The Center for Youth Civic Leadership and Environmental Studies – CYCLES is a Youth-Led and Youth Focus Organization Founded in 2018 and got its legal status January 2020. CYCLES is a national hub for Youth Climate, Environmental and Social Justice Activism and Advocacy in Liberia.
Liberia faced with the adverse effects of climate change, with its high vulnerability to environmental instability due to extreme poverty and high dependence on ‘climate sensitive’ sectors such as agriculture, forestry, fisheries, energy and mining, which further increases inequality such as increase in exposure to climate change risk, increase in susceptibility due to the inability of affected communities to cope and recover from damage cause by climate change affect young people, women and marginalized groups.
we are empowering young people and communities to organize, mobilize and engage power structures to take concrete actions for climate, environmental and social justices. We work to address these inequalities by leading advocacy and activism under three dimensions of climate justice such as distributional justice where we seek to ensure that there is a fare distribution of cost and burden of climate change, procedural justice where we seek to ensure that marginalize groups and communities mostly affected by climate change have meaningful opportunities to participate in decision making process on climate change, and Recongnitional Justice where we advocate for recognition of all social groups that exist and ensure that their interest and priorities are included in the designing and implementation of climate change and environmental policies and programs.
This operational plan directs our 2023 work towards building a strong organization that is purposeful in driving effective and meaningful programs that addresses climate, environmental and social injustices affecting young people and their communities. As we move in this direction, we will explore new horizons, experiment new strategies and make changes to our plan based on learnings from challenges we will encounter along the way.
