The fellowship will focus on capacity building and training of youth climate activists/future leaders with a long-term goal of building activists and leaders who can develop an array of strategies and tools with high impact attached. Preventing activist burnout is also at the forefront of all training and mentoring.
Nurture and support the emergence of a sustainable and distributed youth-led climate leadership to drive strategic systemic change. 

• Increase momentum and scale public demand for climate action by enabling youth leaders activism via monthly stipends. Youth-led activism remains fragile, can result in burnout, and is costly and inaccessible to many. There’s currently no collective vehicle to try and make sure that the experience they’ve acquired can benefit other young activists - the program aims to tackle this, nurturing and training fellows who won’t take a financial or health hit from their much-needed involvement, ideas, and inspiration, propelling their future engagement and activism. 

• Train and build capacity for a new generation of youth climate leaders through developing, and strengthening new activism and skills including e.g. movement building, communications, tactics and actions. Fellows will learn from exchanging with leaders from movements of the past and building collaborations to broaden the supporter base (first wave of the climate movement; trade-unionists; anti-apartheid movement; civil rights movement; movement for black lives etc.), with the goal of helping them to develop new skills and strengthen their work. COPs will provide an opportunity to apply learnings from the experiences (successes and failures) shared by past movements and focus more energies on building and strengthening alliances and actions. Ensuring activists are trained both in street action and various types of confrontation alongside "softer tools" that would allow influencing in more difficult and challenging contexts, such as Dubai, holds tactical and significant importance. By preparing fellows for a variety of hosts with a mix of challenges - trained by a range of activists on different types of activism and with a well-equipped, diverse toolkit - this drives the longer-term aim of sustainability and success of the movement’s future.

• Provide a safe and well-coordinated space for individual mentoring, trust-based coaching, and support to protect and strategically develop youth-led climate activists.

• Increase opportunities for future alliance and networking building amongst youth climate activist movement and other movements via connections globally.

• Create an evolving community and informal “alumni” of youth-led climate activists to strengthen the future of the movement via training a cohort to become trainers themselves. This would also ensure presence at central climate events - at COPs and Climate Justice camps - whereby experience, skills, and knowledge are shared and exchanged with future youth activists and leaders. 

• The Climate Justice Squad Fellowship Program therefore has a long-term strategic objective that encompasses the whole arc of training, including training of trainers in order to ensure adaptable, pivotal, and responses to policy-making/shifting events and opportunities, alongside the deeper, more sustained work of ongoing alliance building and movement strengthening.