Last weekend, 1000 students convened in Austin Texas for the Clinton Global Initiative University for a conference geared towards solving the world’s big problems and empowering students to take action.
In 8 days, 10,000 young people will be in DC for Power Shift 2009 for a conference to demand action on climate change from our leaders and empowering students to push for change.
There is a fundamental difference between these two events:
At Power Shift we will hold our elected officials accountable to do their part in solving climate change. We know that we are all working together to solve one really big (and multi-faceted) problem. And we’re not leaving until they listen to us.
Clinton Global Initiative inspires individuals and small groups to solve a wide range of problems, and highlight the projects that are closest to a set of ideals: Do what you can to make the world a better place, and make this part of your life.’ CGI-U is top down, and Power Shift is bottom up.
Here are few ways that CGI -U either missed opportunities to achieve larger impact, or was not intended to make a bigger impact.
Students were nominally connected together around the issues they were working on by going to the same working sessions, but there was no way to combine similar commitments or create the space for cooperation. Working sessions, as they are called, involved simplistic and abstract conversations about the problems, rather than making action plans.
CGI lacked a fundamental plan for creating change, beyond ‘everyone go do good things for the world’. There was no strategy. They failed, whether accidentally or intentionally, to hold forward a goal of a world without climate change, poverty and curable disease. And without such a goal, they failed to link the related issue areas together and link people across disparate issues in the same effort.
The highest honor at CGI – U is to be recognized by Bill Clinton for your outstanding commitment. Commitments seem to be measured by how many people they helped, how creative they were, and how much money they were going to use in their effort. That’s great and all, but something about competing with each other to ‘help’ the most people by using the most money just doesn’t fit with my notions of social change.
Lastly, and perhaps most specific, there was little to no mention of the large forces that are at work in the world. We didn’t talk about how a US economy that depends on high consumption inherently leads to intensive resource extraction, or how the World Bank uses its loans to restructure countries to make them more profitable for multi-national corporations but remove security and economic power from the people.
How will Power Shift be different? We are more strategic. We have important goals that we want to achieve, that we can only achieve by getting everyone to DC. We want to show our elected leaders that our generation means business, we want to them to pass bold climate policy, and we want to scale up, empower and support the organizing efforts of youth activists around the country to achieve these goals. And we will continue to do this until we succeed.
So what was good about CGI?
Bill Clinton said strongly and frequently that we need to get congress to the point where Obama can take a leadership role in Copenhagen at the international climate treaty negotiations this fall. And young people who are motivated to make change will always overcome the above difficulties.
We got the word out about Power Shift, had many conversations about the types of change we are working for, and (largely outside of the formal conference) made important connections to move our work forwards. So if you want to inspire a lot of young people to change the world, lets do it together at Power Shift and really build this movement.
Morgan Goodwin – You run one of the skill session on putting your commitment into action at CGIU, didn’t you?
I agree with you that these are very different gatherings, but you contradict yourself by defining CGIU as top-bottom and power-shift as bottom-up. You speak about CGIU concentrating on projects and commitments that students and individuals do (to me that seems like bottom-up), and about power-shift concentrating on lobbying policy-makers (seems to me like top-bottom).
In any case, I am not sure your tone of writing is productive at all. Criticism is good. But if the two gatherings are so different, they should probably complement each other, not try to compete and prove who’s better. What good will that do?
Are you seriously claiming that there is little to no value in individuals making personal commitments and projects to make change? If one kid gets access to education due to a single student making a personal commitment, is it not worth your while?
Morgan – you should know more than many, that your actions don’t only count if they are a part of a comprehensive solution. Lets focus on bringing change through complimentary approaches.
I believe power-shift is a fantastic gathering with great potential of advancing the agenda of climate change. Good luck with it.
By the way, Morgan, since you were present at CGIU, it is surprising that you failed to remember that the facilitated table discussions in each working session focused on building action plans for specific solutions.
Hi Michael,
I think the two events highlight different models for change, and I am hoping to point out some of the differences between the two models. I think that one is better, by which I mean more likely to stop large-scale problems. And I want to question where our limited resources should be allocated.
Having been to CGI-U, I wanted to share some of my initial reactions. There were definitely some specific things that I think CGI can do better next year, and also some important things they did well this year. Here I wanted to write about what I see as the more fundamental differences.
These people are dysfunctional savages. ,
They then follow up by making accusations that he is not a good teacher, even though they have not been in his classroom. ,