Why Climate Action Starts With Seeing People: Warm Hearts Awareness Campaign

by Emily Kantardzic for The 44 North

Youth Climate Fellow—Stanford Climate Fellowship & Rustic Pathways

People in coats walking through a blizzard in a city

"One of the most important lessons the fellowship taught me is that you don’t need a perfect plan or a large platform to begin. I used to believe meaningful change required waiting—for the right idea, the right time, or the right level of confidence. This experience showed me that starting small isn’t a weakness. It’s often how change becomes possible."

Before joining the Stanford Climate Fellowship through Rustic Pathways, I thought climate change was something I understood. I followed the news, knew the statistics, and cared deeply about the issue. However, based on what I’d seen in the media, heard from adults, and believed, I thought: Because I’m a teenager, my voice isn’t big enough to make any change. It was amazing how wrong I was. After doing my research into the opportunities available to teens like me—who want to make change but don't know how to—everything shifted. My perspective on the change I could make transformed once I began connecting climate issues to real people and lived experiences through the sources that were right at my fingertips (and are at yours too!).

The fellowship wasn’t just about learning facts—it was about noticing how climate change shows up in everyday life. Through conversations, workshops, and shared projects, I started to see how environmental challenges are deeply tied to social ones, particularly for people who are already vulnerable.

One moment that stayed with me was realizing how extreme weather affects youth experiencing homelessness in my own city. Cold winters aren’t just uncomfortable—they can be dangerous. That realization pushed me to think differently about what climate awareness can look like when it’s rooted in local, human realities.

Learning to Take Action

As part of the fellowship, we were encouraged to design a project connected to our communities. That’s how Warm Hearts began—a youth-led awareness campaign focused on youth homelessness in Toronto alongside sustainable clothing practices. While it’s still early in its journey, Warm Hearts has already helped turn concern into action.

Through the campaign, I share information about youth homelessness, extreme cold, and the environmental impact of clothing waste on Instagram and TikTok (@warmheartsac). The idea is simple: donating gently used clothing can support young people in need while also reducing textile waste and the carbon footprint of fast fashion.

Partnering with Covenant House in Etobicoke, Warm Hearts has helped collect winter clothing and raise funds for youth experiencing homelessness. Equally meaningful are the conversations it sparks—moments when peers, friends, and community members pause to reflect on empathy, sustainability, and how they can make a difference in their own ways.

Emily wearing a red holiday sweater and a Santa hat, holding a hand-drawn Warm Hearts sign.

What I Took Away From the Fellowship

One of the most important lessons the fellowship taught me is that you don’t need a perfect plan or a large platform to begin. I used to believe meaningful change required waiting—for the right idea, the right time, or the right level of confidence. This experience showed me that starting small isn’t a weakness. It’s often how change becomes possible.

I also learned the power of sharing stories. When people understand why something matters, they’re more likely to care and stay engaged. That mindset has shaped how I think about climate issues, leadership, and community action.

Moving Forward

Warm Hearts is just the beginning. I hope it grows into a broader platform that inspires young people to get involved in issues they care about—whether that’s climate justice, homelessness, sustainability, or something else entirely.

More than anything, the fellowship gave me confidence: confidence to speak up, to try, and to keep going even when things feel uncertain.

The Warm Hearts logo

A Note to Other Young People

If you feel a calling to help change the world, that urge is already halfway to the goal. Your voice isn’t too small—don’t let anyone convince you any differently. In situations where most people follow the crowd and don't speak up about topics that really matter, don’t be a follower; be a leader. You don’t need everything figured out to begin. Paying attention, learning, and responding to what matters around you already counts.

Sometimes, meaningful change starts there—and if you want to see what that can look like, Warm Hearts is one example of how young people can take action in their communities. You can follow the journey on Instagram and TikTok @warmheartsac.

A Holiday Gift Guide to Help You Spend & Consume Less

by The 44 North Team

From us to you this holiday season

A handmade gift wrapped in paper, gold ribbon, and a pinecone, sitting on a wooden table next to scissors

When everything is expensive, you want to be more sustainable, or produce as little waste as possible, it’s time to think outside the box.

The Holidays don’t need to be about spending money—they can be about taking the time to make meaningful things. 

Stories to Share, Ideas to Keep

Books travel further than we do, and as James Clear noted, “Books are the closest thing to a time machine that humans have ever created.”  Starting in early high school, every year during the holidays, my dad would gift me a book (or two) and write the date and an inscription inside.  My bookshelves today still hold many of those volumes, and now that he’s gone, every time I pull one off the shelf it’s like he’s reaching into the future to speak to me—and I’m receiving another wonderful gift.  This holiday season, my suggestion is to give a favourite book, either from a local store or from your own shelf—perhaps a copy you dog-eared and loved, with the date and a message inside the cover. 

If you don’t have a book to give, curate a small reading list, like a playlist of ideas:

• Something that made you laugh

• Something that soothed you

• Something that shifted your thinking

• Print it, fold it, tie it with twine. A library card is optional, but a poetic touch.

—Gillian

Edible Moments (Not Projects)

Forget elaborate charcuterie boards. A gift can be four perfect shortbread cookies wrapped in wax paper. Or a tiny jar of cocoa mix or soup with a handwritten recipe. Or one tea bag paired with one cookie:

“A moment of calm, to be used whenever needed.”

