Isra Hirsi is an American environmental activist and the executive director of U.S. Youth Climate Strike. She was born February 22, 2003 and raised in Minneapolis Minnesota. In March 2019, just three months after co-founding USYCS with then 16-year -old Haven Coleman (who has since stepped away from the group), the organization inspired more than 1.5 million students across 120 countries to skip school to demand that adults take action on climate change.

In September of that same year, Hirsi helped rally students to participate in a global climate strike. This “is the fight of my generation, and it needs to be addressed urgently.”

She’s received broad attention for her environmental justice work in Time Magazine and Jacobin, along with tweets from presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. She also received a Brower Youth Award, which are given annually to six recipients under 23-years of age in recognition of their environmental and social justice leadership. But such attention is not new to this teen given that her mother is U.S. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, the first Somali American in Congress in 2019 and the first of two Muslim women (alongside Rashida Tlaib) in the U.S. legislature in 2017.

Receiving national attention has it’s risks - harassment, safety threats, tokenization, and bullying. But Irsa Hirsi manages to stayed focused on her mission of spreading the word about climate urgency and encouraging the world’s youth to be part of the solution.