About this project

UGO is a digital tool that matches students with environmental, water and climate innovation projects of organizations globally. We are a platform in-the-making, working to empower youth in all ways possible,  to make it easy for young people all over the world to get involved in climate action. UGO is designed as a smooth and quick tool, so that in just a few clicks our users can be catalyzed to action; we do this through our ultra user-friendly interface, coupled with open-sourced task boards tailored to our collaborating organizations.

Students and organizations can already pre-register on our site at https://ugo.earth/

UGO will do what young people wait 20 years for - it will prove to them that they don't need to be professionals to become part of change and that their actions always make a difference. That is why we will be referring to our community of students, not as volunteers but as changemakers.

Our Mission Statement is strong and authentic: "Even though sustainability issues are complicated, getting involved doesn’t need to be!"

Goals and Objectives

The main goal is to make it easy for young people all over the world to get involved locally in water and climate action.

The near objectives for UGO are to:
1. Work with our Young Ambassadors to raise awareness about UGO, particularly amongst students from schools and universities that do not have existing partnerships with water and environment orgs.

Our long-term objectives are to:

2. Reach more to ORGs (first milestone is set for 500) and students (20, 000) primarily from countries of Uganda, Niger, Namibia and Burkina Faso, where the need for water projects is critical.
3. Continue building new integrated tools on UGO so that is can best serve the needs of young changemakers and our partner organizations.

Expected result

We hope that an NGOs and NonProfits globally can use UGO not only to get empowered by youth’s creativity and spirit but also to truly make progress on their projects and their impact. One of the key issues in a project that is short on staff and resources is having a long to-do list but not having specific people assigned to tackle the tasks and tackle them innovatively.
We hope to see the students, on the other hand gaining skills through these collaborations, with youth creating UGO profiles they will be able to use our beneficial features such as get matched with projects they could be a part of and track local opportunities for creating their own project. In addition, students will have the option to join OLAF (Opensource Legit Action Force) which will be an efficient team making tool, as many young people hear of an important project that needs action yet doing it alone is tough!

Sustainable Development Goals
13. Climate action 17. Partnerships for the goals 6.A WASH Cooperation and Capacity Building 6.B WASH Local Participation
About me / organisation
Maria Kiejnich

To put my ideas into action, I’ve organized and collaborated on a myriad of projects in some of the most remote and fascinating places in this world. My experiences working with youth as well as female entrepreneurs showed me that action for a sustainable tomorrow with people from all generations is what makes me happy! I hope to dedicate my life’s work to finding the answers to the challenges that local communities face with water; to be both a steward of nature, through water conservation and at the same time continue innovating so that every person out there has access to safe WASH. My most cherished achievement thus far was learning to humbly listen, ask with curiosity and use everything I know to create initiatives that can re-shape the realities of the most vulnerable.

Originally from Poland, I am a recent graduate of UCLA holding a degree in Economics and Environmental Systems and I now focus on building UGO full-time!

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