Get To By J342 Project

“In that moment I knew that I needed to do something to prevent our future generation from the same ways of thinking about our climate.” Claire Roach is a former student of Tualatin High School and currently attends the University of California Berkley studying environmental science. She has always been one to care about the environment and encourage the people of her generation to participate in raising awareness for climate change. Since being in college she joined Berkley's school paper The Daily Californian as an investigative Data Journalist focussing on Climate justice. 

In her sophomore year of high school, she started participating in Tuesdays for Trash which is a trash pickup movement that was created by one of Claire's friends and another student during COVID-19 in 2020. One day she was picking up trash with her friend Izzy Kneeshaw for Tuesdays For Trash and a man slowed down his car to speak to them. He said “Do you guys actually believe in this climate hoax” to which they said that they do and that if you take a look around you can see within their community there have been jurasstic changes in the environment. From then they decided that they wanted to teach young people about the danger of climate change and how we can take steps to prevent it. Claire and Izzy were approached by a City Counselor to start a 501C3 non-profit along with other members of the community to focus on educating the youth about climate change. Izzy said their goal with the Tualatin sustainability network is “to provide the younger generation as well as older locals with opportunities to get involved with helping their community's climate.” They hosted many trash pick-ups in the community park, “The highest attended events were all hosted by Claire, myself, and others from the city and sustainability network, we had 150 volunteers which was really amazing to see.” She and other members of the Student Union also were able to get a climate resolution bill passed within the Tigard-Tualatin school district that implements strategies in schools that help with food waste and education to the students on how to properly discard waste. 

Claire's story could be inspiring to many because she was so young when she started making actual changes in her community. You may think that creating a non-profit is too difficult to do at a young age, but it's not. She will continue working and writing at The Daily Californian, but in the future, she wants to be an environmental journalist and “travel the world to report the factors and effects of climate change that are not widely covered by the media and create a conversation to change that.”

Student Profile (Text) : Claire Roach

Written student profile for Gateway-To-Media course