Happy Earth Day from Kathleen Rogers
Message from Kathleen Rogers, President of Earth Day International, for the Earth Day 2026 Event “Climate Education: Towards a More Sustainable Future” organized by the Fondazione Antonio Emanuele Augurusa in Filogaso, Calabria, Italy
Kathleen Rogers, President of Earth Day Network, has worked for over twenty years as an environmental attorney and activist, focusing on public policy and environmental law, both nationally and internationally. She has held senior positions at the National Audubon Society, the Environmental Law Institute, and two United States Olympic Organizing Committees. She also worked for Garth Associates in New York and for the law firm Beveridge & Diamond, where she developed a specialized practice in defending white-collar environmental crimes. She served as editor-in-chief of the University of California at Davis Law Review and clerked for Judge John Pratt of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Additionally, she collaborated with the United States Delegation to the United Nations Conference on Women.
It is with great pleasure and a sense of genuine kinship that I send these words to Filogaso, to the Fondazione Antonio Emanuele Augurusa, and to everyone gathered here today to mark Earth Day 2026.
I wish I could be with you in person. But even at a distance, I feel close to what you are doing — because the work unfolding in Calabria today speaks directly to the values that have guided the Earth Day movement for over fifty years. And I feel a particular connection to this community: having had the privilege of contributing as a lecturer to the Social Impact Manager program last year, I have seen firsthand the quality and ambition of what the Foundation is building.
At EARTHDAY.ORG, we have long believed that the planet cannot wait, and that the people who will help save it are not only the powerful or the privileged, but everyone — especially those who have too often been overlooked.
The green transition is not only an environmental imperative. It is a social one. The concept of just transition reminds us that how we make this transition matters as much as whether we make it. And if we build a green economy that leaves behind the most vulnerable, the most geographically remote, the least resourced — then we have not truly built a green economy at all. We have only built a greener version of the same old inequalities.
This is why the work of the Antonio Emanuele Augurusa Foundation matters so much, and why it resonates so strongly with Earth Day’s mission. Offering free, high-quality professional training to young people, supporting disadvantaged communities and connecting people with real opportunities across the sectors that will shape our common future is how a just green transition actually happens: one person, one community, one region at a time.
The Green Social Impact Manager and the Virtus Lab models represent two complementary responses to the same urgent challenge. One equips graduates to lead impact initiatives across the non-profit, public and private sectors. The other offers hands-on technical training — in fields like renewable energy — and builds direct pathways into companies looking for exactly those skills. Together, they reflect a conviction that environmental literacy is not a cultural debate — it is infrastructure for the mind. It builds entrepreneurs and innovators, it develops technical expertise, it cultivates the capacity to lead, to design, to solve. It creates a generation of people who can turn their concern for the future into purpose, and into work that matters. The Foundation has understood this, and has built programs that reflect it in full — nurturing the full range of skills and profiles that the green economy genuinely needs. And investing in people this way is not optional. It is how the transition actually gets built.
I also want to speak for a moment about the youngest participants of the event exploring environmental topics in their laboratories today.
At EARTHDAY.ORG, we have long held that climate education is not a privilege — it is a human right. Every child, regardless of where they grow up or what resources surround them, deserves to understand the world they are inheriting and to feel equipped to play a part in shaping it. And because climate change is, at its core, a community issue, it is communities that must take responsibility for that education — not leaving it to chance, but actively choosing to invest in the next generation.
That the Foundation, the schools, and the town of Filogaso have joined forces to make this happen is not a small thing. It is precisely the kind of collective commitment that the next generation deserves — and that we hope to see grow.
Today’s event also brings together local and regional institutions alongside private sector actors — and I think that, too, deserves a word of recognition. One of the things I have learned over many years of this work is that the green transition cannot be driven by any single actor alone. It requires governments willing to create the conditions, businesses willing to invest and hire, civil society organizations willing to take risks for the communities they serve, and individuals willing to step forward.
What you have assembled in Filogaso today is a microcosm of exactly that alliance.
On this Earth Day 2026, I ask you to carry this work forward. To the young participants of the Foundation’s programs, Green Social Impact Manager and Virtus Lab: the world needs your skills, and it needs them now. To the children in the laboratories: keep asking questions.
To the institutions, businesses and civil society representatives gathered here: keep investing in people. And to the Fondazione Antonio Emanuele Augurusa, to its President Francesco Augurusa, and to all who make this work possible every day: thank you.
You are proof that the change we need is not only possible. In Filogaso, it is already underway.
Happy Earth Day.
Kathleen Rogers President, EARTHDAY.ORG
