Sophia Kianni

Founder and President

Sophia Kianni is an Iranian-American social entrepreneur and activist. She studied at Stanford University and is the founder of Climate Cardinals, the world’s largest youth-led climate nonprofit, with 10,000 volunteers in 80+ countries. She is the youngest United Nations advisor in US history. She was most recently appointed to serve on the EPA’s National Youth Advisory Council.

Sophia has amassed a following of over 300,000 across social media platforms and her work has been profiled by The New York Times, CNN, Vogue, Business Insider, BBC, NPR, ELLE, The Guardian, NBC, and even on the front page of The Washington Post. She has also authored opinion pieces for outlets such as TIME Magazine, MTV News, Cosmopolitan, and Teen Vogue. Sophia is a prolific storyteller and has spoken at universities across the world including Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, and Princeton. She won the TED global idea competition and her debut TED Talk has 2+ million views.

She has been named VICE Media's youngest Human of the Year, a National Geographic Young Explorer, on Business Insider’s Climate Action 30, among BBC’s 100 Women, and to Forbes 30 under 30.