In this episode, Manasi and Sualeha sit down with Angela McCarthy, CEO of The Earth Foundation, which strives to foster a self-perpetuating ecosystem that accelerates positive change toward environmental sustainability. The Earth Foundation is home to The Earth Prize, an environmental sustainability competition open to teenage students everywhere where the winning solution is awarded with a $200,000 prize to further their initiative.

We open the episode with Angela deconstructing the process of launching The Earth Prize and the monumental decisions she made as CEO while scaling the organization's impact. She expands upon outreach to schools with wide geographic diversity in order to establish the competition as accessible to all students, including those attending high-income private schools and those attending public schools in low-resourced regions. Angela also shares how The Earth Foundation worked with the United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) to encourage and support 34 teams of Palestinian refugees attending UNRWA schools.

We transition into how The Earth Prize's ambassador system operates and how the adjudicating panel of experts is chosen to cover a wide range of fields and types of expertise to properly evaluate the submissions. We also discuss the expansion of The Earth Foundation moving forward through future initiatives such as The Earth Prize Awards, which is specific for PhD-level students, with a scientific committee assessing research proposals in environmental sustainability. We close the episode by touching on the role of The Earth Prize in pioneering the next generation of climate literacy and education, especially in regions with severe limitations in educational infrastructure.

Learn More: https://www.theearthprize.org/about-us