From November 16-18, students from across the state of New York gathered at Cornell to launch the NY Student Sustainability Coalition (NYSSC, pronounced NISC). The New York Climate Summit ended with a structured coalition of campus student groups that will work from now on with the goal of getting climate legislation passed in Albany in 2008 that will require the state to reduce its emissions 80% by 2050.
The Summit included students from Cornell University, Fredonia College, Ithaca College, New Explorations High School, NYU, Plattsburgh University, St. Lawrence University, University of Rochester, Wells College, and Westchester Community College. It also included members of the Central NY Climate Change Action Group, Sustainable Tompkins, and Energy Independent Caroline.
Our strategic plan includes a push for New York to be a leader on global warming at the upcoming Presidential Debate on Global Warming in New Hampshire, a coordinated Focus The Nation event where we invite legislators and demand them to state their position on global warming and a bill to reduce emissions 80% by 2050 in the state, and a Lobby Day during St. Valentine’s Day (Date Your Elected Officials, Show Love For Warming Action).
Our website will soon be up at www.nyssc.org, but in the meantime people (especially NY students) can visit our google group.
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This looks awesome, Carlos! One of the really exciting things about the past few months has been seeing groups like this spring up all over the country!
Let me know how I can help from this end with Focus the Nation — I’ll be in touch soon anyhow to talk about how things are going and figure out how I can best be a resource to you guys on the ground.
Congrats NY students on kicking this off! It’s powerful to see groups such as yours changing the political climate across the country. I’m working with the Cascade Climate Network (see our google group: http://groups.google.com/group/cascadeclimate) There are several other regional groups such as ours and we should entertain the idea of working on a coordinated effort on national issues. Perhaps a national summit of regional groups is an order.
Great to hear about another state network popping up. There’s a growing trend I’m happy to see. Youth across different states and regions are coordinating, networking and getting much more sophisticated in the scale and scope of our activism!
Here in the Northwest, Oregon and Washington students have formed the Cascade Climate Network, a Texas coalition, Re-Energize Texas just launched. There’s TEAM Minnesota, the California Student Sustainability Coalition and probably many more (please ring in with links to new or old state youth clean energy/climate coalitions).
These networks offer a platform for collaboration, movement building, learning from each other’s successes and failures, and an opportunity to build off of our campuses and into our communities to become a force in state, regional or even national policymaking, elections, etc.
If anyone is interested in starting a network in your state or region, please check out these other groups as models, and feel free to contact me or anyone else at the Cascade Climate Network regarding our network’s model, campaign plan and communication structure. I think it offers a good mode (one among many I’m sure) for other similar state or regional networks.
Ditto Jenny and Ben! These new state and regional networks (and some older ones) are really exciting and represent a new stage in the development of our movement. We’re beginning to network beyond our individual campuses, build broader ties, learn from our mistakes and successes, coordinate bigger, bolder, and badder actions and I think perhaps most crucially, provide the platform for our movements to build off of our campuses and into our communities, to become a core of a broader movement and to be a force in state, regional and even national politics/elections/policymaking.
In addition to the newly formed NY Student Sustainability Coalition and the Cascade Climate Nework, here’s also the recently launched Re-Energize Texas group, TEAM Minnesota, and the more venerable California Student Sustainability Coalition. I’m sure there are more in existence (please pipe up and add to this thread) and many more to come soon.
If anyone is considering starting a new network in your own state or region, please check out these other groups as models for what you might do and feel free to contact me, Jenny, or anyone else from the Cascade Climate Network to talk about what we’re doing, and how the CCN’s structure and campaign plan can be used as a model in other states. I think it offers a pretty good model, and would love to chat with people about it.
Here’s to one big, bold, bad-ass movement!
Jesse
Don’t forget Massachusetts Youth Climate Action (or MYCA)! We are currently working to pass the Global Warming Solutions Act, which would reduce Massachusetts’ GHG emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2050, create a green jobs program, and effectively ban the construction of new coal plants by setting strict emissions standards for new power generation. For more check out http://www.gomyca.org.