Let the Visioning Begin: It’s Time to Define Our Decade

Last night was the first of a series of conference calls for leaders of the movement to discuss using these next few months to Define Our Decade and create a plan to move forward in realizing a clean energy future. With over fifty people on the call, and lots of ways to engage, this conference call -- not usually known to be an especially enthralling forum -- was high energy and inspirational.

Laying out a vision

We started with a discussion on how we are each working to define our decade in our own community. Aided by a chat room, we created an online visioning session, a brilliant display of the hope and creativity of our generation -- and I have to admit, I haven't been as excited about a chat room since middle school.... -- We shared ideas to strengthen our local projects and showcase the movement to the general public.

• We heard about continuing efforts to engage diverse allies around the need for federal climate and energy legislation
• Campus organizers in New York and Florida both shared their hopes to transition their campuses by creating campus green energy funds, and made plans to continue to share with one another.
• We heard awesome ideas for focusing on and spotlighting a couple of key issues and solutions, to demonstrate what we'd like to see as a national movement.
• And there was a lot of discussion about needed to "declare freedom from fossil fuels" and other dirty energy. One organizer offered her vision to establish a moratorium against new coal and nuclear facilities in the Green Lakes Region, another talked about the fight and direct action campaigns in Appalachia to end mountaintop removal mining, and a number of people talked about working to kick their coal plants off their campuses.

 

All of these stories started to give us a sense of our collective ambition, and we turned to thinking about how we could pull this into a national vision and plan that could help us take back the debate on energy, the environment and climate change.

The plan

Ethan Nuss of Energy Action Coalition laid out the plan that has been generated so far:

• First, we'll continue the discussion we started on the call, having local and national visioning sessions that give us a better idea of what we want to achieve in this decade.
• The visioning would culminate in a a big week of action the first week of March centered around demonstrating that there is a big and growing movement behind an ambitious clean energy vision for the country. With local visions coming from across the country, and lots of people contributing and voting on a national vision in a national youth vote, we can demonstrate our numbers and engagement.
• Once we've got our vision, we've got two tasks at hand. The first is making sure elected leaders and decision-makers around the country hear about it. We can march to Senate offices, deliver a vision, a plan, and the people behind it; we can show the country what democracy really looks like!
• Task #2: it's time to get to work fulfilling our visions, modeling the type of action we want to see from our elected leaders. Through a national selection process, we'll take all those local visions and campaigns, and pick 10 to really invest in this summer. We'll fundraise for them, recruit for them, and then get to work. Can you imagine thousands of us working together to build the clean energy economy that we've been calling for? Working on energy efficiency projects, blocking dirty energy infrastructure, and organizing deep political campaigns for real change.

 

By this point people really started getting creative on how we could take our visions, and local work to put it in the center of the debate. We heard some great ideas on creative tactics to pressure our elected officials. It’s already clear how colorful and effective the nationwide youth referendum voting events this March can be! Some ideas included putting massive ballot boxes in front of iconic locations in our communities, and giving voters a mark to distinguish them such as green thumbs or wristbands.

We brainstormed creative ways to deliver or “declare” these referendum results, such as large visual demonstrations like a sea of green flags or taking physical ballots to the doorsteps of our officials, or even showing up en mass in our nation’s capitol for a mass delivery!

Next steps

We had been on the call for nearly an hour, so it was time to wrap up and talk next steps. By that time we were ready to hit the ground running by talking to more people about the idea of defining our decade, joining Working Groups to help further flesh out the campaign, and linking in to the Climate Network, an awesome online tool built for climate organizers. Lots of people signed up to get involved, and over 20 people already said that they would host a Define Our Decade event in their community!

We are going to have another call in two weeks, on February 3rd at 9 PM ET to reconvene, give updates on our progress and continue to discuss and support each other in making this movement bigger, stronger, and more revolutionary.