Young People Taking Charge of the U.S. Election
A while ago Diane Shisk (International Commonality Reference Person for the Care of the Environment) said that based on her reading and research, getting the current U.S. administration out of office is crucial for the survival of our planet.
I run a nonprofit organization in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, that is youth-led and adult-supported. It consists primarily of young People of the Global Majority.
I brought Diane’s words to the young people a year and a half ago. We started doing research. We started talking to people who do strategy. We learned about how important governments are in the big changes that are needed in climate policy.
We learned how the most important and necessary changes will not happen without getting rid of capitalism (which is currently crumbling), classism, and racism. That is the ultimate goal. In the meantime, it does matter whom we elect to public office.
We attended trainings with the Environmental Voter Project and Vote Left and many other amazing U.S. efforts. We worked with our Youth on Board’s “Listening Works” project and created a “deep canvassing” strategy. Deep canvassing means going door-to-door and having conversations with people and listening to them—not just asking them to vote for a particular candidate or support a particular issue. It’s about reaching people’s minds.
Then the pandemic hit. We had to completely change our in-person strategy to a virtual one. But this made it possible to reach out much farther geographically than we had planned. The young people have now created two different PowerPoint trainings and lots of amazing systems.
Because we are a nonprofit and constrained by U.S. laws, we cannot endorse a specific candidate. But we can talk to people about how important the Green New Deal is (the Green New Deal seeks to change the fossil-fuel-based economy to a green economy, with workers’ rights and People of Global Majority at the center). We also talk about how important ending the climate crisis is and how important it is to follow young people in this effort.
We’ve worked with various voting projects and accessed lists of people in “swing states”—states that could vote Republican or Democrat in any election and specifically in the presidential election in November 2020. These are states like Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Ohio.
We make phone calls to people in communities that have been traditionally repressed in the U.S. voting process, people who, if they did get out to vote, would likely vote in favor of progressive climate policies.
The following are some of the ways we do our work:
- Thirty-five young people make phone calls and send text messages twice a week.
- We work with other youth organizations and train them to make effective phone calls and to set up their own systems for making regular, deep canvassing calls. Ten to 150 people have participated in the trainings.
- We do “listening partnerships” (mini-sessions) as part of our training. People get to discharge about having been hung up on [on the phone], racist things said to them, or just basic discouragement.
- We have three drop-in sessions a week for people who have been through the training and the phone calling and want to continue the work.
- We have a social media presence and encourage people to participate in our drop-in sessions and trainings.
- We give people information about upcoming local elections and tell them where their voting stations are and details about registering to vote in their state.
- We give people information about voting by mail if they are not comfortable with going out to vote during the pandemic.
We are taking these steps because we want to see real change in U.S. climate policy. Young people are our leaders.
Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders in the care of the environment
(Present Time 201, October 2020)