Resource Type: Social Science Research

Certain organizing strategies can allow activists to develop leadership skills in different ways. In Australia, the organization School Strike for Climate (SS4C) has generated more involvement among high school students in the climate movement. SS4C has particularly employed some tactics such as “peer learning, mentoring, learning by doing, confrontation, reflective spaces and training” to allow new high school activists to develop leadership skills. SS4C used movement tactics such as mobilizing, organizing, and lobbying politicians, and these different avenues for involvement also allowed new activists to engage in different ways to develop different skills, and lead others in doing them. These different tactics also have different strengths and weaknesses in facilitating leadership development through their execution.

Many people communicating for social change are exploring how to tell diverse and inclusive stories that center marginalized communities while building understanding about how inequality persists. Intersectionality is an important tool to help us tell great stories that help us understand systemic issues. Five guiding principles to telling intersectional stories: Show, don’t tell; Provide historical context; Uplift the voices of marginalized people; Tell whole stories; and, Radically reimagine the world.
  

Sending personal emails to elected officials seems more effective than sending bulk form emails. Further, given the low level of constituent messaging to politicians (at least in Canada) on climate change, there may be an opportunity to increase the volume of personal messages to increase the attention paid by politicians to the issue. This field experiment found that sending campaign emails to the Members of the Canadian Parliament asking them to make their own Twitter posts about climate change didn’t have much of an effect (neither when employing different issue frames such as public health nor standard environmental). However, follow-up interviews with parliament office staffers revealed that they’re more likely to pass along information to the politician they work for if there are enough (more than a couple) messages that are personalized by the sender—not bulk emails sent in the same way. Staffers also revealed that they generally don’t receive communication very often about climate change.