Last night, Captain Planet Foundation, the global non-profit dedicated to empowering youth to be changemakers for the environment, held their annual Gala at Flourish Atlanta and recognized environmental honorees Xiye Bastida and Louie Schwartzberg. The benefit raised more than $650,000 to support the Foundation’s worldwide educational programming and grant-making efforts to engage and empower young people to be problem solvers for the planet. The Gala was hosted by Atlanta News First’s One on One host, Monica Kaufman Pearson, who is also the first woman and first minority to anchor the WSB-TV daily evening news in Atlanta, GA.
The evening began with a musical performance from DejaBlue Grass Band as guests had the opportunity to participate in the gala’s silent auction during the cocktail reception which included 14 private Chef’s table experiences from some of Atlanta’s most treasured Chefs.
Highlighting the extraordinary sustainability efforts of both honorees during the program, Climate Justice Activist, Xiye Bastida, was honored with the Young Superhero for Earth Award for her work organizing Fridays For Future NYC and helping mobilize up to 300,000 people in the 2019 climate strikes. In 2020, she co-founded the Re-Earth Initiative, a youth-led Climate Justice education organization and she is also a commissioner at the Climate Governance Commission that develops reform proposals on global climate policies.
While accepting her award Bastida remarked, “I was raised with a view of the world that was about giving back, that was about reciprocity, that was about climate justice. And if all of the kids in the world were raised with this point of view, we can truly change the world.”
Over the past 31 years, Captain Planet Foundation has funded 3,600+ hands-on environmental education projects with schools and nonprofits that serve children in all 50 U.S. states and in 35 countries internationally. More than 1.7 million children have…
Read the full article here
