Strategic Intiatives: Can Gore's Climate Campaign Drive Social Change?
Organizers, communicators and climate advocates are looking at Gore's $300 million bet. He and the Alliance for Climate Change are bringing massive communications resources into play to motivate American's to move into political action in Washington. Practitioners know the key to success is to merge both grassroots organizing and communications into a integrated effort. This campaign has wrapped it's efforts around "urgency" and "solvability." The historical reference points in the campaign's U Tube clip, above, are broad spectrum: storming the beaches of Normandy, the civil rights movement, and the space program are all invoked.
Once people can see themselves in this new movement, urged on though affiliation, association and crisis, how will grassroots organizing be fired up? I will be discussing this living and high stakes societal case study as it progresses through the social and policy metabolism.
Modern Organizing
"Cathy Zoi, the Alliance for Climate Protection's chief executive, said the group will focus on individuals known in the advertising world as "influencers" who talk to a disproportionate number of people in their communities. While some ads will target inside-the-Beltway policymakers, the bulk of their efforts will focus on the general public."
"This is modern organizing," Zoi said, adding that the campaign aims to convince voters that "this is a solvable problem." (see Washington Post link, below.)
Given that this a well-heeled billboard effort, the questions of ownership and sustainability arise.
People tend to stick with something that they own, and ownership begins with being able to creatively impact how policy and politics are done. Web 2.0 is one mode of participatory engagement through punditry. Another, and challenging path is through sustainable, local grassroots face to face contact and community building.
The ownership and sustainability aspects of successful organizing were explored and became understood by The United Farm Worker's founder, Cesar Chavez and his mentors Fred Ross and earlier organizer, Saul Alinsky. The pattern of communications merged with organization and ownership is found over and over again in the annals of profound social change.
It it fitting to also note that Chavez would have been 81 this week, the moment of a launch of this well funded effort in political and policy change by the Gore group.
As veterans of social movements know, the "thing" that changes in the end is not just the status quo or policy, but the inner and collective experience of persons who are empowered and connected not only to a larger purpose, but to each other, as change is made.
Can people be motivated top down, when all of the science issues, spokesperson issues, demographic issues and money issues have been handled up front, as happens in a good Presidential campaign? Or will the smoothness of it all seem manufactured?
Meanwhile, it is also important to see if this initiative begins to create a giant issues wedge, and hits the beaches of the POTUS campaigns, as it is surely designed to do. A question that Grist has in the mill, below, is will the wave and systems effect on political change here be as enormous as what is happened in Australia? Will other constituencies with unmet needs benefit, and will their causes rise with the climate boat? Certainly the 1960's multiple waves of change suggest that these waves of change could be happening again, in 2008. Society, enterprises and the public sector could like find the playing field rapidly changed for every endeavor, large and small.
Source: Grist.com
"If you read Juliet Eilperin's great rundown in the Washington Post, you know that today marks the launch of a massive PR effort from Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection.
Gore has concluded that U.S. politicians will continue to be timid on climate change until the public demands otherwise. "The simple algorithm is this: It's important to change the light bulbs, but it's much more important to change the laws," he said. "The options available to civilization worldwide to avert this terribly destructive pattern are beginning to slip away from us. The path for recovery runs right through Washington, D.C."
To that end, the Alliance is launching the "we" campaign, a $300 million, 3-year campaign to shift public opinion and create a sense of urgency commensurate with the problem, along with a sense of "solvability" -- that is, a sense that we can beat it. The campaign's goals are audacious: mobilizing 10 million volunteers through TV ads, print ads, and social networks.
Gore has famously put his money where his mouth is, putting all profits from An Inconvenient Truth, his salary from Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, and the cash from all the awards he's won toward the ACP campaign. Private donors will pony up the rest.
Cathy Zoi, CEO of the ACP (and leader of a similar effort which led to the political flip in Australia recently), spoke with a small group of bloggers today about the details and thinking behind the campaign.
Their research has found that there's only about 18% of people in the U.S. who are opposed to climate change action on ideological grounds (Romm's "deniers and delayers"). That leaves over 80% reachable. Around 9-10% are activists, people who get it and are engaged. Around 35% are taking some small actions, though their understanding is shaky. The rest are what Zoi called "fearful and confused" -- they don't really get what global warming is, what causes it, or how to address it, but they're acutely aware that it's a huge problem and it stresses them out...MORE, go to headline.