Small servings can feel intentional and thoughtful—a treat for now, not a chore for later.

—Gillian

Scrapbook Holiday Cards & Letters

Sometimes it’s hard to generate the words we’d like to share with our loved ones, especially during the holidays. But if you have old magazines, notebooks, cookbooks, textbooks, or even holiday cards around, you may be able to borrow words in some fun, crafty ways:

• From a book or magazine (that you’d recycle otherwise), use scissors to cut out a full page of an essay, short story, or news article. Circle or cross out words, sentences, and phrases with a permanent marker. What you’d like to say might erupt as the words left on the page! 

• Gather an array of materials with writing in them, such as notebooks, cookbooks, textbooks, or past holiday cards. Pick out phrases or sentences you love, and cut them out with scissors. Rearrange your fragments on a new piece of paper to craft a message, card, or letter!

Of course, you can always go full-craft-mode and decorate your pages with other make-shift supplies around your house. Some fun ones might include memorabilia we usually throw away, such as receipts, ticket stubs, bottle labels, sleeves of to-go coffee cups, twist-ties, or information/business cards. Get creative!

—Mikaela

Make Ornaments

Get your craft on and make something meaningful for your loved ones with things you already have lying around your home. Felt? Air-dry clay? Old wrapping paper? This is one of those easy gift ideas that lets you customize your ornament for whoever you’re giving it to, and there is no shortage of tutorials and links online to learn how to do it. 

It also allows us to slow down during what can be a very busy and overwhelming time of year. Put on some music, light a candle, eat a snack, and get crafting. 

—Megan

Poet’s Corner: “half-blood” by Justene Dion-Glowa

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North

Senior Editor

“half-blood” by Justene Dion-Glowa from The League of Canadian Poets’ Poetry Pause, June 5th, 2024

A bison in a wheat field under a cloudy sky

Note: This poem is not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read it.

Justene Dion-Glowa is a queer Métis poet living in Secwepemcúl’ecw. An alum of the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, they now work in the non-profit sector and recently released their first full-length poetry collection, Trailer Park Shakes, available now via Brick Books.

The brilliance of Justene Dion-Glowa’s poem shines through their use of white space on the page, which is one of my favourite craft tools in poetry. In “half-blood”, space—including caesuras, stanza breaks, line breaks, and indents, for example—works as hard as words, enacting the feeling of being ‘halved’ alongside a sort of sinister whiteness. But there is also space for thought, pause, breath, love, and reverence, for “the strength of our people / and Creator / reflecting in my eye shine”. The title of the poem, “half-blood”, isn’t extrapolated directly, but this is why it works so well: it layers the poem’s language. And although it likely speaks to Dion-Glowa’s Métis heritage, it also says: for so much to coexist is to be devastated—to be in a perpetual state of halving oneself and being halved by society. It’s both a brand of erasure and a necessary state of reflection.

Dion-Glowa, with tender care, also weaves in reflections on longing for the “sleek, hot, and slender-framed conventionally attractive”, “not made for a life of hardship”. A longing, now, to be halved. But I also think about the etymology of the word ‘hardship’, which conjures the rigidity of the British and French ships seemingly pouring into harbours, everything aboard inflicted like a trap. Dion-Glowa’s lines, here, gently shift blame and fault from them and their people. Followed by white space, I see these lines afloat, reclaiming the sea dominated by whiteness. 

There are also several short lines, intentionally placed to help us mirror feeling. For example, “spoons tapping along to the rhythm / I consider / how lucky I am / to have a weight I must carry physically” offers space to mirror how we consider gratitude, particularly with the inclusion of extra space beneath “how lucky I am”. Similarly, Dion-Glowa leaves extra space for generations to hurt—the past is not obsolete or ‘back in time’, it’s ongoing and always with us. The hurt didn’t happen behind us, it’s beneath our every step.

I’m also drawn to the musicality in “half-blood”, specifically in “girthy thighs”, “bison & bear”, and “food / fur / fibre / so / I starve no longer.” When rhyme and alliteration are used here, they ask us to chew. The language is delicious, so an excellent craft choice for the content of these lines (which become memorable for these reasons).

In the same vein as musicality, word choice profoundly shapes a poem. The word ‘meager’ stands out, starkly, because it’s the only word italicized. It also drives the last line, and is uncapitalized when we’d expect a capital ‘M’. We so often repeat “meager means” when we’re speaking about intentionally marginalized and “underprivileged” folks. By using lower case and italics, Dion-Glowa is tapping on the shoulder of the inflection—fear, discomfort, disgust—that’s used when we say ‘meager’, which our lexicon bolsters: “deficient in quantity, fullness, or extent; scanty, deficient in richness, fertility, or vigor; feeble, having little flesh; lean (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition).” Anti-fatness and ableism are apparent here without these exact words, reflective of the covert ways they outline our world. This is the power of poetry—‘meager’ is one word, and placed well, it does the work of evoking everything “half-blood” is alive on the page to say: in body, mind, spirit, and relationship, Dion-Glowa and their people are not, never have been, and never will be meager.