by Ana Herrera, Mexico, ELP 2015 Written on July 18, 2015.   As an economist I have worked on Poverty and Climate Change issues for 5 years. At the beginning, I worked only in macroeconomics and statistics issues. However, I gradually became interested in environmental and poverty issues and the impacts that climate change has on the most vulnerable people. It made me conscious about the importance of studying the effects that climate change produces in human life. At the same time, that led me to focus on the causes and consequences of conflicts between human and environment. Over the last years I have been involved in activities with an NGO in Oaxaca State (Mexico). During this time, the understanding of social organization among environmental activities made me think about the importance of the participation of local communities in climate change issues. I find this experience as one of the most wonderful experiences in my career. The first time that I heard about the ELP was in 2012, when my thesis adviser attended this course. Since the beginning, I found this program very interesting so I started to prepare myself for the application. Being a participant of the ELP was a great experience in my life, especially because this summer was the 15th anniversary of the program. The ELP gave me the opportunity to know wonderful people, share knowledge and improve my skills of communication and collaboration. Furthermore, I observed and comprehended many of the problems that each of us was facing in our projects, and it was very nice to see how everybody helped each other to solve it. I have to say that ELP participants inspire me to keep going on, and I am very sure that all the tools that I got from the meetings in this course will help in my current and future work in climate change issues. Specifically, it will be an essential key to do activities with different kinds of stakeholders (communities, public and private sectors, universities, NGOs, and so on). On the other hand, I see my experience as an opportunity to share this new knowledge with more people in my country. This program generates a friendly space to discuss, exchange ideas, and make new friends from around the world. At the same time, the ELP gives us the chance to interact with many professors from UC Berkeley in order to share our experiences and face our challenges. ELP, thank you very much for this effort that you make to meet us. We have a lot of work to do about climate change, now it is time to take action.