Laura Schifter
Senior Fellow in the Aspen Institute’s Energy and Environment Program, where she leads This Is Planet Ed, an initiative advancing education as a force for climate solutions. She also serves as a senior advisor to SustainableED at Brown University’s Annenberg Institute and launched Aspen’s Play It Cool youth heat-safety campaign.
“Speak Up, Sit Out, Cool Down” Targets Youth Heat Illness
Laura Schifter of the Aspen Institute argues that protecting young athletes from extreme heat requires more than telling them to hydrate: children need permission and a simple script to stop playing when symptoms emerge. The institute’s Play It Cool campaign promotes “Speak Up, Sit Out, Cool Down” as a shared response to dizziness, nausea, headaches and cramps, with active cooling such as cold towels or ice packs after leaving the field. Schifter says the aim is to make stepping out of play a normal safety decision rather than a failure to push through.
Children’s Climate Media Must Pair Honest Facts With Agency
Children are already experiencing climate disruption, and adults should not respond by leaving them to make sense of it alone, Laura Schifter argued in an Aspen Ideas: Climate panel with Al Roker, Sesame Workshop’s Kay Wilson Stallings and producer J.J. Johnson. The panelists said children’s media should match facts and emotional stakes to a viewer’s age—from nature and small acts of care for preschoolers to more direct accounts of danger for older children—while giving them characters, trusted adults and practical ways to act rather than asking them to carry the problem themselves.