Resource Type: Tips & How-Tos

On Thursday, September 15, the Climate Advocacy Lab hosted the second training in our North East Training Arc, Elements of a successful campaign strategy. This training focused on the importance of building a strong campaign strategy, understanding the componants that makeup a strategy that builds power, and looked at case studies of campaigns that we can learn from to bring key strategic vision to our organizations and communities. 
 

I write to you from my AC-less apartment, with my windows wide open and hoping for a breeze. The west coast is experiencing another record-breaking heat wave and while I’m spared from the worst of it in typically cooler San Francisco, the Bay Area is being scorched, fueling several fast-moving wildfires. At the same time, an unimaginable one-third of Pakistan is currently underwater due to catastrophic flooding, displacing 33 million people. Extreme flooding and record droughts contributed to Jackson, Mississippi, a predominantly-Black city, losing access to safe drinking water. Both examples and realities continue to show how climate change disproportionately impacts people of color and those who have contributed the least to warming. Within this context, it feels timely to refresh ourselves on everything we know about extreme weather and public engagement as we work to engage our communities and audiences on climate action in these extreme times (You can find our last deep dive on this from 2020*).

This workshop on combating apathy and powerlessness for the RE-AMP Network’s current peer learning circle covered what social science is telling us about the root causes of apathy and ways to move people toward hope, and how to combat sentiments among supporters like “My actions don’t matter.”        

The Lab hosted the first training in our Narrative and Communications Training Arc. The Developing Your Narrative Strategy training will focus on defining why a narrative is so important for change and what role it plays in the movement, how to develop a narrative strategy for yourself and your organization, and make space to think through how we can bring back these learnings to your organization to grow your collective narrative! This session provided an overview of narrative work and allowed for members to connect via breakout rooms. Join our future sessions to continue strengthening your evidence-based work.

How do we build the power to win? The Lab is constantly working to uncover and share what works (and doesn’t) to help build grassroots power and win equitable solutions through evidence-based advocacy. A common request we receive is for rigorous best practices to grow people power. Last year, the Lab finalized our research vision and research agenda and solicited research project ideas from the Lab community, rooted in how to improve organizing and mobilizing, and grounded in a common conceptual framework.
Today we share results from these six collaborative research projects, and our guidance for your recruitment and mobilizing work, based on the evidence we gathered together.

Texas is back in the news this week because the state faced record temperatures that almost crashed its power grid. Well, earlier this year, Justin Rolfe-Redding at the Lab wrote about the upcoming Valentine’s Day campaign #BreakUpWithGas. The campaign was designed to push back on disinformation and use the one-year anniversary to galvanize public attention to the problem with fossil fuels. That Texas freeze in 2021 resulted in hundreds of Texans losing their lives and more than half of the state was without power or water service for days. Now it’s time to revisit that campaign and see what they/we can all learn.