Our Programs
Chapters
Youth-led teams, led by the people who know their communities best.
Climate Cardinals Chapters are based in schools, universities, and local organizations around the world. We empower chapter leaders to tackle local climate issues through grassroots climate education and action.
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What chapters do
Chapter leaders identify community priorities and lead projects that respond directly to them. Depending on those priorities, that can include climate workshops, translated resources, advocacy campaigns, community events, school partnerships, and other locally relevant projects.
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What we invest in leaders
- Training, mentorship, and practical resources
- Quarterly regranting and nominations for external opportunities
- Monthly workshops and regular networking calls, including with the World Bank, Project Green Schools, and others
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What it produces
Chapters submit a report every quarter showing an activity, progress on one, or a capacity-building session for the wider chapter, which is what counts as active here. Those reports cover localized education, mobilization, and resilience-building to ensure we’re holding ourselves accountable to strengthening community resilience, rather than optimizing for headcount.
Today there are 145 active chapters across 39 countries. As of August 2026, 89% of them are based in the Global South.
Advances (Theory of Change Goals): Community Resilience · Youth Leadership
Fellowship
Invest early, in the people usually invested in last.
Our Fellowship invests in emerging social impact leaders, focusing on young people ages 16–22 who have had limited access to similar opportunities, particularly those from non-English-speaking, immigrant, and frontline communities.
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What we invest
Over one academic year, fellows receive personalized mentorship, a stipend, and a structured curriculum covering nonprofit strategy, fundraising, budgeting, public speaking, digital strategy, impact measurement, and other core leadership skills.
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What fellows do
In parallel, fellows apply what they learn through hands-on work across Climate Cardinals’ programs and operations, gaining experience taking projects from planning through implementation.
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What it produces
- 93% report increased public engagement and advocacy skills
- 92% report increased civic capacity
- 82% say it influenced their academic or professional goals
Figures are from an alumni survey (n = 60). In 2026, 30 fellows will be selected from a pool of 6,629 applicants across 133 countries.
Advances (Theory of Change Goals): Youth Leadership
Translations
Climate information, in the languages communities actually use.
Combining Phrase’s machine translation technology with our global volunteer network, we translate and review reports, educational materials, campaigns, digital content, and other public-interest climate resources, pairing technology with language fluency and local knowledge.
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Who we translate for
- Free of charge to grassroots and youth-led organizations
- Reduced rates for eligible nonprofits, governments, and multilateral organizations
- Not available to for-profit companies, because the program is volunteer-based
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What that model does
It directs our capacity toward the organizations and communities facing the greatest barriers to accessible climate information, while creating meaningful opportunities for multilingual volunteers to contribute their skills to climate action.
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What it produces
Partners include UNICEF, CARE International, Yale Climate Connections, and the Climate Mental Health Network. Grassroots partners report at six months on how translated materials supported resilience, adaptation, and advocacy.
We have translated more than four million words across 100+ languages, delivering 145 translation projects with 30 partners in FY2025.
Advances (Theory of Change Goals): Language Justice · Community Resilience
FAQ
What funders ask us most.
How do we ensure accountability to communities?
Climate Cardinals is a youth-led global organization committed to transparency, accountability, and community-driven leadership.
We regularly gather feedback from our chapters, fellows, translators, ambassadors, and other community members through surveys, calls, and check-ins. This feedback helps us improve our programs and make better decisions.
We track key program metrics through an organization-wide impact framework. We also evaluate our programs through surveys and post-mortems, and publish an annual impact report: see our 2025 report.
As we grow, we continue to strengthen our governance, financial systems, safeguarding, and organizational infrastructure.
Can a funder support a specific program or region?
Yes. We accept restricted giving at the program and regional level, so support can be directed to Chapters, the Fellowship, or Translations, or toward a particular region of the world.
We do not accept restrictions to an individual chapter.
What does it cost to run each program for a year?
About $1,630 per chapter, about $6,077 per fellow based on a cohort of 30, and a flat $17,200 for Translations at our current capacity.
The chapter and fellow figures are each the full program budget divided by the number of chapters or fellows at the time of reporting, so they are all-in costs rather than the marginal cost of adding one more.
For Chapters, that covers regranting, workshops, production of materials, professional development opportunities, the software we use to keep costs low, staff time, and external validation over the longer term. For the Fellowship, it covers fellow stipends, which keep the program accessible and compensate fellows for their work, along with workshop facilitation, production of materials, microgrants, professional development and external opportunities, software, and staff time.
The Translations figure covers platform management through Phrase and a part-time translation manager. We can raise the number of words we translate each year by increasing platform costs and hiring additional managers. In 2026 we multiplied our translation capacity fivefold by switching translation platforms.
We monitor program health indicators, including NPS scores for workshops and feedback from staff, to decide how far to scale the number of chapters.
How are chapter leaders held to safeguarding standards?
Every chapter signs an agreement with Climate Cardinals, and that agreement includes agreeing to our safeguarding policies. Chapter leaders are bound by those policies throughout their chapter’s activity.
This is a separate commitment from the background checks that govern access to participant data, which are described in our monitoring and evaluation approach and apply to staff and reviewers.
How do we decide what to translate?
Our capacity is finite, because the program is volunteer-based, so we prioritize deliberately rather than taking on whatever arrives first.
We take on translations that carry a direct benefit to the communities receiving them, and that relate to the three goals in our Theory of Change: Youth Leadership, Community Resilience, and Language Justice.
That focus is how we direct capacity toward the organizations and communities facing the greatest barriers to accessible climate information.
Why human-verified translations?
AI and machine translation have opened powerful possibilities for scaling access to information. Machine translation can process content in seconds, helping us reach more people faster than ever before. But speed doesn’t always equal accuracy, especially when it comes to languages with limited digital resources.
Low-resource languages, like many Indigenous, regional, or under-digitized languages, are often underrepresented in AI training data. As a result, machine translations in these languages are frequently inaccurate, incomplete, or simply unavailable.
That gap is structural. A landmark study of linguistic diversity sorted roughly 2,500 languages by how well they are served by natural language processing, the field of computer science behind translation and other language tools. Seven languages sat in the top tier, holding the bulk of the world’s data, tools, and investment. At the bottom sat 2,191 languages with almost no resources at all.
This is not a gap that scale alone closes. Research across more than 250 languages found that adding languages to a multilingual model helps low-resource languages only up to a point. Past it, fixed model capacity is spread too thin and results degrade for every language in the model, high- and low-resource alike. Researchers call this the curse of multilinguality, and their conclusion is that massively multilingual systems may not be optimal for any of the languages involved, while more targeted models perform significantly better.
Even in well-resourced languages, machine translation can miss tone, context, and cultural meaning. That is especially dangerous when sharing climate information, where clarity and trust can mean the difference between action and inaction. Automated translations must be reviewed and adapted to meet real community needs.
We’re tech-positive and believe in the power of AI. But it’s not enough on its own. The future isn’t one without human translators. Instead, it’s one where translators use AI to do their work better. That’s why we combine technology with human insight: to build tools that are fast, fair, and trusted.