2. Find Your Passion
What’s Meaningful to you?
Activity #2A:
What’s meaningful to you?
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What Inspired You?
List 1-3 things that got you fired up to take actionon climate change (youth leaders, social media, friends, etc.).
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List your top personal goals: What do you want to get out of your club experience?
What do you want to learn?
What do you want to try?
How would you like to be involved in the club?
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What Impact Do You Want Your Club to Make?
What do you hope to accomplish?
How to make a lasting change at your school?
EXAMPLES:
- Learn how to organize events.
- Learn how to present on climate change to my peers.
- Get more people to join our club and actively participate.
- Hold a climate strike.
- Get my school to institute a yearly climate lecture for all students.
- Incorporate more vegetarian options into your school’s cafeteria menu.
Creative Collaboration: How to Work Together?
Purpose:
To come up with ideas that are better than what one person could generate alone.
Creative Collaboration strengthens your team. It’s not always easy! Hang in there: Collaboration often results in the best ideas!
For Each Idea, Consider:
- Does the idea appeal to your members?
- Does it fit with your high-level goals?
- Logistics: is it do-able?
- Will it make an impact?
Creative Collaboration Steps:
Choose Your Club’s High-Level Goals
Activity #2B:
Use Creative Collaboration To Choose Your High-Level Goals
High-Level Goals:
Unifying, broad-based ideas about what your core group wants to accomplish as a club.
- Use the ideas about what inspired you individually and brainstorm how these might fit together under a broader goal.
- You could also organize goals around a theme for the semester (like “Food Systems”, see page 25).
- What topics or objectives resonate with the group? Is there energy to make it happen?
- High level goals may be ”aspirational”—something you hope for the future and are willing to work towards.
EXAMPLES:
Motivate fellow students to take action to resolve the climate crisis.
Theme: fossil-free energy system.
Envision a Sustainable Future & Focus on Solutions
What does a sustainable future look like?
- What does the future look like & how do we get there? Where do we need to be?
- How do we make it into a reality— to create a future that’s BETTER than what we have today?
- A transition to decarbonization goes hand-in-hand with: resilient communities, eco-system restoration, and equal relationships of power within a community and the larger society.
- How can we live in a way that creates a sustainable future for everyone?
We already have the knowledge, tools, and skills to get there!
Activity #2C:
Explore Solutions & Issues
1. Research current climate solutions (from reputable sources).
Divide up into teams. Each group present a summary of findings to your club at the next meeting. Check out resources like:
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- Dr. Veerabhadran Ramanathan, California Collaborative for Climate Change Solutions
- Hal Harvey, Designing Energy Solutions
- Paul Hawken, Drawdown
- Dr. Mark Jacobsen, The Solutions Project IPCC Report
2. Research climate justice issues and present to club.
Learn about the moral, spiritual, and ethical implications of how we’ve interacted in the past and how we need to change in the future. Bring ideas for viewing a Youtube documentary during your club meeting. See Resources section.
3. Watch, read or research together as a club.
Hold a discussion together:
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- What did you learn?
- How can you implement new ideas?
- What does the group think?
Meet: Aisha Wallace-Palomares, Del Lago Academy, Escondido, CA Class of 2019
HOT TIP:
“Try different things, be open to new experiences, push yourself, and don’t let fear of the unknown stop you. If you ever doubtyou’re capable, remember why you embarked on this journey in the first place. ”
WHAT I’VE LEARNED:
“What we as youth are capable of has no limits: the future we envision is possible by being passionate and having the courage to act boldly.”
Aisha, SD350’s first high school intern, helped create the vision for the youth climate leadership program. She’s now at UC Berkeley. She helped organize climate strikes and will be teaching a course next fall called Zero Waste Solutions for a Sustainable Future.
Highlights: Vision: Youth Climate Action Summit where teens from all over could come together to share, bond, and learn from each other. Became a reality in June 2019 with SD350. Over 50 students from more than 20 high schools participated.