Climate Cardinals appoints Samrah Khan as its first Chief of Staff
New York City, NY – February 5, 2025 — Climate Cardinals, one of the world’s largest youth-led climate organizations, announces Samrah Khan as its first-ever Chief of Staff. Her appointment marks a major inflection point as the organization enters a phase of rapid expansion and systems-level growth.
Khan brings a powerful mix of frontline climate action, coalition-building, and movement leadership. A first-generation Pakistani American, she began her advocacy career as a Global Goals Ambassador with the United Nations Association of the United States, advancing partnerships aligned with Sustainable Development Goal 17.
After transferring to the University of Texas at Dallas, she emerged as a campus leader through competitive public service roles and community-centered mentorship. She later served as an AmeriCorps Climate Impact Coordinator, planting hundreds of trees in urban heat zones and accelerating community climate resilience across Minnesota.
Since joining Climate Cardinals as Director of Partnerships, Khan has led the development of multilingual alliances that expanded access to climate information and strengthened the organization’s impact at scale. Her leadership is grounded in lived experience with environmental injustice and a solutions-oriented commitment to shifting power toward frontline communities.
Climate Cardinals’ Executive Director, Hikaru Wakeel Hayakawa, shared: “The first time I met Samrah, she came with a 20-slide deck and full briefing guide — for a volunteer project. That told me everything. She’s disciplined, bold, and relentlessly outcomes-driven. Samrah is the kind of leader who transforms teams and raises the standards of an entire organization.”
As Chief of Staff, Khan will oversee executive operations and help drive implementation across the organization, supporting Climate Cardinals’ mission to eliminate language barriers in climate action and its vision of climate resilience for all.
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Press Inquiries:
Hikaru Wakeel Hayakawa, Executive Director — [email protected]
Samrah Khan, Chief of Staff — [email protected]
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About Climate Cardinals
Climate Cardinals is the world’s largest youth-led climate education organization. We break language barriers in the climate movement so every community can take action and protect their future. With a volunteer community of 19,000+ youth, Climate Cardinals has translated 4M+ words of climate information into 105 languages for organizations like UNESCO, UNICEF, Yale, and the Italian Ministry of the Environment, led grassroots climate education initiatives at 85+ schools in 35 countries, and created multilingual climate action campaigns, reaching 19M+ people in 145 countries.
