Resource Type: Evaluation & Measuring Progress

Last week I attended Netroots Nation and had the chance to connect with and learn alongside leaders across racial, social, economic, and climate justice movements, including many Lab members! This newsletter is inspired by one salient takeaway I heard across different panels and conversations at Netroots: building long term power to transform and govern means having a plan to win that includes strategies for both building grassroots power and electoral capacity. Leaders organizing in rural communities and multiracial communities shared how focusing on both makes it more possible to build the kind of durable power that can be flexed at the key moments shaping our political and social landscape, which include elections. 
 

A Climate Advocacy Lab training focused on the latest climate justice messaging research, our recommendations, and how to apply them to your work, including:

An overview of what polling research reveals about what Americans across communities understand (and don’t) about the connection between climate change and social justice;
What message testing tells us about the most engaging ways to talk about climate justice, such as by leveraging “moral emotions;” and
How to avoid triggering backfire, and the situations in which focusing on climate injustice may—or may not—increase support for addressing it.

Like many of you, the Lab team has been exploring how we can best support the climate movement at this critical moment, with nearly a trillion dollars on the table to reshape the climate and energy landscape following the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA),  Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), and CHIPS & Science Act. Simultaneously, we know communities across the country continue to suffer from the impacts and fight build-out of the extractive, polluting fossil fuel industry – including many of my neighbors across the Southeast, calling on President Biden to oppose the Mountain Valley Pipeline.

From studying past social movements, the Lab has learned that the transformational change necessary to equitably address the climate crisis is more likely to occur when multiracial, cross-class (MRXC) movements* claim their collective power, expand the imagination of what’s possible, and organize and mobilize people at scale. In the last 5 years, the Sunrise Movement has demonstrated a commitment to learning and practice on multiracial, cross-class movement building. This week’s newsletter features reflections and lessons from Lab member and Deputy Organizer Director at Sunrise, Dejah Powell. As a Lab member yourself, you can read the full report* on how Sunrise has been working to build a movement across race and class, and the implications and learnings based on those efforts. This report was developed as part of the Lab’s Climate Justice Microgrant Program.

The year 2023 is well under way, but I’ve been getting around to looking back at 2022, and wanted to share our roundup of some of the most notable resources—case studies, reflections, field tests, polls, and social science papers—that we added to the Resource Library last year (you can also check out our mid-year roundup* from last May for even more 2022 action; and our best of 2021* too). While there’s too much good stuff to share it all here, I’ve focused on what the year taught us in three priority areas: multiracial, cross-class (MRXC) movement building; climate justice campaigning; and organizing & mobilizing.

Describe the clean energy aspects of the IRA (Inflation Reduction Act) as a “landmark achievement” to address climate change and show off local benefits to communities, rather than as a way for people to save money. This is one insight from the Potential Energy Coalition’s research after they surveyed over 15,000 people, tested dozens of messages and gathered hundreds of hours of interview data from Americans across the political spectrum in the past nine months. All to answer the question, what is the best way to talk about clean energy that gets Americans excited? This webinar also covered the public’s current state of opinion and knowledge on these topics, other effective messages and messaging traps to avoid, plus wording guidance.

“They mentioned climate!” I will exclaim enthusiastically to my partner while we’re watching TV or a movie together – often followed by a critique of how the program could have been more effective in their approach, from an evidence-based perspective, of course!