August 2020: The Challenges Ahead

CLIMATE CARE UPRISING and the Autumn Moment

Following an Action Conference where over 100 representatives from across a wide range of grassroots movements, Climate Care Uprising was announced last week, by a coalition that emerged from the conference. The goal of this coalition is to advance our direct action and activism as essential work towards healing ecologies, societies, bodies and economies.

The Climate Care Uprising is just the first part of the coming Autumn Moment, so make sure you pay attention to this mailout for exciting announcements to come.

WILL YOU GUIDE US?

Earlier this year, a survey of over 70 activists led to a series of online skillshares that you might have participated in. We’ve since launched free to use social storming tools (more on that later) and now another survey to help us understand how over the next few months we can help build capacity and provide support to grassroots movements.

INTRODUCING STORIES

We’ll be documenting your climate activism stories over on our new blog, James, giving our growing network of movements a space to discuss their creative, daring, and impactful actions and show how they connect with each other.  Our first story comes from the NoTAP movement from Salento, Italy, where activists are facing prosecution for their opposition to the Trans Adriatic Pipeline.

If you’ve got a story of ordinary people doing extraordinary things that you want us to amplify and show solidarity with, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us by replying to us directly at [email protected].

FREE TO USE CAMPAIGNING PLATFORM

We’ve launched a new digital platform for creating custom social storms on twitter, facebook, and instagram. The platform is free to use, lets you set up campaign pages with your own branding, and is fully customisable into most languages.

Use digital-activist.org to organise activists on social media and put pressure on your campaign target, like this fantastic example from Climáximo.

Webinars

Despite the challenges presented by covid-19, our objective of supporting grassroots activists, across borders and movements, has stayed the same. Faced with this new reality, we launched into rapidly prototyping and delivering online skillshares.

Through surveys with the European grassroots community and 350.org, we hosted weekly, interactive workshop style sessions from mid-May. We’ve begun the process of uploading video snippets of these to our Youtube channel, the first one ready for you to watch

Actions conference

Initiated by the European Changemaker team, the Greenpeace European Climate Ambition team, and the By2020WeRiseUp platform, last month’s online Actions Conference — bringing together around 100 activists and movement leaders — was the first step towards creating the Climate Care Uprising moment, as part of the upcoming Autumn Moment. The conference decided on the period for the collective moment, established working groups, put in place the key elements of the narrative, and settled on a title for the upcoming actions.