tools and handouts to build long-term capacity and power
We need to proactively recruit people to join our events and actions. We can’t just depend on emails or social media to recruit for our events. By doing public outreach, we can grow our strength in numbers that will create the impact we need; we get the chance to hone our message by talking to people in-real-time and we get the chance for building long, lasting, personal connections.
In this manual we share some broader theory of direct action and recent examples of kayaktivism, drawn from experiences as early as the 1970’s to recent examples (as recent as an action Cam participated in just a few weeks ago). We share this to think about best practices and how to carry out this work even more effectively.
A lot of campaigns forget one very important element of success: photography. An action can be strategic, technically smart, and flawless in detail, yet still fail if it has nothing to show for it — if it doesn’t have beautiful photos to demonstrate its power, excite the media & inspire supporters.
Here’s a chance to practice creating new actions or tactics for your group. It supports creativity and can be a chance to apply strategy lessons taught in earlier activities. It’s quick and guaranteed to get a few new tactics.
There are many aspects to carrying out a good action. They may be fun and creative, or well-planned, or poorly executed. They could have lots of people or few. Many groups spend the bulk of their time on these elements of actions, and they are important. Yet perhaps the most key area of action-planning is the action itself, what it is, what it stands for—action logic.
Cardboard signs are an easy and effective way to take a rectangular poster sign to the next level! You can double your impact by making the shape of the cardboard sign communicate your message in addition to any text or imagery on the sign itself. You can create a series of cardboard signs to be carried together.
A flat puppet is often made as a sculptural representation of a specific person that is often large or life size. These instructions are for how to make a flat puppet likeness out of cardboard that can be mounted on a stick and used as a puppet.
Music, sound and rhythm are powerful additions to events and to the movement as a whole. Here are few simple musical instruments that can be made using easy-to-find materials. Use these to add a bit of rhythm to any march, parade, performance or bike ride.
Parachute banners are highly visible and very photogenic from above, from below, and from all over. A parachute banner is an energizing way to amplify messages and images and to occupy space.
“Singing is another important connective practice. Songs unify us in ways that can feel mysterious, magical and sometimes even spiritual. Songs help us stay calm and resolute during a demonstration; channel anger, sadness or grief; raise each other’s spirits; and share history, heritage, and culture with one another.” - Sara Blazevic and Aru Shiney-Ajay (p. 166 in Winning the Green New Deal)
Stencils are great for reproducing images or text. They are easy and cheap to make, they can be used on a variety of surfaces and you can produce many images from a single stencil.
An art build is when a group of people get together to create art for a common project. Art builds are a great way to bring in new volunteers, share work that needs to get done, and get people motivated about an upcoming event!
A lot of campaigns forget one very important element of success: photography. An action can be strategic, technically smart, and flawless in detail, yet still fail if it has nothing to show for it — if it doesn’t have beautiful photos to demonstrate its power, excite the media & inspire supporters.
We need to proactively recruit people to join our events and actions. We can’t just depend on emails or social media to recruit for our events. By doing public outreach, we can grow our strength in numbers that will create the impact we need; we get the chance to hone our message by talking to people in-real-time and we get the chance for building long, lasting, personal connections.
There are lots of kinds of power. Corporations have money. Governments have police and military. What is our power? People power — that means we build a base of people who are ready to be active. So how do we build a local base of support?
Building a movement isn’t just about carrying out an action. Movement-building is about growing relationships, and growing people’s sense of power. For that, we offer ways to get people more deeply involved. The concept of the ladder of engagement can make sure we are inviting people to make a deeper commitment.
A young organiser was asking for advice on how to be a better organiser. An older organiser replied, “You are selfish—you take all this work and do it yourself. But other people want to participate and help out. They need you to be more giving and give them meaningful work so they can feel part of the organisation.” Those are wise words—and true for many of us. So how do we get others involved by giving work away? One tool to help us with this is: the menu of tasks.
7 behaviors we can use right away to strengthen ourselves, so we can keep taking more and more powerful and strategic actions
You have every right to be fully in climate grief and despair. Feeling ungrounded is a common feeling these days. Let’s take it in. Don’t push it away. Feeling angry, anxious, fearful, means we’re empathetic. These are our natural responses to the loss and devastation produced by the climate crisis. So let’s not harm ourselves by keeping our feelings at bay.
Meditation is like a bird with two wings – one is stopping and the other is deep looking. In sitting meditation, we always start with stopping. We stop the mind from ceaseless thinking and wandering by bringing the mind back, first to the breath, and then to the body.
We have to overwhelm the world, not ourselves, with those “little bits of good” that Desmond Tutu talks about. Show care to ourselves and to others, as a simple intention from our heart, and then honoring it through everyday actions, nurture our love, liberation, interdependence, and regeneration to reimagine our culture, economies, communities, and our relationship to the web of life. Express love because through it, individuals find their center, core, power.
