Chilean Julieta Martínez (18) was the only Latin American woman to share the stage with former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the UN’s Generation Equality Forum, held in Paris in early July. The event brought together important world figures like Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad, businesswoman Melinda Gates, and U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris who came together to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Summit and also took the opportunity to show their commitment to gender equality. “It was as if Hillary was passing the baton to new generations of women,” Martinez explained in a Paris interview with the EFE news agency,

Julieta’s leap. Julieta took up her activism at a very young age, inspired by the talks she was invited to by her mother, journalist Marcela Oyarzún, who works in the world of entrepreneurship and social innovation. “That’s when I realized that innovation is not reinventing the wheel, but rather taking something that exists and continually improving it,” she explains.

• But what really motivated her to take the final leap was her medical condition. “I have diabetes mellitus and am insulin dependent, so before I had the insulin pump connected I had to inject myself,” she has explained in a number of interviews. When her parents gave her the pump that would change her life, they told her that she should take good care of it because having it was truly a “privilege.” That word made Julieta uncomfortable, and she was quick to empathize and connect with the existing inequity in access to healthcare in Chile. Soon thereafter this youth took it upon herself to go out and march, signs in hand, to demand that the service be included in the AUGE healthcare plan (a plan that explicitly guarantees coverage for listed conditions). Julieta was only 10 years old.

The strength of Tremendas. Julieta’s concerns later led to the creation of the Tremendas collective (www.tremendas.cl), whose aim is to connect young people whose ideas have not been given voice due to lack of opportunities or contacts, but whose value deserves that they be put into practice. The platform works with a focus on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) across seven action areas: environment, inclusion, gender, health and well-being, culture, science-technology, and education.

• This collective has opened the door for Julieta to join multiple international organizations and led to numerous appointments. In 2018 she was recognized as a Change Agent by the Ashoka Foundation, and in 2020 she was named Young Influential Woman by the Chile’s Community of Influential Women within the APEC framework.
• Julieta was also an Inspiring Girls finalist, and in March 2021 she was selected to participate in Al Gore’s Climate Reality Leadership Global Training Program from which she graduated successfully in June. She is also a member of the UN Women Youth Task Force, co-founder of Latinas for Climate, WWF ambassador and Teen Council member for the “My Voice Counts” program.

The inevitable. Comparisons with Greta Thunberg, the global face of teenage activism, are frequent. She publicly acknowledges her admiration and recognizes the “gigantic impact” that the Swede has had on the climate change debate. But she stresses that there are other relevant voices too, many of them anonymous, which are the ones that the Tremendas Foundation intends to make heard. “Just as there is Greta, there is Sofia, Antonia, Josefina, Juliet,” she explains. “I don’t want to be the Latin American version of anyone; I’m Julieta Martínez.”

• Caring for the environment has undoubtedly been one of Tremendas‘ and Julieta Martínez’s priorities. “The environmental crisis is also a social crisis, and social justice defines our dignity, humanity and hope,” she declared in her 2019 COP25 speech in Madrid at the ‘Action for Climate Empowerment’ event.

Growth. Tremendas has grown into a foundation. It currently involves young people from 14 to 22 and has a presence in 17 Latin American countries, in addition to 1,000 volunteers.

• During the pandemic, they didn’t stop and created new programs like Juntas en Cuarentena, a cycle of conversations with UN Women to provide support to girls and teens in times of confinement, which will also be made into a comic book by Chilean illustrator Nati Chuleta.
• Prendid@s, a program of webinar sessions that provides tools to young people committed to social entrepreneurship is another of their initiatives. Ponte la Medalla are workshops that promote self-esteem, while Círculos de Cultura are sessions around feminism based on reading circles of Amanda Labarca’s work. And then there is Tremendas Dirigentas, which provides social aid to the most vulnerable communities, highlighting the role of women social leaders who have historically taken charge of communally organized free meals for those in need.
• Two years after the creation of Fundación Tremendas, a collective which aims to empower young women as agents of change, the Academia Climáticas initiative – created virtually in March 2021– concluded successfully with the graduation of 277 girls, teens, and young women from Latin America and the Caribbean, who received their diplomas of participation. The initiative carried out with support from Sprite, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, la Facultad de Agronomía de la Universidad de Chile, Fiis, Plastic Oceans, Cambio Global UC and ACCIONA, was a workshop that is only the first part of a larger project involving an academy for each area of work.