College Climate Gathering

 

Where: Brown's campus! (Providence, Rhode Island)

When: November 3-5 (Friday evening through Sunday morning)

Who: College students interested in on-campus climate organizing from across the northeast

What: A two-night conference hosted on Brown's campus for college students interested in climate organizing (no experience necessary!) to participate in a series of skills-based workshops (i.e. how to organize a rally, how to screen print, how to build a campaign timeline, etc.) led by other students, attend talks and panels by older environmental justice advocates and academics, get to know other interested students from different campuses, and bring a greater sense of community and purpose to the college climate movement.

 

The conference/gathering will be shaped from the ground-up by students and for students, and will be free to attend for all who cannot otherwise afford costs of transportation and food. Housing will be provided. 

We will operate under a set of shared principles for college climate organizing while recognizing the inherent nuances present in on-campus organizing at each individual institution. Ultimately, through sharing the skills and energy present on dozens of campuses, this conference/gathering will equip attendees to organize for a mass mobilization the following spring on Earth Day 2024.

 

Why: While youth protests have gathered significant international attention over the past few years, peaking in 2019 directly before the pandemic, they have been largely unable to build the sustained power to push for specific policy change on the scale necessary to meet the urgency of the climate crisis. In higher education, the fossil fuel divestment movement has gained significant momentum over the past decade, but fails to attract the same headlines as it once did.

 

Now, emerging out of the global pandemic, with the young people who helped to form the 2019 strikes or who were inspired by those strikes now in college, and the climate crisis worse than ever, we are faced with a unique opportunity for mobilization. However, the college climate organizing space is fragmented. Individual campuses focus on individual campaigns, and many campuses have interested individuals but lack a starting place or point of reference.

 

By organizing this conference, we are not only uniting the individual campaigns happening across campuses under a shared set of principles, but we are uniting the people that drive those campaigns. We also hope that a large portion of those who attend have almost no college organizing experience at all and can bring back some of the skills and lessons learned from other campuses back with them to start something new.

 

There is no time like the present for this movement to ignite, and we hope that this conference can help make that ignition a reality.