Jerome Foster II is a 20-year-old environmental justice activist, motivational speaker, youngest-ever White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council Member, and Co-Executive Director at Waic Up. He served as intern for the late Honorable John Lewis at 16 years old and served as Board Member for the DC State Board of Education's High School Graduation Requirements Task Force at 15. He is Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director at Waic Up, an international communication to community impact charity which is an expansion of the charity OneMillionOfUs, which mobilized a movement of young people to vote in the 2020 elections.
Jerome Foster II studies International Environmental Governance, Policy, and Social Justice at Harvard University. Jerome has spoken at Harvard, Oxford, and Princeton University, and is featured in the Cambridge University curriculum. He has been a keynote speaker in South Korea, Dubai, United Kingdom, Romania, and across the United States, and has also spoken at the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights. Jerome helped to pass the Clean Energy DC Act (one of the most comprehensive decarbonization bills being implemented in the nation). He is one of the lead organizers of the Fridays For Future youth climate strike movement holding weekly climate strikes in front of the White House and Harvard University for over 80 weeks. For the first climate strike in February 2019, he mobilized 400 students from his school and took a citywide leadership role in organizing climate strikes and speaking out about climate justice issues in rallies and town halls. Later, he began working alongside Jane Fonda to kickstart Fire Drill Fridays in front of the U.S. Capitol.
His experience in climate activism extends further via his work with National Geographic, where he journeyed across the island of Iceland as a Climatology Researcher and Virtual Reality Developer.
Before his time as an activist, he coded civic-based 3D Virtual Reality Environments, later winning the World Series of Entrepreneurship for creating a civic-based virtual reality organization called TAU VR.
