Hi all you Climate Positive folks,
So, life is just flying, and I start classes tomorrow. It's supposed to
rain tomorrow. I repeat, it is January in Minnesota, and it is supposed
to rain tomorrow. This does not happen.
I have lots of really awesome news, but first some logistical stuff.
Most of us have not been using WeCAN for posting these bits of
awesomeness. I'm using email, since it's the only reliable way to reach
you (since not everyone is on WeCAN yet) but I'm also posting this as a
WeCAN blog entry in our group "Climate Positive Vision" which can be
found below:
http://www.wecannetwork.org/climatepositive
To test it out and identify problems, we need to use the system. Let's use it! Please add group content there.
Also, some of you: Jesse? Juliana? have fragments of audio from the
conference that should be posted. Please add them as a resource and
then link to the below archive:
http://www.wecannetwork.org/janclimateinst-archive
If you're not yet on WeCAN, you've already been invited, and we can (pun quite intended) invite you again if necessary.
Okay, now on to the awesomeness:
I'm really not clear what's happened since I last told you about stuff,
since the past week has been a blur - we keep realizing that we're only
13 days out from the conference and we've caught ourselves referring to
campaigns in December or even early January as "back in the day".
1. We spent much of the earlier part of the week preparing for our
first engagement with the Macalester community, which meant convening
about 20 key admins, staff, faculty, and students who have strong ties
to our vision and believe in our work to a meeting on Friday. We spent
much of the evenings in the earlier part of the week editing down the
cosmic Saturday night conversation from 3.6 hours to 2.6 hours (cutting
out breaks, blank space, laughs etc.) to 1.5 hours (taking the best
parts) to 15 minutes to get a really distilled section (we chose two
sections) that really emphasized the core ideas of what we're talking
about. This was really effective, along with a table describing the old
and new paradigms, old and new methods, and old and new outcomes around
the paradigm shift that has been building in this movement and got very
clearly expressed at the conference - David Wheaton, the colleges
Vice-President who most of you met, was very helpful in helping us
understand how to do this. These were crucial inroads into one of our
action items, which is figuring out how to communicate this to other
groups and engage new people. Austin, can you post the shortened audio
files (maybe the 1.5 hour and 15 minute versions) to WeCAN. Jason, can
you get pictures of our action step list and table of paradigms etc and
post that to WeCAN. The overall outcome was a basic foundation for
moving forward and buy in from a lot of people. We'll turn that into
concrete stuff this coming week and in the future. I can't exactly say
Macalester is 'on board' or what we'll get out of it, but the
institution is getting in the loop.
2. We've engaged some MacCARES members not at the conference in this
discussion and are being increasingly able to make it work. A couple of
our freshmen are running our Focus the Nation/ NCEC mobilization called
MELT - the Macalester Energy Leadership Team - and are revamping the
planning to mass-mobilize Macalester students, faculty, and staff
around this movement.
3. Earlier this week, our energy efficiency project starting clicking.
We have a new name (at least interim): Cooperative Energy Futures, and
have reorganized the steering committee into five tracks: Community
organizing, Co-op model/culture, the Business model/operations,
finance/investment, and strategic planning. Partners are flocking in.
Justin our logistics wizard made a breakthrough in terms of our
communication strategy quite accidentally - talking about a 'vision for
the home' with local residents. I'm spear-heading three state
legislative initiatives for this session with Kristen and Mary that
will greatly facilitate our operations. Nathan Wyeth, part of our
project team from Brown, is experimenting with our model in the rental
setting in Rhode Island, so that end could work out. My business mentor
from Kenya is helping me think about long-term planning, attracting
investors, and scaling up to support the movement. We also built an
alliance with an AWESOME visiting professor who is going to help us in
any and every way she can - her focus is conservation psychology and
the social psychology around building environmental movements.
4. MN now has a state network conference, where we will be presenting
our vision for MN's future in parallel with the Governor's presentation
of his plans to students. On Friday, we committed to establishing a MN
Powershift around it focused on building a green people-powered economy
in the state as a model for the world.
5. Also Friday, I finalized an outline of the 10-step action plan that
we drafted on Monday of the conference. It's not quite finished, and
Jesse J. is working with me, but it's a strong beginning. Check it out:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=dfs6mngz_27wqzh6ddq&hl=en
6. Yesterday was dynamite. I had a whirring 2.5 hour conference call
with some of you where we were trying to figure out exactly what this
strategic visioning meant approaching it from both the SSC perspective
and the movement perspective. I'll be in the SSC part, but also
focusing on a broader strategic movement plan. Jesse calls this a
meta-campaign, a campaign focused on generating agreement and unity
around a roadmap for the movement where different groups are defining
the details for the parts of the plan that involve them, yet support
the whole. After that call, I talked with Morgan and had a great
conversation about what he thought we were missing - and incidentally
using the Dem. party as a mobilizing base, and then with Jesse about
building this up, thinking carefully about how far this is released,
and focusing on base-building with core groups. I'll be talking with
Maura to figure out how to engage in the EAC planning process. My final
vision for the doc is a background summary, a brief descrip of the 10
action points, (see item above) with linked youtube videos of key
people involved in each segment talking about each piece and what's
going on with it - basically to give some more than superficial
explanation without making a super long and super boring plan.
7. This morning, members of ARISE (the Ford plant group), our
efficiency team, EJ-interested folks, MN Powershift planners and those
of us working on the meta-campaign (there's so much overlap, that's
only about 8 people) met to figure out partnerships with Environmental
Justice Advocates of Minnesota (EJAM) and Green For All to bring green
re-industrialization into the heart of this new world vision. That was
amazing in and of itself (Teryn and Jesse, I want to connect,
especially since this connects to Breakthrough, and by way of
partnerships in the Bay Area to community development funding with
Google) but it also brought up an amazing opportunity in terms of
electoral work around generating a new vision for the Obama campaign
(interesting, bounced off of what Morgan said 12 hours earlier about
the possibility (he wasn't sure) of using the Democratic Party as our
new strategic vehicle). We basically sketched out a game plan of how to
build a new campaign platform that unites all the vision already in the
campaign through the frame of a new energy economy - we have a hard
core team of supporters of Obama's campaign at Macalester and Kai is
going to be touching base with Tom Daschle (his own rep from S. Dakota)
about it when he visits Mac on Tuesday. Just to clarify, I don't think
all of this group is 100% sure that we want to be supporting Obama, but
I think we all agree that his campaign is an ideal vehicle for driving
this agenda.
I'm skipping some, but basically, we're seizing every opportunity and everything's only speeding up.
PLEASE check out: http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=dfs6mngz_27wqzh6ddq&hl=en
as I mentioned and comment/ edit in a new color. If there are other items you want to work on, SPEAK!
Timothy DHT