A comprehensive communications audit can transform your organization’s messaging. The audit digs deep into your newsletters, emails, social media, and website to uncover what’s working and what needs a little TLC. A comms audit is a deep dive into everything from newsletters to reels, uncovering what’s working and what’s… well, just taking up space. If your audience engagement feels like it’s on life support, an audit can prescribe exactly what you need to revive it. By highlighting the strengths and revealing missed opportunities, an audit streamlines your messaging and boosts audience engagement. Pausing to ask questions like, “Why is that the most clicked link?” or “Do we really need another group photo on Instagram?” can supercharge your next move. This interactive audit tool will highlight strengths, identify weak spots, and help.

Relationships are the building blocks for all community organizing activities. Community building occurs one-to-one: you need to build relationships with people one-to-one if you want them to become involved in your group or organization. Often building relationships is the groundwork that must be laid before anything else gets done on a project. The bigger the project, the more relationships you will usually need as a foundation. When you plan a project, you need to include the time it takes to build relationships into your plan. People need time to build trust. Whenever people work together, they need to have trusting relationships. When trust is missing, people usually have a difficult time functioning cooperatively. Here’s an 11-step program to building trusting relationships: build relationships one at a time; be friendly and make a connection; ask people questions; ask people questions; go places and do things; accept people the way they are; assume other people want to form relationships, too; overcome your fear of rejection; be persistent; invite people to get involved; enjoy people.

We welcome you to the kitchen table of the legendary eco-spiritual teacher Joanna Macy, where we’ll dive into what it takes to live with our hearts and integrity intact in this time of global crisis. You’ll be guided into these conversations by Jess Serrante, a longtime activist and student of Joanna’s. Together, we’ll discover abiding wisdom that can help us stay joyful and energized as we work toward a more just and life-sustaining world. Joanna Macy, PhD, is a scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking, and deep ecology who has been working for peace, justice, and the preservation of life on Earth for seven decades. Jessica Serrante is a coach, facilitator, and trainer who has been supporting activists in the climate movement since 2007. Episodes include (for example): “Breathing Through,” “This Pain Is Not for Nothing,” “There Is No Future if We Go Numb,” and more.

Mass movements work by organizing ordinary people to work together and withdraw consent from the status quo. As the Momentum participant guide explains, “For instance, the boss relies on the tacit consent of the workers to work; if the workers don’t show up, the boss’ power is empty – he rules over no one.” With a social view of power in mind, movements need many, many participants in order to have the power to win – not just a few core organizers. To bring supporters on board to a movement, we can categorize support as “passive” or “active.” The difference between passive and active supporters is exactly what it sounds like; active supporters walk the passive supporters’ talk.

Investments by The Solutions Project (TSP) in climate justice grantee partners delivered large-scale impact in the 2021-2023 period. Frontline Solutions’ analysis found that grantee partners also reported over one million direct program beneficiaries and engaged over 77,000 members in their base-building work in the last three years. TSP grantee partners advance equity-centered climate solutions and systems change. TSP’s unique approach strengthens grantee partners and the climate justice movement ecosystem. Investments in the climate justice movement ecosystem achieve climate impact by shifting power, strengthening democracy, and transforming relationships. Grantee partners deeply value TSP’s field-building ecosystem approach, grant-making and narrative communications strategies, and the additional movement infrastructure support offered through the ecosystem funds.

In the spring of 2020, Sunrise Movement had a goal of making 300,000 phonebank calls on six congressional primary races. Sunrise decided to create volunteer teams to manage other volunteers, liaise with campaigns, set goals, and develop strategy. The volunteer leaders of these teams took on a level of responsibility and autonomy typically reserved for staff. The team members took responsibility for setting goals, creating strategy and tactics, liaising with campaigns, and managing the work of thousands of other volunteers.

Since 2017, New York Communities for Change (NYCC) has built hard-hitting multi-racial campaigns to win transformative results. In large part, their climate-focused work began in response to the devastation that Superstorm Sandy wrecked on the organization’s membership. NYCC attacks the linked crises of inequality and climate change. In order to win, NYCC combines its base in low-income communities of color with the predominantly white progressives who are active on climate to bring powerful pressure on specific governmental and corporate decision makers for major results. This report describes NYCC campaigns from 2017-2022. Some highest-impact winning campaigns: NYC pension divestment, enacting local law 97, stopping the Williams NESE pipeline, cracking BlackRock, removing Lee Raymond from the JP Morgan Chase board, and stopping new fracked gas power plants, all won alongside allies. NYCC hopes that activists, foundation funders, donors, and leaders take a close look at this kind of organizing and base building work.

A broad current of the US Left has been practicing the “inside/outside” strategy—building powerful organizations and protest movements outside the halls of power, while also electing champions to work the inside game. This episode features a panel on the inside/outside strategy hosted by Momentum and moderated by Hegemonicon host William Lawrence. The panel asks: What have we learned about bridging the outside and the inside? How close are we to our goal of actual governing power? How important is it to deliver material wins to communities through political action while building “political instruments”? The four panelists each have built a somewhat different political instrument for their own contexts: Lizzy Oh of NYC-DSA; Kamau Chege of Washington Community Alliance; Asha Ransby-Sporn, Chicago organizer; and Evan Weber of Sunrise Movement and Our Hawai’i.

Fossil fuel interests are working with climate denial think tanks and community groups to obstruct offshore wind projects. These community groups have made national headlines for their opposition to projects in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. They appear to be new organizations that operate organically and independently, but they often share legal support, personnel, talking points, and financial resources with major organizations that have been blocking climate policy for the last several decades. This resource shows how think tanks in the anti-offshore wind movement have received donations from six fossil fuel-interested donors between 2017 and 2021. Of these donations, $16,278,401 has gone to members of a grassroots-appearing coalition at the center of the movement. As public relations and obstruction specialists actively engage local groups to block offshore wind projects, the climate and environmental justice consequences are dire.

The Sunrise Movement has had successes but also experienced internal difficulties. This article, a personal reflection on Sunrise experience, argues that the energy and mobilization of the 2018-2020 years that led to a surge of youth joining the Sunrise Movement won’t be possible in the next four years unless a new organizational strategy is built in the youth climate left. This author organized with a local Sunrise “hub” and then joined national leadership teams. However, Sunrise internal politics were based on who you knew.