Recipient of the WIN WIN Youth Award 2026
As founder of Tremendas, Julieta Martínez has advanced a powerful model for youth-led change, positioning young women at the forefront of climate action and gender equality. She has built a movement spanning 18 countries, strengthening young women's leadership in shaping solutions and influencing global conversations. For her visionary work connecting youth with climate action and gender equality, she is awarded the 2026 WIN WIN Youth Award.
Julieta
Martínez
"This recognition is deeply meaningful to me because it reinforces something I strongly believe: in contexts like Latin America, advancing gender equality is not about charity or pity, but about reshaping the way we understand power and who gets to lead. Girls and young women are too often seen only as victims of the crises that affect them - from climate change to migration to political instability - when in reality, they are already active agents of change within their communities. We need to reshape the narrative, one where they tell their own stories and write their own futures.”
- Julieta Martínez, 2026
THE BACKGROUND
From a young age, Julieta realised how rarely young women had a voice in decisions on climate and social development. Determined to change this, she founded Tremendas at 15 — a global platform now active in 18 countries — that empowers girls and young women through education, mobilisation, and international advocacy. Growing up in Chile, she saw the need for youth, especially girls', voices to shape local and global solutions, igniting her commitment to train, mobilise, and amplify the voices of young women across Latin America and beyond.
WORK AND IMPACT
Through Tremendas, young women gain the tools, training and networks to lead initiatives across seven action areas linked to the UN Sustainable Development Goals — including climate, gender equality, education and health.
In a world where women represent the majority of those most severely affected by climate change, yet remain a minority in the negotiating rooms where climate policy is shaped, Julieta Martínez has made it her mission to close that gap. Her work is built on a clear conviction: that young women should not only have a seat at the table, but lead the conversation.
Tremendas connects young women across borders and contexts through a low-threshold, digitally anchored model that can be adapted to different regions without losing its focus on local leadership. The organisation works across seven action areas aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, including gender equality, education, and climate.
In 2021, she launched the climate academy Climáticas, which has since trained and mobilised 740 young women from Latin America to become agents of change. She has also served as a member of UN Women's Generation Equality Youth Task Force, contributing to the integration of youth voices into the Beijing+25 convention, and currently serves as an active member in the UN Women Leaders Network.
Her work has been recognised by multiple international organisations, and in a time of both climate crisis and growing pushback against women's rights, Martínez represents exactly what the WIN WIN Youth Award seeks to recognise: a young person who does not wait for change, but builds it.
“Through Tremendas, Julieta Martínez has given young women and girls – too often rendered invisible in the spaces where power is exercised and the future is shaped – the tools and community to transform frustration and anxiety about the climate crisis into real drive for change. She makes it clear that gender equality and climate justice are inseparable – and that young women's leadership is an absolute prerequisite for a sustainable future. With this award, the jury wishes to honour Julieta Martínez's ability to make climate activism accessible and hopeful, and to move more people from placards to action."
- Johan Holmén, Chair of the WIN WIN Youth Award Jury