Many people are finding themselves exhausted from the never-ending video calls and virtual experiences. It is not that they do not want the option of connecting in digital spaces, but that they are finding them emotionally and energetically costly. It is crucial for you to pace yourself in this time of physical distancing.
Self-nurturance is about treating yourself with compassion by prioritizing your mental and physical health. After all, when your health suffers, so does your ability to function at your best. By learning to self-nurture, you can get so much more out of life. Nurturance also means caring for, feeding the body with energy, love, and touch. Anyone can nurture, everyone needs it.
Getting outside helps us get grounded and centered. We go back to the basic form of healing in a time when there was anything but: natural healing.
Self-massage is an easy way to stimulate your body's energetic channels to relieve tension, mild pain and discomfort. Your body is the place you wake up in every day. It is your primordial household, your temple, the place that you can go back and find safety when things get rough. Your body knows even when your mind does not.
The health of body, mind and heart is continuously affected by trauma, violence, stress, fear, diet, environment, daily news, and the challenges of life. The following simple exercises are offered for use at times when we feel stressed, distressed, overwhelmed or scattered. These tools are for all of us, whether we are survivors of trauma, activists confronting injustice and oppression, caregivers working with others or persons overwhelmed and stressed by daily life.
To teach empathy on climate impacts
Movies to learn about climate change
To teach empathy on climate impacts
A handout to more effectively talk about climate change
A treasure trove of online interactive and participatory tools in one place
The shortest way to do a roleplay with a group in a complex challenge
A treasure trove of online interactive and participatory tools in one place
Five sessions to teach Media Skills. These sessions can be run back-to-back as a full-day session, or as separate stand-alone workshops.
In 2015 the outgoing editor of The Guardian decided to change how they reported on climate change. Convinced they...
Media Advisories Media advisories inform the media about an upcoming event, whether it’s a march, a rally or a press...
Letters to the editor (LTEs) are typically short piece (< 300 words), in contrast with opinion pieces (op-eds) which may...
When you are thinking about media outreach, it’s always best to think about where your audience goes to find out about local news and events. More and more people are getting their information online – and therefore so should we! And, more than ever, we can create our own online media.
A lot of campaigns forget one very important element of success: photography. An action can be strategic, technically smart, and flawless in detail, yet still fail if it has nothing to show for it — if it doesn’t have beautiful photos to demonstrate its power, excite the media & inspire supporters.
Beware of potential interview pitfalls Journalists are looking for the “real” story. They know people come prepared with talking points....
Journalists don’t cover opinions (that’s for the Opinion section of the newspaper). They cover news — something that is new, preferably dramatic and surprising, and connected to current affairs or issues already being covered in the media. This is a challenge for us because the news is not built for covering on-going slow-burn problems well, like the warming of the planet. Here are some tips to help an action be more newsworthy:
Tips for building a positive relationship with press: Be quick and efficient in your communication. Press are very busy! Try...
Tips for TV: Remember: your visual will make as much of an impact as your words! Use gestures that complement...
Before an interview Learn as much as you can about the interview. What’s the angle of the story? What’s the...
Even when journalists agree with us (and when they don’t), they have restrictions on what and how they can cover issues. Understanding journalists makes us more effective at working with them.
Want to get media for an action? Here is a checklist for different roles.
A treasure trove of online interactive and participatory tools in one place
We need to proactively recruit people to join our events and actions. We can’t just depend on emails or social media to recruit for our events. By doing public outreach, we can grow our strength in numbers that will create the impact we need; we get the chance to hone our message by talking to people in-real-time and we get the chance for building long, lasting, personal connections.
Cardboard signs are an easy and effective way to take a rectangular poster sign to the next level! You can double your impact by making the shape of the cardboard sign communicate your message in addition to any text or imagery on the sign itself. You can create a series of cardboard signs to be carried together.
A flat puppet is often made as a sculptural representation of a specific person that is often large or life size. These instructions are for how to make a flat puppet likeness out of cardboard that can be mounted on a stick and used as a puppet.
Music, sound and rhythm are powerful additions to events and to the movement as a whole. Here are few simple musical instruments that can be made using easy-to-find materials. Use these to add a bit of rhythm to any march, parade, performance or bike ride.
Parachute banners are highly visible and very photogenic from above, from below, and from all over. A parachute banner is an energizing way to amplify messages and images and to occupy space.
“Singing is another important connective practice. Songs unify us in ways that can feel mysterious, magical and sometimes even spiritual. Songs help us stay calm and resolute during a demonstration; channel anger, sadness or grief; raise each other’s spirits; and share history, heritage, and culture with one another.” - Sara Blazevic and Aru Shiney-Ajay (p. 166 in Winning the Green New Deal)
Stencils are great for reproducing images or text. They are easy and cheap to make, they can be used on a variety of surfaces and you can produce many images from a single stencil.
