MEEA works with youth and early career professionals to create leadership opportunities that empower their drive for social and climate justice. This support includes tools, resources, and stipends for their time and expertise. Community building is essential to fostering youth leadership. Therefore, we connect youth to network peers, community partners, mentors, and coaches. We recognize our youth’s work through award nominations.

Educators are critical change agents. We aim to support their work through peer connections, convenings, professional development, and financial and non-financial resources. We elevate storytelling and celebrate educator successes to share these achievements with our state and national network.

Research and evaluation are crucial in highlighting the needs of our community. MEEA works to identify statewide trends, patterns, and needs and utilizes this information to support programmatic evaluation, assess progress toward systems change, and disseminate local case studies of innovation. We also seek to communicate best practices from the national level.

Multiscale change is essential to MEEA’s work. We build organizational infrastructures to cultivate values-aligned procedures, emergent strategies, transparency with failure and process, and authentic relationships. We share the lessons learned with our state and national networks through modeling, teaching, and ensuring accountability for others working towards these culture shifts.

MEEA strives to advance research-informed, transformational policy solutions that will have systemic impact across the sector, the state, and beyond. Our approach focuses on engaging with grassroots movements, collaborating with coalition partners, and building relationships with state and federal decision-makers.