Resource Type: Tips & How-Tos

In 2022, the Climate Advocacy Lab is giving an 8-part Campaign Planning and Organizing training series. In part 1, we delve into the use of the SMARTIE framework for goal setting in alignment with organiztional strategy. We position the use of SMARTIE within the context of organizing and campaigning with a multi-racial cross-class lens in order to build the people power necessary to win a just transition.

Learn how to improve your advocacy (quickly) with state of the art research techniques. The perennial conflict in research – quality vs. speed – is a compromise no more, with quick-turn-around numeric tools and always-on focus groups you can trust, rigorous public opinion research and detailed audience engagement measures. Join Potential Energy as they share tips on research methodology and tools, and how you can get for-profit insights on a non-profit budget. Find out how to get deeper audience understanding that will make your messages truly connect with your audience for greater impact.

When I joined the climate movement in 2013, fossil fuel divestment campaigns were surging across the country on college and university campuses. At the time, I was a student and compelled by the narrative of stigmatizing the fossil fuel industry and taking away its social license to operate. The vision that captured my imagination of what is possible centered on people and building a world where everyone can live a dignified life.
The foundation of this vision embodies roots from the environmental justice movement. From Native people’s resistance of colonization to Latinx farmworkers’ determination for safe workplace conditions to Black and brown communities demands for basic human rights: clean air and water; organizing for what people deserve has always been the pathway for how we win.
So what does it take to do the necessary and bold work of multiracial, cross-class organizing in the climate movement?
The Lab recently engaged in dialogue on this question at Celebrating Our Community Power. Over 80 members joined in and learned from one another. Below, we highlight the most relevant insights that came out of the discussion and recommendations for how you can apply them to your work.

This booklet aims to give people thinking about going to or organizing a protest information about best practices for interacting with law enforcement in-the-moment. Further, it can also help as advance information to consider in order to assess risk and prepare for possible police encounters. When you are protesting or having any interaction with law enforcement, asserting your rights does not usually mean that the police will respect your rights or change how they are treating you. However, by using your rights (by saying them out loud, as this booklet will teach you to do), you can make it harder for police to use your own statements or anything found on you during a search as evidence against you during a trial. Using this information could help your case later in court and, importantly, can help you protect your fellow activists.