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Gulliver Prep has selected senior Maya Gowda as the Silver Knight nominee in the Speech category.
“I think everything I do is related to climate action,” she says. “In 2019 I participated in a big strike at Miami Beach City Hall called The Global Week for Future. I helped plan it with the CLEO Institute.”
She not only planned the event, but she also convinced a busload of Gulliver students to go with her to the strike.
Gowda has been working with CLEO since mid-2019 and has been a Certified Climate Speaker since her freshman year.
“My Silver Knight project is my Global Climate Literacy Program called Students for Environmental Education and Discovery,” she says. “I started it in the beginning of my freshman year.”
The purpose of the organization is to design curriculum strands. She designed five strands.
One is about the general impact of climate change. The second strand is about the health impact. The third is the impact of climate change in Africa. The fourth is about the impact in India and the fifth is about water conservation.
She and a friend taught the first strand at Touching Miami With Love in both Overtown and Homestead. She’s also taught the impact of Climate Change on Africa strand to students in Africa via Zoom.
In 2022 some of the modules were used for the Earth Day curriculum for the Miami-Dade County Public School’s Earth Day.
Now she’s collaborating with the South Africa World Health Organization, Universal Health Coverage/Healthier population team.
“I’ve been distributing the information,” she says.
They’re working on publishing children’s books so they can distribute those books to rural communities in Africa.
“I will probably do picture books first because I want to teach the younger students first,” she says.
At Gulliver, she helps organize the annual Earth Day events with the Gulliver Environmental club.
Currently she’s an ambassador for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
“I was invited to the Youth Assembly in August in New York,” she says. “There are students from all over the world, 18 and over, that come to discuss sustainable climate goals.”
Gowda is the mayor’s appointee to the Miami Dade Youth Commission.
“I was able to pass an urging, a climate education urging, to have climate literacy in all schools in Miami-Dade,” she says.
So far, Gowda’s been accepted to the University of Miami and University of Florida. She’s waiting for a few more acceptances in April. She wants to major in Environmental Studies, and study health and development, climate injustice, and climate literacy.
At Gulliver she’s a member of the Environmental Club and HEAL and vice president of Together We Innovate, a STEM based club.
“We give presentations about STEM topics. It’s through Breakthrough Miami,” she says. “I teach the health presentations for the Saturday classes.”
Through the Sunrise Movement chapter in Miami, she organized the Green New Dade Campaign with some of her peers.
“We learned about the Green New Deal. There was a document about how it would be implemented in Miami and we created a presentation for the webinar,” she says.
Gowda has done presentations on period poverty to students in North Miami.
“We also told the girls how they could get menstrual products from the Hygiene Project,” she says.
She did the Advocacy and Youth Research Fellowship with the CLEO Institute where she measured the air pollution in different areas.
“There were higher levels in communities composed of people who earn lower incomes and communities of color,” she says. She is still writing a research paper on the findings.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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