“Look at Deon on the stage (far right of screen)!”

In an emoji-and-exclamation-point-laden exchange among Monitor colleagues last week, correspondent Sara Miller Llana shared the image of young Namibian delegate Deon Shekuza on center stage at the Africa Climate Summit in Nairobi, Kenya. Sara and photographer Melanie Stetson Freeman had interviewed him only weeks earlier in Namibia, and we were all excited about the recognition of someone who tenaciously, without immediate reward, chips away at barriers to progress.

Sara, Melanie, writer Stephanie Hanes, photographer Alfredo Sosa, and senior editor Clara Germani are preparing a global series – launching in November – about the generation born into the climate crisis and now driving transformation, innovation, and progress.

In this season of climate conferences, it’s powerful to hear about the work of young people effecting change in extraordinarily diverse ways. They aren’t generally well known. They often don’t tell their stories the way an American reporter may anticipate – which can demand extraordinary patience to allow a story to emerge.

That’s what happened in Namibia. Sara’s first interview with Deon sprawled, leaving her with doubts.

“Then, the next day,” she says, “I listened to my recording and realized he was teaching me a lesson – that you can’t get all the answers at once or get everything right away. It’s a metaphor for his work: It’s the long game. He’s going somewhere big, but it’s not linear, in his outlook.”

Trust grew. Deon showed Sara and Melanie the one-room home he shares with his mother. They saw the power in his seemingly modest steps: helping random young people on the street, explaining green hydrogen to a group of kids in a poor neighborhood. (They listened intently and took notes.) He put everything ahead of his own well-being, Sara says, with “a generosity of time that we don’t know in North America.”

Our reporters’ work will take you to the Arctic, the Caribbean, Europe, and South Asia. We hope you’ll enjoy starting the journey with us soon.