Draft:Hikaru Wakeel Hayakawa

Hikaru Wakeel Hayakawa (born June 15, 2001) is a Guyanese and Japanese American social entrepreneur, researcher, and climate justice activist. Hayakawa is the Vice President and Founding Partnerships Director of Climate Cardinals, the world's largest youth-led climate advocacy non-profit organization with more than 10,000 volunteers in 82 countries as of 2023.

Early life and education
Hayakawa was born and raised in Maplewood, NJ, where he attended Columbia High School (New Jersey). After graduating, Hikaru lived in Skopje, North Macedonia for a year as part of the U.S. State Department-sponsored Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange & Study Abroad Program. He is now a student at Williams College in Massachusetts, where he studies history and environmental studies, and he was a visiting student at Exeter College, University of Oxford.

Activism
Hayakawa joined the founding team of Climate Cardinals in 2020. The organization's mission is to make climate change education more accessible to non-English speakers and empower grassroots climate change education. In 2024, the organization was announced as one of the first-ever youth-led organizations to be funded by Google.org, the charitable arm of Google. Before then, Hayakawa told Forbes, "We began with a $500 budget and have largely functioned with a near-zero budget with volunteers spending their time on Climate Cardinals between work, sleep and study.”

During his tenure as Founding Partnerships Director, Hayakawa developed the organization's signature translation program in partnership with Translators Without Borders  and Google Cloud. According to Climate Cardinals founder Sophia Kianni and Hayakawa, the organization's partnership with Google Cloud allowed it to accelerate its translation workflow with AI support and volunteer proofreading, leading to 500,000 words of climate information translations in three months.

Hayakawa has spoken about Climate Cardinals' work for several conferences and organizations, including with the Smithsonian, Italian Ministry of the Environment, UN Development Programme, and the March On Foundation. Hayakawa also represents Climate Cardinals on the UNESCO Youth Climate Action Network Steering Committee, which represents over 105,500 young people in 84 countries.

Hayakawa is also known for his work on Indigenous rights research and advocacy. During his time at Williams College, he conducted collaborative research with Stockbridge–Munsee Community, a federally-recognized tribe.