Student Guide: Partners in Activism

Algalita is a nimble grassroots organization working to end plastic pollution worldwide. In 1997 our Founder, Charles Moore, sparked a global movement after discovering and bringing attention to the swirling soup of plastic pollution in the Pacific – now known by many as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. We exist to empower a new generation of critical thinkers who will shift the broken and unjust systems that have caused the plastic pollution crisis. Our mission is not only to cultivate successors for our movement, but to ensure long-lasting solutions to plastic pollution are present across all sectors of our future society.

The Post-Landfill Action Network cultivates, educates, and inspires the student-led zero waste movement. We inform students about the waste crisis and equip them with the necessary skills and resources to implement solutions to waste in their campus communities. PLAN empowers our generation to be changemakers. The Post-Landfill Action Network was founded in 2013, by a group of college students. These students witnessed a systemic waste problem on their campus and developed the first student-led, financially self-sustaining, zero waste move-out program of its kind. Other campuses wanted to replicate the program and from there, PLAN was born.

The #breakfreefromplastic Movement is a global movement of more than 8,000 organizations and individual supporters from across the world have joined the movement to demand massive reductions in single-use plastics and to push for lasting solutions to the plastic pollution crisis. BFFP members share the common values of environmental protection and social justice, and work together through a holistic approach in order to bring about systemic change. This means tackling plastic pollution across the whole plastics value chain - from extraction to disposal – focusing on prevention rather than cure and providing effective solutions.

We work with professional staff at colleges and universities to make sure our peers have the skills, opportunities and training they need to create a better, more sustainable future for all of us. Our chapters on 35 campuses provide the training, professional support and resources students need to tackle climate change, protect public health, revitalize our democracy, feed the hungry and more. Students have been at the forefront of social change throughout history, from civil rights, to voting rights to protecting the environment. For over 40 years we’ve helped students to get organized, mobilized and energized so they can continue to be on the cutting edge of positive change.

Cafeteria Culture (CafCu) is an environmental education organization that works creatively with youth to achieve equitable zero waste, climate-smart school communities and a plastic free biosphere. Our youth programs merge citizen science and civic action with media production and the arts. Students in our programs, overwhelmingly from lower income communities of color, provide an urgently needed voice to the environmental movement by taking on leadership and advocacy roles and bridging the interconnected issues of zero waste, environmental justice and the climate crisis. Our award winning documentary, Microplastic Madness (2019), screened in 30 countries, is sparking youth-led action for a plastic free future with schools as hubs for change.

Student Guide: Partners in Activism

About Our Partners