Join Kentuckians for the Commonwealth to learn more about their deep canvassing efforts, lessons learned, and best practices from their on-the-ground experience. During this webinar, participants will hear from the folks involved about how deep canvassing can be a powerful tool for bringing new people into the climate justice movement as well as how learnings might be applied to other climate deep canvass and relational conversation programs across the country. 

The Fairbanks Climate Action Coalition (FCAC) is working to advance a Just Transition away from fossil fuel extraction and towards renewable energy and a regenerative economy in interior Alaska. For several years, FCAC’s Renewable Energy Working Group has been organizing around their local electric utility cooperative, Golden Valley Electric Association (GVEA), to support more generation from renewable energy sources and energy justice initiatives and decarbonization of electricity. FCAC’s organizing efforts have supported more pro-renewable candidates to be democratically elected to the GVEA’s Board of Directors and pushed the utility to consider community solar projects and on-bill financing. A major win came in June 2022 when the GVEA Board adopted a strategic generation plan including a commitment to close down one of their coal plants and pursue a large scale wind power project.

In this webinar, FCAC shares learnings from their Microgrant Report: Cooperative Opportunity: Clean Energy documenting the development of their campaign, sharing reflections on how their organizing structure led to wins, the challenges they faced, and the lessons that can be learned to succeed in future campaigns.

In Cleveland, OH, the nonprofit Cleveland Owns is incubating the state's first community-owned solar developer, Cleveland Solar Cooperative, which was the subject of a recent case study funded by the Climate Advocacy Lab. 

On the call, organizers shared lessons learned, their motivations to keep at this work, and best practices for groups around the country working to build community-owned solar arrays. The insights shared in this webinar will inform advocates working to start community-owned solar projects, provide practical tips for groups building relationships with the goal of taking action for climate justice, and introduce attendees to a national network of organizations that support projects like this around the country.

Successfully meeting with policymakers requires a few key steps. The group trying to meet with their representative must select a priority issue (or issues), recruit the correct people (and a lot of them) to attend the meeting, properly schedule the meeting ahead of time, prepare the advocates in the room, and follow up with the representative’s office after the meeting. This webinar details all of these ingredients.

Have you had concerns about a team project and didn’t share it with others? Or been part of a team where you couldn’t speak up with questions? These self-protective behaviors help us manage others’ perceptions of us. No one wants to look ignorant, incompetent, intrusive or negative. But withholding your voice can have significant negative consequences for the team. It deprives the team of the full range of the team members’ knowledge, skill and experience and makes it less likely that the team will learn and achieve its purpose.

In this training, you will glean insights from Partnership for Southern Equity and their values-based organizing model, contextualized by their short film The 4th Arm which explores how centering values and lived experience is critical to the work of organizing and central to our ability to achieve energy and climate justice. This training will help you:

• Develop the skills necessary to be an effective community organizer 
• Gain an understanding of value-based community organizing
• Deepen your understanding of allyship and allies
• Explore what it means to build power and "systems change"

Optimize your climate messaging with the surprising results and important guidance gleaned from 76 climate persuasion experiments, presented by the social scientists who collectively analyzed them. Individual studies come out all the time (and the Lab loves to let you know about all of them), but it can be difficult to piece together the big picture from all the data points. That’s why it’s so valuable when researchers occasionally comprehensively review and synthesize a whole body of studies, such as this combined analysis of dozens of separate climate persuasion experiments in the US from the last 10 years. The social scientists will also share insights from their review of research on reducing political polarization on climate.

The Feminist Green New Deal Coalition released a report with Data for Progress that finds there is a strong shared belief that care should be central to climate, workforce, and infrastructure policies. In the midst of intersecting economic crises, climate crises, and the ongoing infrastructure fights, these findings reiterate that people want bold economic investments that center care for people and the planet.

Planning for a future that centers well-being for people and the planet requires an understanding of the intersectionality of the ongoing crises of care and climate, the ways in which policy can deliver intersectional solutions, and the narratives that help and hurt this cause. Join the Climate Advocacy Lab with Tamara Toles O'Laughlin (EGA), Kahea Pacheco (Women's Earth Alliance), Amanda Novello (Data for Progress), and Mara Dolan (WEDO) for a deep dive into the report's findings as well as relevant takeaways for climate advocates and their work.

In 2018, the Portland Clean Energy Fund (PCEF) campaign secured a landslide ballot measure victory in Portland, establishing a multi-million dollar municipal fund that addresses climate, economic, and racial justice by providing funding for renewable energy projects, job training and apprenticeship programs, and regenerative agriculture. Last year, we got to look “under the hood” with PCEF Steering Committee members to cover the history of the campaign, what PCEF does, and how the community-led coalition was able to win at the ballot box. 

In a follow-up webinar, we came back together to share new developments on the victory and cover topics including:

• How has PCEF been implemented, and how is it helping the community build political power? 
• What lessons have been learned since winning the legislation, and what challenges and insights does that bring? 
• What would it take to replicate this winning model in your own context and municipality?

This interactive webinar covered the process of how this collaboration between environmental justice and labor forces was facilitated, how they built a shared vision around resilience, a rundown of the report's key findings, and a guided activity for how to apply the report's insights to participants' local communities and organizing work.