Letter from the Executive Director
It was 2017, and I found myself in a hackerspace in New York surrounded by high school and undergraduate students, researchers, and educators. We had come together for a National Science Foundation-funded project exploring how open-source data could help us better understand complex problems. I thought I knew exactly how the session would go.
By then, I had already taught in the classroom, completed my master's degree at Teachers College, Columbia University, and joined Columbia’s workforce, where I was helping connect research and educational programs.
As the conversation unfolded, the students began describing the worlds they moved through every day. They spoke about the places where they lived, learned, worked, and spent time with their families—not as disconnected experiences, but as systems shaped by countless interacting forces. They described how transportation influenced opportunity, how the built environment affected physical and mental health, and how one seemingly small decision could ripple across an entire community. None of them used the language of systems thinking, yet that was exactly what they were discussing.
What struck me wasn't simply that they cared. It was the sophistication of their reasoning. We had arrived with data, research, multiple degrees, and years of professional experience. They arrived with something none of us could have acquired through our work alone: an understanding of their own worlds that no dataset could fully capture.
I remember leaving that afternoon with a realization I couldn't quite shake. The youngest people in the room often had the deepest understanding of the problems we were trying to solve, yet they had the fewest opportunities to shape the conversation.
That afternoon quietly changed the direction of my work for years to come.
Over the years that followed, first at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and later at the Climate School, I found myself returning to the same question: what would happen if we designed learning experiences that expected students not only to understand the world's biggest challenges, but to contribute to solving them? The more I worked with researchers, educators, and practitioners, the more convinced I became that we had underestimated young people—not their intelligence, but the role they could play. My experience in that hackerspace suggested something very different: Young people don't simply need more knowledge. They need more opportunities to apply what they already know, to test their thinking against others, and to discover that their perspectives have value beyond the classroom.
That question ultimately became Planet+.
Over the past year, we haven't simply been building a competition. We've been designing a year-long learning experience around a belief that has guided us from the beginning: high school and undergraduate students deserve opportunities to engage with real-world problems long before they enter the workforce. Yet remarkably few experiences give them the platform, the structure, or the expectation to do so. We ask them to learn about the world's biggest challenges, but rarely invite them to help wrestle with them.
Every decision we made came back to that belief. We rewrote cases, redesigned milestones, challenged our own assumptions, and debated not how to make a better competition, but how to create a better learning journey.
Climate change is one of the defining challenges of our time precisely because it refuses to stay within the boundaries of a single discipline. It demands collaboration across science, finance, agriculture, public health, policy, and communities themselves. It demands people who are comfortable working with uncertainty, changing their minds when the evidence changes, and building solutions with people whose experiences differ from their own. Those habits cannot be developed in a weekend, nor are they learned by watching from the sidelines. They emerge through sustained practice.
That is why Planet+ exists.
We built Planet+ because we believe the next generation deserves a place to wrestle with difficult questions now, alongside researchers, practitioners, educators, and one another. Not because they already have all the answers, but because better solutions emerge when more perspectives are invited into the room.
If there was ever a moment to rethink how we educate young people about climate change—not simply to inherit the challenge, but to help shape it—this is it. If you share that belief, I hope you'll follow our journey, join our mailing list, and become part of the growing community rethinking what climate education can be.
The students are ready. It's time we build learning experiences that are ready for them.
- Cassie Xu, Executive Director, Planet+
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