About

Hikaru Wakeel Hayakawa is a twenty-three year-old Japanese-Caribbean American social entrepreneur and researcher. Hikaru is the Executive Director of Climate Cardinals, the world's largest youth-led climate advocacy organization, which works to make climate education more accessible to non-English speakers.

As the Founding Partnerships Director, Hikaru established the organization's signature climate information translation program through key partnerships with Translators Without Borders and Google. He has coordinated over a million words of climate information translations, and has raised around half-a-million USD for Climate Cardinals. Over the past three years, he has served as Founder and UN Secretary-General Advisor Sophia Kianni’s second-hand in growing the organization. He has spoken about his work for events with the UN Development Programme, Italian Ministry of the Environment, Smithsonian, U.S. Climate Engagement and Capacity-Building Interagency Working Group, and the March On Foundation.

Hikaru is also a student at Williams College, the premier liberal arts higher education institution in the U.S., majoring in History with minors in Global and Environmental Studies. He has prior work experience with the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation, a federally-recognized tribe, the Ecologic Institute, a leading environmental policy think tank, and the UN Environment Programme-Finance Initiative. A native English speaker, Hikaru also speaks Spanish, Macedonian, and Russian, and has lived, studied, and worked in the U.S., Germany, the U.K., North Macedonia, and China.