Hi fellow climate activists,
Hope this message finds you well.
After the election of Tony Abbott and his attempts to rapidly dismantle all of the hard-won progress of the climate movement over the past decade, many of us have been doing some soul searching about the direction of the movement and what comes next. How can we turn this around and win? And what does winning look like?
The climate movement faces significant challenges this year. There are crucial and urgent campaigns being run to protect our clean energy laws, maintain the renewable energy target and halt the expansion of the coal and gas industries. The results of these campaigns will have important implications for the movement into the future. At the same time, it is clear we do not currently have sufficient political power to win the scale of change required to limit global warming and its economic, social and environmental impacts.
Many of us in the movement recognise that we can’t just keep on doing more of the same and that it is time for some serious reflection. What have we learnt over the past few years of climate campaigning? How do we move forward from here? What are the opportunities for us to work better together?
After many conversations over the past few months, a few of us have initiated a project to do some of this kind of reflection. And we’d like you to be part of it.
For lack of a better name, we’re calling it a “climate movement strategy project.” It won’t be perfect but hopefully it will be useful. It won’t come up with a grand strategy, but hopefully it will help map out some useful directions. And, given limited resources, it won’t be as participative as we’d like – but we’ll give it our best go to get as much input and feedback from as many people as possible.
The European Climate Foundation, Getup! and The Sunrise Project, in consultation with CANA and other NGOs, agreed to fund this strategy process and have engaged Sam La Rocca to lead it. Sam is an experienced activist educator, researcher and organiser. He co-founded the Change Agency and more recently worked as Adam Bandt’s Chief of Staff heading up Adam’s successful campaign for the federal electorate of Melbourne in 2013.
The first step in the process is to do an audit of who the climate movement is, what we are all doing, what we have learnt and garner some ideas about our future strategy. We’ve pulled together a simple online survey to help us to do this. It isn’t a shallow, tick a box survey – we’re looking for serious, reflective input. So please put aside at least 20 minutes (more if you can) of quality thinking time to fill the survey in.
This is our best chance to harness the collective wisdom of the climate movement so we appreciate you taking it seriously.
The survey closes midnight 30 March so we can feed back the responses at the CANA conference 3-4 April in Sydney. Why not do it now? Head to: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/climatemovementsurvey
Thanks for being part of this. We don’t know exactly what is going to come from this process, but we know that reflection and review of our strategy as a movement is going to be critical if we are going to help turn the politics of climate change around in this country.
Thanks again. Looking forward to reflecting with you,
John Hepburn, The Sunrise Project
Mark Wakeham, Environment Victoria
Laura Kelly, CANA