An art build is when a group of people get together to create art for a common project. Art builds are a great way to bring in new volunteers, share work that needs to get done, and get people motivated about an upcoming event!
In this manual we share some broader theory of direct action and recent examples of kayaktivism, drawn from experiences as early as the 1970’s to recent examples (as recent as an action Cam participated in just a few weeks ago). We share this to think about best practices and how to carry out this work even more effectively.
A lot of campaigns forget one very important element of success: photography. An action can be strategic, technically smart, and flawless in detail, yet still fail if it has nothing to show for it — if it doesn’t have beautiful photos to demonstrate its power, excite the media & inspire supporters.
Journalists don’t cover opinions (that’s for the Opinion section of the newspaper). They cover news — something that is new, preferably dramatic and surprising, and connected to current affairs or issues already being covered in the media. This is a challenge for us because the news is not built for covering on-going slow-burn problems well, like the warming of the planet. Here are some tips to help an action be more newsworthy:
Creating a campaign to confront climate change is hard work. Every group and context is different, so there is no standard process. But there are often some common steps.
There are lots of kinds of power. Corporations have money. Governments have police and military. What is our power? People power — that means we build a base of people who are ready to be active. So how do we build a local base of support?
Building a movement can sometimes feel like pushing a boulder up a hill. We’re pushing against major forces that take great effort to budge. Other times it can feel like racing downhill — we start something and it quickly takes-off. Sometimes we are running to keep up with what is happening, spending energy to help events roll on course and in the right direction. Whatever our work feels like, it needs the same thing: momentum.
Activist groups can reach a point where they stop growing. Such groups often mistakenly believe they’ve tapped all the people who care about their issue. They think, for instance, that nobody else cares about the expansion of coal plants or is willing to take a stand against rising sea levels. The problem is often not that we have run out of people in our city or town: it’s how we are organizing and the way we think about growing our group.
Groups often waste precious energy on an endless series of educational events or actions that don’t seem to add up to anything. In contrast, campaigns channel group power by focusing on a concrete goal.
Here’s a chance to practice creating new actions or tactics for your group. It supports creativity and can be a chance to apply strategy lessons taught in earlier activities. It’s quick and guaranteed to get a few new tactics.
There are many aspects to carrying out a good action. They may be fun and creative, or well-planned, or poorly executed. They could have lots of people or few. Many groups spend the bulk of their time on these elements of actions, and they are important. Yet perhaps the most key area of action-planning is the action itself, what it is, what it stands for—action logic.
Building a movement isn’t just about carrying out an action. Movement-building is about growing relationships, and growing people’s sense of power. For that, we offer ways to get people more deeply involved. The concept of the ladder of engagement can make sure we are inviting people to make a deeper commitment.
350 staffer Sarah from Egypt has been using a method called appreciative inquiry. That approach centers around the belief that groups make their best progress when they they focus on the skills they do well. When a group says they aren’t good at communication, for example, this approach asks of the group: “Okay, but when you’re the best at communication—what does that look like?” The idea is that seeing what you’re lacking doesn’t help you know what to do more of. Instead focus on what resources you have and how to expand and grow those.
Campaigns aren’t won all at once; instead, they are won through a series of actions. Yet, too often, we design only one action ahead of time. That can be a problem – when that action is over, people want to know what comes next. Right after the action they are energized and ready to do the next thing, and we lose that energy if we don’t have the next step. This tool is about helping us plan ahead and keep momentum. It’s a great tool to use after people have been thinking about possible tactics, or near the end of a campaign workshop to finalise a plan.
Power-mapping can help you to identify targets and focus your strategy. The idea is to map out your potential targets, and the institutions and individuals who influence your target, so you can begin to understand possible ways to impact them. A power map can be a useful visual tool to help your team understand power, and see possibilities for campaigning.
The goal of this activity is straightforward: getting people to create a timeline of what they have been up to in the last, say, six months. We encourage reflection in small groups so that you get a wide range of input and more chances for participation. Plus, small groups are another way of getting participants to work with each other, especially if you encourage people to get into groups with people they don’t as well or don’t work with as often.
A strategy tool to examine the range of social forces and groups, spread across a spectrum, from those who are the most dedicated opponents to those who are the most active supporters. This tool can uncover how tactics need to be planned in relation to whether or not they attract key allies; encourage more optimistic mobilisation efforts through a realization that it is not necessary to win over everyone to our point of view; and assess where a group needs to do more research related to allies.
