Three years, three trips to Dallas, and one youth climate movement that grew out of them.
Some partners show up once. Leia Lowery keeps showing up. Over three EarthX seasons, from the Partnerships for the Goals stage in 2024 to the Environmental Xperience in 2026, Leia has helped shape what young people experience in Dallas each spring, and she has been there in person all three years: 2024, 2025 and 2026. That steady commitment grew into Growing Green Leaders.
Leia is the co-founder and Executive Director of The Climate Initiative (TCI) and a Director of the Rotary Climate Action Team. For 30 years she has built educational programs that connect young people to the places they live, working as a teacher, curriculum developer, and national speaker and trainer. Her work rests on a simple idea: meaningful climate action starts locally, with places young people actually know.
TCI’s Learning Lab trains local educators, who then carry climate solutions directly into their own classrooms, and TCI students learn with En-ROADS, the climate policy simulator from MIT. Leia also helped write the Living for Life document for the Global Biodiversity Framework. A member of the Kennebunk Rotary Club (District 7780) for more than 11 years, she holds a BA and MS from Virginia Tech and is completing her PhD in Policy and Education Leadership at the Muskie School of Policy, University of Southern Maine.
Within Growing Green Leaders, Leia oversees TCI’s Climate Action Leadership Program, Lessons 1 to 3, the foundation every division of the program is built on.
EarthX launched a Rotary stage in 2023 to showcase Rotary environmental projects from around the world. When planning began for the 2024 Partnerships for the Goals stage, Leia was among the first educators Steve Bender called. In late February she joined prep meetings with media and technology partners, making time even in the same week she was finishing an essay for her PhD application. That April she came to Dallas for her first EarthX.
That spring she was also teaching at a summit in California and working with the Aspen Future Leaders gathering in Miami. EarthX connections kept flowing back to her after the event: Rotary colleagues who met new climate allies in Dallas introduced them straight to Leia.
In September 2024, Leia offered TCI’s own Zoom platform to host an RCAT forum on youth and climate. Her goal, as she put it to the group, was getting the project out to Rotary clubs and expanding John Mathers’ vision for young people.
In November, Steve proposed bringing more than 100 students from Texas, plus about 20 from other states, to EarthX on April 21, 2025. Leia answered within the hour. She offered a full climate workshop modeled on one TCI had run for 100 young people at Aspen, complete with a companion booklet.
The months before EarthX 2025 showed how far Leia will go to make an event work. She floated the idea for a youth program ahead of EarthX at an RCAT meeting, and her TCI colleague Ariel wrote it up. She kept coordinating even from an offshore research center with almost no internet.
In April 2025, Leia traveled to Dallas for EarthX, where she and Ariel took part in the RotaryXperience Congress of Conferences as speakers and facilitators. That July, Steve told her he wanted to get fully behind TCI in the year ahead, and the two began mapping where Rotary could help the Learning Lab reach new communities.
For the Environmental Xperience at EarthX 2026, held April 20 to 22, RCAT prepared a one page profile for the official event booklet, with Leia part of the team behind it. Leia returned to Dallas in person for her third EarthX in a row. On that stage, our Growing Green Leaders students interviewed Past RI President Barry Rassin, showing what young people can do when they are trusted with the microphone.
That summer, Leia turned years of EarthX conversations into a plan. In July 2026 she drafted the Growing Green Leaders competition with partner CAVU, with a goal of 30 student teams across North America this school year.
Leia signs many of her emails with three words: “In this together.” Her years with EarthX show she means it. She makes time between classes, flights and field research, she says yes before the details are settled, and she always brings the conversation back to students.
Growing Green Leaders carries that spirit forward, growing green leaders one classroom at a time.
Thank you, Leia.