Choose Action Now
When our Earth Guardians youth delegation returned from Glasgow and COP26, in 2021, we noticed a couple of things. One was that our youth leaders, who were in the Green Zone and out on the streets with our climate justice partners, dedicated to uplifting the voice of youth leadership from the global south - Earth Guardians youth leaders were FIRED UP, shouting out, making connections, and celebrating the power of local organizing and global networking. At the same time the youth leaders, friends of ours inside the negotiations, who spent their days shuttered within the Blue Zone, were discouraged, weary, and cynical, and found themselves more focused on photo opps to demonstrate effectiveness, than the power of action and global policy decisions.
The Choose Action Now campaign is our response.
We are running out of time to act on climate
On November 8-20, 2022, the 27th session of the United Nations Climate Change Summit, COP27, will take place in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.
There, our world leaders will make decisions for our people and for our planet that will change the fate of our future.
We won’t let them make decisions about us, without us
With our 200+ youth crews across 61 countries, we will make it loud and clear that our generation is waiting for them to act boldly on climate change.
On November 12th we will Choose Action Now and mobilize for a Global Day of Action - manifesting the bold change we want to see in the world.
We interviewed Marlow Baines, Earth Guardians director of youth mentorship, and CAN campaign lead. Here’s what she shared with us:
We’ve been busy working with our youth leaders across the globe, meeting 2-3 times per week, and we:
Estimate 100+ crew actions across the globe on November 12th!
Are mobilizing 2,000+ youth globally
Plan to recruit 20+ CAN Regional Leads by end of July
Over the past month, we’ve:
Outreached to 1,300 youth and 95 crews about CAN
Have 19 youth leads on the global CAN team:
Youth organizers are from: Japan, Cameroon, Togo, Kenya, United States, Mexico, New Zealand
Seven of our International Youth Council members are actively organizing on this campaign
Our CAN partners include: Patagonia (Boulder), Sunski, Care About Climate, Power Shift Network, 1% for the Planet, with more coming soon…
We’ve accomplished ALL OF THIS using the following methodologies and tactics:
We’ve strictly adhered to our CAN team and Earth Guardians values
We are on all-team CAN organizing calls, once per week on Mondays
In May, we had 6 subcommittee meetings
We’ve created two toolkits + organizing resources from our CAN Comms team
We presented the CAN campaign on our May Global Crew Call
What has stood out as you’ve organized this campaign?
It is amazing to meet with 20 youth organizers, from 7+ time zones, once or twice a week. We are seeing our new Youth Council members step up, share their vision, and lead - and this is incredibly inspiring. It is powerful to see how a global day of action with 100 crew actions is possible.
What have you learned?
I am learning how important it is to give everybody the opportunity to step up, and I’m learning the power of Trust. It is so important to slow down - I find it very helpful to give the campaign enough wiggle room that we can slow down to really plan out the details of the campaign structure and make sure the whole team is on board and caught up. Accountability - the power of recap emails allows everyone the opportunity to read through the development of the campaign, keep track of who is responsible for what, and what we need to cover in the next week.
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