Beneficiary: Changing Climates Environmental Society, $2,500 award

"The conference brought youth together as future leaders for positive action."

Alysia Garmulewicz stood on the frozen landscape of the world's coldest continent one December afternoon in 2002. It was an experience that changed the course of the 15-year-old's life. And it may just help change the future of planet Earth as well.

Garmulewicz had earned a spot on a Students on Ice learning expedition. Visiting Antarctica was a thrill in itself, but iceside with a team of environmental experts, the teenager started to make some big-picture connections. "It's like nothing you can imagine," Garmulewicz says. "It's huge and magical and seems untouched. But it hits you at an emotional level to learn that such beauty is being destroyed by climate change."

Back home in New Denver, B.C., Garmulewicz visited local schools to share what she'd learned. But she was also a woman on a mission, eager to take climate-change action to another level. "I decided to hold a conference," she says.

Wooing sponsors such as Bell Canada, BC Hydro, TD Bank Financial Group and Mountain Equipment Co-op, Garmulewicz raised more than $150,000 and won the support of environmental powerhouses Elizabeth May, Severn Cullis-Suzuki, the David Suzuki Foundation, Environment Canada and the Rocky Mountain and Pembina institutes. "Intergenerational mentorship is important," Garmulewicz says, "and I wanted to learn and work with Canadian leaders."

The result was the 2005 Canadian Youth Climate Change Conference (YC3), which welcomed 85 youths, ages 15 to 20, from across Canada to the Royal Roads University in Victoria, B.C. For four days, delegates immersed themselves in rousing keynote speeches, intense workshops and roundtable discussions, action-planning sessions and educational presentations, all geared toward developing a "holistic" appreciation of climate change. "The conference brought youth together as future leaders for positive action," Garmulewicz explains. "It challenged us to rethink how society operates and to encourage the search for sustainable alternatives."

Today, Garmulewicz is a student in environmental studies at Carleton University in Ottawa. Continuing the work of YC3, she has founded the Changing Climates Environmental Society and a website that allows her to maintain a vibrant dialogue with an evergrowing list of youth activists. "It's important that we break out of the doom-and-gloom scenario," says Garmulewicz, "and start to create exciting new ways of doing things."