Hikaru Wakeel Hayakawa

Vice President

Hikaru Wakeel Hayakawa is a twenty-two year-old Japanese-Caribbean American social entrepreneur and researcher from Maplewood, NJ. Hikaru is the Deputy Executive Director and Founding Partnerships Director of Climate Cardinals, the world's largest youth-led climate advocacy organization, which works to make climate education more accessible to non-English speakers and empower grassroots climate education.

As the Founding Partnerships Director, Hikaru established the organization's signature climate information translation program through key partnerships with Translators Without Borders and Google. Over the past three years, he has coordinated over a million words of climate information translations, expanded Climate Cardinals’ translation capacity to a maximum three million words per year, and has raised around half-a-million USD for the organization. He has also served as Founder and UN Secretary-General Advisor Sophia Kianni’s second-hand in growing the organization. After the Google Translation Partnership, he coordinated with the President to professionalize the organization and onboard full-time employees. He has spoken about his work for events with the UN Development Programme, Italian Ministry of the Environment, U.S. Climate Engagement and Capacity-Building Interagency Working Group, and March On Foundation.

Hikaru is also a student at Williams College, the premier liberal arts higher education institution in the U.S., majoring in History with minors in Global and Environmental Studies, and he has also studied at the University of Oxford and Gimnazija Orce Nikolov in Skopje, North Macedonia. Hikaru has prior work experience with the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation, a federally-recognized tribe, the Ecologic Institute, a leading environmental policy think tank, and the UN Environment Programme-Finance Initiative. A native English speaker, Hikaru also speaks Spanish, Macedonian, and Russian, and has lived, studied, and worked in the U.S., Germany, North Macedonia, and China.