and AI.
With the help of this grant, we aim to have at least a 50% increase in translation output. In the past, with one part-time volunteer director managing incoming translation requests over the past three years, we translated more than 1.5 million words. Moving forward, we project 3.2 million words annually with the help of TWB’s CC portal & Google’s AI hub.
LandPaths mission is to foster a love of the land in Sonoma County. We engage more than 8,000 community members each year with our (3) core initiatives – Rooting Youth in Nature, Branching Out Conservation for Everyone, and Growing Community with Nature. These complimentary initiatives get youth from marginalized communities outside for recreation and science based nature exploration, connect families to the natural world through our Community Gardens and Vamos Afuera program, and engage volunteers in stewarding the land we manage to benefit the land while nourishing our volunteers.