The Basics of Organizing a Successful Climate Emergency Group

“Organizing is people working together to get things done.”

This is the opening sentence in the book, “Organizing: A Guide for Grassroots Leaders,” by Si Kahn. If you want to organize and/or build a successful local group on the climate crisis, it’s a sentence that should not be forgotten.

Organizing can be done by anyone who is sincerely concerned about a particular issue or set of issues. You don’t have to attend a workshop on organizing to start in doing it, although attending such workshops is always a good idea so that you can improve your organizing skills.

The two main things needed to start up a climate emergency group are a personal understanding of the urgent need to slow, stop and reverse global warming and a willingness to reach out and talk to other people. From those two things can blossom over time a powerful organization capable of winning important victories in your part of the world. We know this because we’ve experienced it.

Getting Started

The first thing you need to do is find at least one or two other people who agree with you about the need for action. They may be friends or members of your family. They may be part of a church, synagogue or mosque, a union, community association or other group you belong to. They may be neighbors on your block.

You don’t need to have lots of people to start a group, although if there’s a lot of interest, great. The key thing at first is more quality than quantity. You need to begin meeting with people who share the same concerns as you and are willing to make time to do something about them.

Holding Effective Meetings

Once you’ve found at least one-two other people, you need to meet to make your plans. You can meet in someone’s living room. If the group is larger than five people, and maybe even if it’s smaller, you should have someone who facilitates, or chairs, the meeting.

The facilitator’s role is to help everyone who wants to speak do so and to help the group as a whole make decisions about what it does as a group. The facilitator should speak up as he/she wants to and feels is needed but should be sure to make every effort to encourage others to speak up too. He/she also needs to prevent any one person from speaking so much that others feel discouraged from speaking.

People develop a commitment to a group if they are able to participate and feel like their ideas are taken seriously by others.

The first thing to be done at a meeting is for everyone to introduce themselves. The second thing to do is to agree upon an agenda. It is a good idea, if you are the initiator or a leader of the group, to come up with a proposed agenda beforehand.

At a first meeting, for example, this might be the proposed agenda:

Introductions

• Agreeing upon agenda

• Why we have come together (the initiator(s) briefly explains how and why the meeting was organized and what is hoped to come out of it, followed by a discussion to see if there is agreement)

• What we should be doing together (discussing possible actions that can be taken)

• How we structure ourselves to be effective (choosing people to follow up on the decisions in between meetings)

• Setting a next meeting date, time and place

A few other tips:

• Usually, basic meetings of a group shouldn’t go for more than two hours unless people are really into the discussion and want to go longer.
• You should meet as often as people collectively are willing to meet, usually either once a week, every two weeks or monthly. The more frequently people are willing to meet, the better.
• It’s always a good idea to have drinks and light snacks to encourage a friendly atmosphere.

Recruiting Additional Members

After the first meeting, or after a second or third one if more discussion is needed to come to basic agreement on the purpose of the group, you need to begin recruiting other people to join. To find them, members of the initial group consciously need to do outreach--talking to others, sending out emails or letters, making announcements in group settings or in newsletters, calling in to talk radio programs and giving out your contact information or in any other way you can think of.

If people in the group don’t have much experience giving leadership to organizations, you might want to recruit more slowly. You don’t want to be overwhelmed with so many people joining that it becomes unwieldy. But if your group gels quickly and you feel prepared to do so, the more widely you can reach out the better.

Setting Up the Group

Once you’ve got a group that is having effective meetings and is beginning to work well together, there are a few basic things that should be done to set yourselves up. These things can happen early on, like at a second or third meeting, or take longer.

One thing to do is choosing a name. The name should be short. You might want to have in the name something which defines the geographic area where you’re working (like “Chesapeake,” “Peoria,” “Freedom County,” etc.) And you should definitely have something in the name which gives a sense of what you’re about, like “climate emergency” or “clean energy.”

A second thing to do is to put together a mission statement, no more than a paragraph, which summarizes what your group is about. This is important as a way to get everyone coming to meetings in agreement as to your basic objectives. It’s also important to help potential members know what it is they’re being asked to join.

As an example, here’s the mission statement of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network: “The Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN) is the first grassroots, nonprofit organization dedicated exclusively to fighting global warming in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. Our mission is to educate and mobilize citizens of this region in a way that fosters a rapid societal switch to clean energy and energy-efficient products, thus joining similar efforts worldwide to slow and halt the dangerous trend of global warming.” 

The third thing to do is to choose officers for the group. Choosing officers is about matching people’s abilities and interests to functions that your organization needs in order to work effectively. Usual officer positions are Chairperson, Vice-chairperson, Secretary and Treasurer. Sometimes a group has two secretaries: a Recording Secretary who takes notes of meetings and a Corresponding Secretary to deal with letters sent to the group and who sends out notices of meetings in advance.

Communications

Good communications have been called the “mother’s milk” of organization. If members and supporters and the people you’re trying to reach hardly ever hear from you or about you, it’s going to be impossible to grow and have an impact.

These days, with the internet and email, communication to members and supporters is much easier. You should be trying to gather up as many emails of potential members and supporters as possible, input them into a reliable computer or use a group (like Yahoo) to host your list, and regularly communicate about meetings, actions, events or with important information on the climate crisis.

You should also aim to periodically produce a newsletter, or do a regular mailing, to people who don’t have email.

You’ll want to have several different lists—a) officers and members who are very active, b) other members and c) supporters. Occasionally you’ll want to send something to everybody; more frequently you’ll do so to the less active members; and most frequently to the active members. An email discussion group, where anybody on it can easily communicate with the list as a whole, is a good way to make communication easier, but be sure that everyone has access to email or a way to access key emails.

And don’t forget that if you really want people to come to something, email and regular mail is not enough. You need to call them to urge them to come. You won’t get everybody, but you’ll get a lot more if you make those calls.

Fund-raising and Press Work

These are both essential aspects of growing and building your group and its effectiveness, so important that we will be writing up more in-depth suggestions elsewhere on this website. Check back soon for more information.

Working in Coalition

As we say in point five of the “Ten Steps to Creating an Effective Local Climate Emergency Council” article, “Build a big and varied clean-energy coalition.” Already existing groups should be approached to solicit their support for or involvement in your actions and campaigns. As you reach out, listen carefully to the input you get from others so that you can modify your message to incorporate any specific concerns they have that your group agrees are important. Remember that although the climate crisis is an issue that everyone in the world should be concerned about, you will need to take time to explain why and how other groups who don’t have that as their primary issue or focus should care about and do something about it.

On-Going Evaluation

Finally, make sure to build in time in your meetings for people to express how they feel things are going and to evaluate your actions and campaigns. There should be a continual process of action/evaluation so that the group as a whole learns from both your successes and mistakes. And don’t be thrown by mistakes and problems you encounter. We all make them; the mark of a successful organizer/organization is an ability to learn from them and keep moving forward.

And remember, “Organizing is people working together to get things done.”