Linares: the full ladder of climate action, in one territory
130 students from public schools took part in the Young Climathon of Linares. Their teachers had trained first in the Climate Action Academy. This is what a territory looks like when learning is sequenced.
Linares is an agricultural city in the Maule region of south-central Chile. It does not usually appear on climate innovation maps. And yet one of the sequences that best explains how we work happened there.
First came educator training: teachers from public schools in Linares and its surroundings took part in methodology workshops and in the Climate Action Academy, 2811’s programme preparing educators of any subject to bring climate action into the classroom. More than 90 people went through the methodology workshops in the territory.
Then it was the students’ turn. With their teachers already trained, 130 young people from public schools took part in the Young Climathon of Linares: an innovation day where student teams identify climate challenges in their own territory and co-create solutions, using the international Climathon methodology 2811 has facilitated in Chile, Colombia and the United States.
Why the sequence matters
It would have been faster to organise only the event. A Climathon is visible, exciting, photogenic. But an event without prior training evaporates: the teams go back to class and nobody is prepared to sustain what started.
The Linares sequence inverts the order: first the educators’ capabilities, then the students’ activation. When the Young Climathon ended, the ideas stayed in the hands of teachers who knew how to keep working on them, because the event was part of their training, not a parenthesis.
We call that the full ladder: educator training, student activation, and a territory left with more capabilities than before. It is the same principle we apply today with higher education institutions, from a single workshop to a multi-year alliance.
This century’s challenges call for new capabilities, new alliances and new ways of teaching. Linares shows what that looks like at the scale of a city.
Can you picture this ladder at your institution or territory? Let’s talk.