× Expand Youth Climate Action Team More than 1,000 students marched to the state Capitol on March 15, calling for more action on climate change. More protests are planned for Sept. 20. In Madison, students will march from East High to the Capitol.

Max Prestigiacomo is frustrated. Since last winter, he and a growing group of students across the state have been organizing to battle the global climate crisis.

There are other things he’d rather be doing, but Prestigiacomo doesn’t feel that he has any choice. “I just get pissed off, frankly, that I have to do this,” says Prestigiacomo, a UW-Madison freshman. “[Students] have to add this to our plates because no one else will, not to the extent we want.”

He’s come to accept that meaningful action on climate change isn’t going to happen unless he and his peers across the world demand it. In March, when he was a senior at Middleton High School, Prestigiacomo helped mobilize more than a thousand students and supporters for a climate strike and march to the Capitol. He estimates another thousand took to the streets in other Wisconsin cities.

Now, on a warm Sunday evening, he meets with a handful of other teenagers in a small office off University Avenue, with more students joining the meeting online. The group is part of the newly formed Youth Climate Action Team (YCAT) of Wisconsin. Members are planning a statewide climate strike on Sept. 20, expected to be even bigger than the March 15 protest.

“We changed so many hearts and minds just from that one protest. We got so many people registered. This is NextGen Wisconsin’s office, and they pledge and register people to vote,” Prestigiacomo says. “I got our data back the other day and it was like 1,300 [new registrations] just from that [protest]. These were students, adults, everyone.”

Like the March strike, the Sept. 20 action is being planned and promoted by students, most still in high school.

“We need a recycling plan, we need vendors, and then we need a street event site map,” relays 14-year-old West High School student Suraya Gade as she fills out the city’s lengthy street permit application. “They want a detailed schedule, so I said from 11 to 1 we’re setting up, blocking the road and positioning all tables. And then from 1 to 3, I’m not sure what to say we’re going to do.”

“We’re having like a block party, lots of booths, tables, food trucks,” Prestigiacomo says before pausing. “Well, there’s going to be food for sure,” he says, laughing.

“No one has sent a request for a bus. Do you think Verona would need a bus?” asks Sophie Guthier, also a UW-Madison freshman. “I’m going to make a document with bus requests and put Verona on there.”

Guthier, who helped plan last spring’s strike as a senior at Memorial, notes that transportation is key to getting students out. YCAT is planning to fund buses, if needed, to bring students in suburbs and rural areas to nearby strike locations in Madison, Milwaukee, Janesville, Appleton, Ashland and La Crosse.

The team is also working on getting buses for Madison high school students.

“We look up the Metro routes for Madison schools and we usually find one or two [organizers] to ride each of the buses to help students get on and off. Just so people know where they’re going,” she explains. “And then we also try to get bus passes in advance, or just quarters for people, so that if they don’t have a bus pass or can’t afford to get on the bus, then we can provide one.”

In addition to the donated office space and computers from NextGen Wisconsin, YCAT also received $10,000 from a new, international philanthropic venture launched over the summer called the Climate Emergency Fund.

“We’re doing a lot of fundraising, like grants, reaching out to people we know in the community,” Guthier says. “We’re trying to get as much money as possible to spread the word.”

But one door has been closed to the students — a meeting with Gov. Tony Evers.

“They keep on denying our requests,” says Guthier.

Evers’ announcement in August that Wisconsin would strive to reach 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2050 was cheered by many, but not by YCAT. “It needs to be 2030, not 2050,” Guthier says. “2050 is just way too late.”

YCAT members were invited to the news conference announcing Evers’ initiative, and they say they were told they would have a chance to meet the governor afterward. The students were even positioned behind Evers during his remarks. But no meeting happened.

“They talked about, ‘Oh we have these supporters,’ but we wanted to talk to him about how we wanted a goal of 2030,” she says.

“Even though it wasn’t what we wanted, we thought, ‘Okay, we’ll get to talk to him, and it’s still a good step in the right direction,’” Prestigiacomo adds.

× Expand Youth Climate Action Team Max Prestigiacomo: “We want [Gov. Tony Evers] to declare a climate emergency.... Like you would declare a state of emergency for flooding.”

Instead, the students were left feeling like they were a photo op for the governor. “They gave us some pens and then he took a picture with us, and then they left,” says Guthier. “We were like, ‘You didn’t work with us on any of this.’ We’ve been trying to get a meeting with him since March 15, and every time we put in a request they would say he was too busy.”

Melissa Baldauff, deputy chief of staff with the governor’s office, says there must have been a misunderstanding and insists no meeting was offered to YCAT. She adds that the governor would be happy to meet the group.

