Three years ago, Joshua Amponsem and a group of youth movement leaders set out to address a basic problem: While young people are often visible and sometimes tokenized in the climate change movement, almost none of the world's climate finance reaches the local youth-led organizations doing the work on the ground. The Youth Climate Justice Fund, where Amponsem now serves as co-executive director, was built to close that gap by changing who philanthropy trusts to spend the money at all.
Amponsem is a climate leader and strategist who works between grassroots organizing and the institutions that fund it. In a recent conversation with Proximate Press, he spoke about what three years of working with young people and trying to move that money has taught him, and how recent youth uprisings and global events mean for the movement moving forward.
Amponsem is candid about their initial assumptions about philanthropy. "Philanthropy is so rigid. The sector is designed to do what makes the way easier for them, versus what makes it easier for the field… [but] one of the things we immediately learned was that philanthropy is actually adaptable.” To take advantage of this adaptability, YCJF shifted tactics, deciding to "bring philanthropy in, as opposed to calling them out." This informed their new organizational theory of change, built on the assumption that the more funders saw and understood what youth-led work actually meant, the more willing they would be to support youth in their climate work.
Based on this experience, YCJF produced a report in partnership with ClimateWorks Foundation, with recommendations that will sound familiar to anyone following the broader push for locally-led development: trust-based giving, longer funding cycles, simplified vetting, and a shift from top-down capacity strengthening to peer-to-peer networks. None of it is new. But a hurdle still remained, to get funders to understand the broad impact youth can achieve.
"When they actually see how a youth group with relatively smaller funding is able to unlock impact in a place, that is when the funders, all of a sudden, get it," he says. He points to a youth group monitoring deforestation across Malaysia in real time and feeding that data directly to the government. "A funder hearing that is like, wow, I didn't think a youth group could be doing that."
The frustration underneath that anecdote is hard to miss. The Malaysian youth group is "small, but the reason they are small is because the system has kept them small," Amponsem says. The assumption that youth groups mainly run awareness campaigns, that their passion rather than their experience is their greatest asset, says less about youth capacity and ability than about how little funders have historically dug into their impact and expertise. "There has been historical harm, and that informs what I think the world needs," he says. "You realize you don't necessarily want a low-carbon future if all your agency is taken away from you."
The word “agency” is key. For Amponsem, a just transition means that the fight to control climate money isn't separate from the fight to have ownership or leadership over other challenges youth are facing. As he tells it, youth groups aren’t waiting for a grant committee to decide they're credible enough to receive money or waiting for anyone to decide their grievances are legitimate. Over the past few years, youth-led protest movements have swept through Kenya, Bangladesh, Nepal, Peru, Morocco, Madagascar, and Indonesia, often with little formal infrastructure and even less patience for institutional process. For Amponsem, watching it unfold is personal. "I think of myself, seven years ago, on the street, demanding an end to corruption and the end of coal," he says. "It reinforces my belief that young people do not wait for institutions."
What strikes him most is the shape the organizing takes. "They are not organizing in a way a development expert would typically define as traditional infrastructure," he says. "They're using litigation, creative communication, distributed leadership models where everyone has equal ownership… Infrastructure could be as simple as a shared narrative, or trust, or just having clarity around why something is happening. It's about providing resources for people to take care of themselves, so they can consciously build the future they want."
Asked what shared narrative youth movements can unite around now, especially with the massive disruption to oil and natural gas distribution caused by conflict in the Middle East. Amponsem redirects the question. "For the YCJF, this is a big global moment, and yes, it's important," he says. "But the deeper issue, particularly for young people, is that no market shock should be used to delay a just transition."
What sits underneath it, for him, is the same question running through the whole conversation: "who pays the costs for the transition." He says. "If it moves very fast, are communities again treated mainly as a place for extraction, cheap labor, minerals, taking whatever is required to support the world, but leaving them poor?" It's a warning against treating any single crisis as the main event. "We're not chasing a headline," he says, "but staying focused on those deeper issues."
Amponsem's and YCJF’s argument is that, “young people are already organising across climate, livelihoods, health, land, and the cost of living. What is missing is the infrastructure that allows this work to endure.” The barriers facing youth climate organizing were never really about young people’s capacity, but rather funders’ inability to see how youth use the capacity they have to have outsized impact. Amponsem says YCJF's model has made real headway getting funders to change how they think and how they give in support of youth-led climate action. Whether that adds up to a lasting shift that does “more than fund campaigns or visible moments of mobilisation” is the question YCJF’s framework is asking philanthropy to confront. Or as Amponsem put it: “The real test is whether philanthropy will invest in the organisations, protection systems, and next generation of leaders needed to build lasting power and hold decision makers accountable.”
