SVYCA Spotlight: Jayden Wan
“SVYCA has enriched my personal life with purpose, impact, and community, and my professional life with opportunity, leadership, and networks.“
How’s it goin’? I’m Jayden Wan, an SVYCA member since late-2022. I attended Burlingame High School (Class of ‘25), and am starting a new journey at Stanford University (Class of ‘29) studying Civil Engineering!
There’s no doubt that SVYCA’s been one of the most outstanding contributors to my fulfillment throughout the years, supporting my growth as a leader and person overall.
The Origin Story
Attending one of the first SMC Team Meetings in 2022!
I joined SVYCA for purpose, but stayed for the impact and the community.
As an eight-grader during the COVID-19 pandemic, through a screen I saw a world struggling to save itself from what folks describe as a “metacrisis.” Gaps in government, industry, and society at-large – revealed by the mass outbreak of a killer virus – left me feeling overwhelmed and uncertain, about the future and my place in it.
Even after the pandemic ended, a heavy ambiguity lingered – one that, looking back, I’m lucky to have resolved through SVYCA. I spent my first year of high school experimenting with different activities, different causes – and I settled on the environmental movement. Moral, modern, but still inchoate – in its unrealized potential I saw my own.
SVYCA’s 2022 Youth Leadership Summit was the turning point, where a combination of “think globally, start locally” and “institutional over individual impact” translated abstract hope into a plan for action. Silicon Valley, California, would set rippling precedent worldwide with its resources as responsibility – and SVYCA’s newly-formed San Mateo County Team presented itself as a strong agent of change that I could contribute to.
As a team member, I worked social media until I took on the Co-Lead position in late 2023. Continuously volunteering myself for action items and events – as well as pointing out organizational “gaps” – helped me convey to others and to myself that I could take on this new role.
I’m probably most proud that across all of San Mateo County’s twenty cities and towns, we were able to track and advocate for innovative policy in each one, empowering members to be the climate champions in their own hometowns (see all our accomplishments on the slides here). From advocacy in building electrification and bike lanes, school assemblies and social media, I’d felt that the team increasingly embodied the kind of efficacy in advocacy we aspired to.
As for the organization at-large, an influx of new leaders, new ideas, new funding, necessitated an overhaul of administrative infrastructure – the idea being to create a self-sustaining organization whose capacity to execute its mission wouldn’t change even if membership did.
In a responsibility later formalized through a Youth (co-)Director position, I’d take more initiative in revising and standardizing systems of member recruitment, retention, and succession, streamlining a shared workflow through Slack and Google Drive, improving the leadership experience, getting real’ “into the weeds” with it. I enjoyed it, really – an agency to experiment and invent, each new process and scrapped idea, taught me lots about advocacy and about myself.
Summer Summit Snowball
Flashback to the summer of ‘24 – with junior year over, I felt invincible! At least, until planning for the 2024 SVYCA Youth Leadership Summit rolled around – and I snowballed myself into leading it.
Yeah, I’d helped out a bit with the socials for the 2023 Summit – but this was a “whole ‘nother beast” that for a while I’d struggle to wrangle. My biggest realization was that it wasn’t – never was, and never will be – just me. The reason why the Summit succeeds isn’t because of one great project manager; instead, it’s a sum of equal efforts from our peers at SVYCA and beyond.
Across three teams – outreach, speaker panels, and logistics – my role was to coordinate, meaning making the project vision transparent across all members, accessibly defining resources for work, following-up on meetings and action items, and playing to people’s specialties to ensure everyone liked the work they were doing!
I wasn’t actually even able to attend that year’s Summit (oops!) since we were out of town, but I heard that it went well! I look back fondly on SVYCA’s event-organizing opportunities – Summits, Green New Year Celebrations, Green Bus Tours, workshops, public comments at Council Chambers, etc. – because each one dragged me out into the spotlight and stage, to face the audience and to face myself. Even if and especially if I didn’t feel ready, SVYCA presented these high-stakes circumstances as a calling for me to rise to the occasion, and to teach others to do so as well.
Electric Eyes
What makes SVYCA special are those empowering experiences that make me pause and wonder to myself, “Is this really happening? Am I really here?”
The 2024 Summit was one instance – so was my work with Peninsula Clean Energy (PCE), an organization I’ve gotten to know exclusively through SVYCA.
Earlier in 2024, SVYCA secured a $40,000 Community Outreach Grant with PCE to conduct outreach around clean energy toward a high school demographic. I hadn’t worked in either energy or climate literacy much, but our superstar San Mateo County Team wasn’t scared, so neither was I. We developed a clean energy curriculum, a 10-Minute Climate Literacy Video, 2 Climate x Health Videos, and “went on tour” across different high schools, presenting it to students! We accomplished enough to receive the grant again this year in 2025 where we’re having high schoolers administering a paid internship for other high schoolers, which is even more unprecedented and impactful!
What’s more, Peninsula Clean Energy featured me in a video about Reach Codes policy, shown to policymakers at an special awards night held in collaboration with Sustainable San Mateo County. Like a door into opportunity that once opened can’t be shut, my work with SVYCA’s taken me places I’d never dared to dream – for that, I’m truly grateful.
Concrete Tree
I’ve learned a lot during my time in SVYCA, perhaps the most fascinating being that a LOT of the world's issues (yes, the “metacrisis”) can be solved via adjustments to the built environment. At Stanford University, I’m hoping to engage in the Civil and Environmental Engineering program, going down the path of being a P.E. (Professional Engineer) – a Civil Engineer!
The literal foundation of our lives is infrastructure, buildings, the physical alterations we humans’ve made to the natural environment around us that facilitate our society. Civil Engineering is often known for its STEM-related topics – construction, transportation, material science, data – and I’d really like to investigate its intersection with ESG, with topics like policy, anthropology, energy, sustainability, and more. Especially in an age where ethics are of increasing discussion in the engineering world, it’ll be important that we have advocates in all industries for people, policy, places, and the planet.
Thanks, SVYCA!
Thanks for reading Jayden’s blog. To keep up-to-date on SVYCA news and events, sign up for our newsletter at the bottom of this page.
If you would like to support SVYCA with a donation, you can do so here.