By themselves, rulers cannot collect taxes, enforce repressive laws and regulations, keep trains running on time, prepare national budgets, direct traffic, manage ports, print money, repair roads, keep markets supplied with food, make steel, build rockets, train the police and army, issue postage stamps or even milk a cow. People provide these services to the ruler though a variety of organizations and institutions. If people would stop providing these skills, the ruler could not rule. - Gene Sharp • The Politics of Nonviolent Action
A young organiser was asking for advice on how to be a better organiser. An older organiser replied, “You are selfish—you take all this work and do it yourself. But other people want to participate and help out. They need you to be more giving and give them meaningful work so they can feel part of the organisation.” Those are wise words—and true for many of us. So how do we get others involved by giving work away? One tool to help us with this is: the menu of tasks.
Creating a campaign to confront climate change is hard work. Every group and context is different, so there is no standard process. But there are often some common steps.
Building a movement can sometimes feel like pushing a boulder up a hill. We’re pushing against major forces that take great effort to budge. Other times it can feel like racing downhill — we start something and it quickly takes-off. Sometimes we are running to keep up with what is happening, spending energy to help events roll on course and in the right direction. Whatever our work feels like, it needs the same thing: momentum.
Activist groups can reach a point where they stop growing. Such groups often mistakenly believe they’ve tapped all the people who care about their issue. They think, for instance, that nobody else cares about the expansion of coal plants or is willing to take a stand against rising sea levels. The problem is often not that we have run out of people in our city or town: it’s how we are organizing and the way we think about growing our group.
Groups often waste precious energy on an endless series of educational events or actions that don’t seem to add up to anything. In contrast, campaigns channel group power by focusing on a concrete goal.
There are many aspects to carrying out a good action. They may be fun and creative, or well-planned, or poorly executed. They could have lots of people or few. Many groups spend the bulk of their time on these elements of actions, and they are important. Yet perhaps the most key area of action-planning is the action itself, what it is, what it stands for—action logic.
350 staffer Sarah from Egypt has been using a method called appreciative inquiry. That approach centers around the belief that groups make their best progress when they they focus on the skills they do well. When a group says they aren’t good at communication, for example, this approach asks of the group: “Okay, but when you’re the best at communication—what does that look like?” The idea is that seeing what you’re lacking doesn’t help you know what to do more of. Instead focus on what resources you have and how to expand and grow those.
Campaigns aren’t won all at once; instead, they are won through a series of actions. Yet, too often, we design only one action ahead of time. That can be a problem – when that action is over, people want to know what comes next. Right after the action they are energized and ready to do the next thing, and we lose that energy if we don’t have the next step. This tool is about helping us plan ahead and keep momentum. It’s a great tool to use after people have been thinking about possible tactics, or near the end of a campaign workshop to finalise a plan.
Power-mapping can help you to identify targets and focus your strategy. The idea is to map out your potential targets, and the institutions and individuals who influence your target, so you can begin to understand possible ways to impact them. A power map can be a useful visual tool to help your team understand power, and see possibilities for campaigning.
The goal of this activity is straightforward: getting people to create a timeline of what they have been up to in the last, say, six months. We encourage reflection in small groups so that you get a wide range of input and more chances for participation. Plus, small groups are another way of getting participants to work with each other, especially if you encourage people to get into groups with people they don’t as well or don’t work with as often.
A strategy tool to examine the range of social forces and groups, spread across a spectrum, from those who are the most dedicated opponents to those who are the most active supporters. This tool can uncover how tactics need to be planned in relation to whether or not they attract key allies; encourage more optimistic mobilisation efforts through a realization that it is not necessary to win over everyone to our point of view; and assess where a group needs to do more research related to allies.
By themselves, rulers cannot collect taxes, enforce repressive laws and regulations, keep trains running on time, prepare national budgets, direct traffic, manage ports, print money, repair roads, keep markets supplied with food, make steel, build rockets, train the police and army, issue postage stamps or even milk a cow. People provide these services to the ruler though a variety of organizations and institutions. If people would stop providing these skills, the ruler could not rule. - Gene Sharp • The Politics of Nonviolent Action
A treasure trove of online interactive and participatory tools in one place
Building a movement isn’t just about carrying out an action. Movement-building is about growing relationships, and growing people’s sense of power. For that, we offer ways to get people more deeply involved. The concept of the ladder of engagement can make sure we are inviting people to make a deeper commitment.
350 staffer Sarah from Egypt has been using a method called appreciative inquiry. That approach centers around the belief that groups make their best progress when they they focus on the skills they do well. When a group says they aren’t good at communication, for example, this approach asks of the group: “Okay, but when you’re the best at communication—what does that look like?” The idea is that seeing what you’re lacking doesn’t help you know what to do more of. Instead focus on what resources you have and how to expand and grow those.
The goal of this activity is straightforward: getting people to create a timeline of what they have been up to in the last, say, six months. We encourage reflection in small groups so that you get a wide range of input and more chances for participation. Plus, small groups are another way of getting participants to work with each other, especially if you encourage people to get into groups with people they don’t as well or don’t work with as often.