The World Energy Community Action Network (WeCAN) was founded by a student organization called MacCARES (The Macalester Conservation and Renewable Energy Society) working on innovative climate solutions at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Through a wide range of on-campus sustainability projects, independent research, and cooperative community initiatives with labor leaders, faith communities, local citizens groups, rural energy development groups, and non-profit environmental organizations, this team of students became acquainted with the achievements, opportunities, and needs of the emerging climate movement. Recognizing the splintered nature of these diverse initiatives, we set about creating a collaborative network to unite them. From its conception in fall 2006, WeCAN was envisioned as a global community of leaders from civilian, corporate, institutional, and governmental backgrounds sharing resources, expertise, ideas, inspiration, and most of all a common purpose in building a sustainable society.

With the help of EcoWatch, a student group at the University of Minnesota, we hosted the Minnesota Citizens Conference on Climate and Energy Action in February to formally launch WeCAN. Planning and outreach for this conference, proved exceptionally difficult, both since we were new to the process and due to the difficulty of communicating the vision. Many of those we invited found it hard to understand the vision of local actions building a global solutions, and the idea of a conference consisting of discussion, presentation, and planning led largely by participants seemed implausible to many. Even so, we got around 20 people from a wide range of backgrounds to the conference and formulated a game plan for a number of cooperative initiatives around the Twin Cities including the Ford Plant Project, the metro-area suburban efficiency project
the Minnesota high school alliance, and a rural community energy development legal reform team. Over the spring of 2007, these initiatives progressed rapidly. Macalester students also started discussing WeCAN and the concept of people-powered global solutions at a Midwest regional conference in early March, and launched the coalition that started TEAM, while sharing the idea with key leaders within the Sierra Student Coalition and the Energy Action Coalition. At Macalester, we integrated the vision of WeCAN into our effort to implement the President’s Climate Commitment, taking Macalester beyond the simple frame of internal carbon neutrality to a perspective of leadership and sharing of the solutions we could implement. Everywhere we went, the more interest we found.

We had partnered with the Renewable Energy Alignment Mapping Project (REAMP) to start a prototype web network to serve WeCAN on a part of their network in February 2007. In May 2007, a team of youth started the process of building a much more comprehensive network to service the needs of the ever expanding web of interested allies we found. This process took over two months, and involved extensive learning on the part of a number of amateur web builders, as well as lots of work by our design team. Finally ...

In the meantime, Macalester students returning home from semester started WeCAN groups in other communities across the country. We began the process of identifying students who could start similar groups in other countries through their study abroad programs. One of our new members from Cornell University with extensive youth networks in Latin America began extending the network across Latin America in June 2007. While this introduced the challenge of a bilingual site far earlier than expected, it gave clear signal that interest in this system was truly global.

On (date), we established our web-based network, and started signing on members ...

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