“The governor is incredibly encouraged to see advocacy like this from young people in Wisconsin and appreciates their leadership,” she says.

Baldauff says the governor’s office was unaware that YCAT is unhappy with the goal of 2050, even though organizers did meet with Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, who, she says, is the “lead person in the administration on climate change, sustainability and clean energy.”

Students they say they’ll keep pushing to meet Evers.

“We want him to declare a climate emergency. Because the Republican Legislature is so unlikely to pass a resolution like that, [Evers] needs to make a proclamation,” Prestigiacomo says. “Like you would declare a state of emergency for flooding.”

Students have been staging smaller, weekly climate strikes on Fridays with five to 10 protesters each. The strikes don’t bring as much media attention as a thousand kids streaming down East Washington Avenue, but they get attention on social media.

“We try to have a focus each week. We wore dinosaur suits, and we said, ‘The dinosaurs thought they had time too.’ We made a whole [Instagram TV] video about it,” Gade says.

“We have a videographer. We just try to push out as much content as possible that will bring in new, young people and bring in new young voters too,” says Prestigiacomo. “We’ve raised quite a bit of money so far, and we’ve put pretty much all of that towards digital organizing because that’s the most effective way.”

You probably won’t see YCAT members going door-to-door or handing out flyers, he says — mobilizing students happens through their phones. “We don’t have to think about it, we just do it,” Gade says. “Ninety-five percent of how I hear about things is through social media. I think that’s how we get turnout. It’s through people re-posting.”

The March strike was almost entirely organized on Instagram, and YCAT is continuing that strategy for Sept. 20. At its meeting, the group prioritizes answering Instagram messages from students, mostly outside of Dane County, who are wondering how they can get involved.

“Appleton and La Crosse have been [two] of our biggest hubs. After the climate strike, those kids have been getting 35 to 40 people out [to protests] every Friday,” Prestigiacomo says. “Everyone has been saying that they want to continue this. And they know friends who want to do it too. It’s really important on our end to be incentivizing it through a young person’s perspective.”

Students in Madison know their counterparts around the state will likely face more pushback than they do when it comes to leaving class and speaking out about the climate crisis.

“We’re so lucky here that when we go down to the Capitol and we strike and we’re chanting about climate, we get people who will stand and chant with us, not people that are coming at us,” notes Gade.

But Guthier believes it’s critical that students outside of Madison and Milwaukee get involved. The most challenging part of YCAT’s mission is nurturing grassroots activism in places where organized protests are rare.

“A lot of people that have been contacting us are brand new to this stuff. More basic stuff like reaching out to the press and permits, we’re trying to help them figure out how to do that,” she says. “We want to give them lots of support, but we also want to make sure that they have their own voice. You want to give them the freedom to do what they want, but also you don’t want to leave them so open that then they feel like they’re not ready for what they’re doing. So we’re trying to be as communicative as possible.”

When students walk out of class, meet at East High School, and walk to the Capitol en masse for the second time in six months, they won’t be alone. They’ll be joined by adult activists, including people from the 350 Madison Climate Action Team, the First Unitarian Society, the Sierra Club, Wisconsin Network for Peace, Climate Action Wisconsin, Extinction Rebellion - Madison, the Climate Reality Project and the People's Green New Deal group. And they’ll be part of a global strike, with kids from all over the world taking to the streets, including 16-year-old Greta Thunberg of Sweden who sailed from Britain to New York last month on a zero-emission yacht to attend the Sept. 23 climate summit at the United Nations.

“I love her,” Prestigiacomo swoons. “We all love her!” Gade interjects.

Thunberg has spent the last year protesting every Friday in front of the Swedish Parliament, demanding government action to address the climate crisis. Her Friday protests have spawned worldwide student-led weekly Friday actions like the ones YCAT organizes.

“When we do these weekly strikes, we get people who are always like, ‘It’s uncomfortable being out there protesting with just two people,’” says Prestigiacomo. “And we’re like, ‘Yes, this is uncomfortable, but remember that Greta was just one person and her face is everywhere now. It makes an impact.’”

But YCAT organizers know that they need to make more than symbolic impacts — they need to ramp up the pressure for systematic change.

“We need bigger actions,” Prestigiacomo says. “Because we don’t have any time.”

Climate strikes around the state on Sept. 20

La Crosse: Office of U.S. Rep. Ron Kind

Janesville: Upper Courthouse

Appleton: Houdini Plaza

Ashland: Chequamegon Co-op to the Bandshell

Milwaukee: North Point Water Tower to City Hall

[Editor's note: This article has been updated to include a list of adult activist groups that are also taking part in the climate strike activities next week.]