It’s Getting Hot In Here

What’s up, youth climate movement? Focus the Nation here. We haven’t spoken in a little while, but exciting things have been happening in our crazy little attic at Lewis & Clark College. Just earlier this week our 900th team signed up, bringing us within double digits of our total goal: 1000 groups registered for Focus the Nation. Can you taste it? Yeah, it’s that close.

But close only counts, as they say, in horseshoes and hand grenades. Our goal, admittedly far-fetched, is to get to 1000 by next week. So it’s all hands on deck time. I know you’re all getting stoked for Power Shift (and we are too — see you there!) but take just a minute to check out our wishlist and look for any school in your area that hasn’t signed up. Then give them a call. Ask for the sustainability coordinator, ask for the environmental studies department, ask for the biology department. Heck, just get somebody on the phone — that’s most of the battle. Once you’re talking to a faculty or staff member, ask them to sign up. If they won’t or can’t, ask them who will. There is somebody at every school who will do this, we just need to find them.

I’m going to be honest for a minute: I’m not sure we can do this. If our current progress is a good indication, in fact, we won’t. But last time we asked you for help, you came through in a big way.

Let’s see you do it again.

PORTLAND, OR — Focus the Nation HQ is humming with activity. After doubling our staff in the last couple of weeks (pictured clockwise from bottom left: Laura, Alex, yours truly, Garett, Minna), the FtN team is getting down to the very important business of making January 31st, 2008 kick as much ass as possible.

In top news, we are now officially a nationwide teach-in (i.e. active in all 50 states) thanks to the University of North Dakota and Concord University in West Virginia whom Minna and Laura signed up this week. Booyah.

In local news we’ve brought on a team of intrepid interns (not pictured, but beautiful — trust me) from Lewis and Clark College. The intern team — Andrew, Angela, Dan, Kim, and Tori — are hard at work figuring out who we need to talk to at the 250 schools we still have to sign up.

And a related story, we are now 3/4 (that’s %75 if you aren’t that into fractions) of the way to our goal of 1000 institutions involved in Focus the Nation, having signed up our 750th just earlier today. Booyah-kah-shah.

But we’re not getting complacent. We’re calling and email professors and students at schools all across the country over the next month to make sure we get as many stragglers on board as we can. Did you know that NYU hasn’t signed up? Did you know that neither Amherst nor Hampshire has signed up? What’s the deal? If you can help with these or any other school that isn’t signed up yet, send us an email!

We’re also hard at work putting together an organizer’s kit to make it easier than ever to make Focus the Nation happen on your campus. If you are organizing a teach in and have any suggestions, let us know! If you’re not organizing an event, WTF?

The past couple of weeks have been pretty exciting here at Focus the Nation HQ. We’ve doubled our staff, thanks in part to the MySpace Impact award you helped us win. We’ve hired a Director of Media and Public Relations, Garett Brennan, and three new Organizers, Alex Tinker, Laura Westwood and Minna Brown. Now we’re gearing up for the fall, and strapping ourselves in for what is sure to be an exciting ride.

As the first of many exciting mileposts on that ride, we kicked off our Green Torch sign-ups yesterday at Lewis & Clark College. Students from PSU, University of Portland, Lewis & Clark and Willamette University will all be signing this “official invitation” to our representatives and senators, asking them to attend a Focus The Nation event on January 31, 2008. To deliver the invitation, teams of students from all the schools will participate in the Green Torch relay from Portland to the steps of the capitol. Starting October 21 teams will be running, biking, paddling the Willamette, and hopefully even skateboarding across the state to make the delivery.

If you want to get involved in a Green Torch event, or if you want to organize one of your own, shoot us an email: info -at- focusthenation -dot- org.

One of the questions we frequently get asked at Focus the Nation HQ is, “How do I get started organizing one of these awesome teach-ins?” Well, we saw the YouTube presidential debate — we know that the kids these days only pay rapt attention to something presented in internet video format — so here is our answer, courtesy of Seventh Generation and Black and Blue Productions:

Peep the shout outs at the end.

We did it! Thanks in large part to the It’s Getting Hot In Here community, Focus the Nation is the MySpace Impact Award winner for July. We couldn’t be more thrilled at the honor, or more humbled by the overwhelming support we’ve received from folks around the country.

This prize is pretty exciting for us.

First of all, the prize will help us to hire another organizer heading into the fall. This is super important, because we’re going to be swamped when students get back! Which reminds me: do you have mad crazy organizing skills? Are you looking for a job? Do you live in, or can you move to, Portland? If so, hit me up. We’re hiring.

The second exciting thing about this prize is the exposure. In the last two weeks, we’ve added almost 300 MySpace friends, and are now adding 20 or 30 a day. This is just from the traffic the voting generated for us, but in the next month MySpace is going to run banner ads for us which should raise traffic even further.

But the question raised for me is this: how do we turn MySpace friends into meaningful support? I put an email sign-up form on the front page, as well as a link to our website, but I’m not sure how much traffic we’re actually driving back there. Beyond that, I suspect that many people who add us as friends never look at our page a second time, making any updates or blog entries there less useful. The aspects of MySpace that have proved useful are bulletins and comments. Bulletins allow us to reach all of our friends at once, and comments allow us to reach friends of friends.

Facebook obviously has slightly more advanced infrastructure for groups like ours (join our Facebook group!), but tactics there seem much the same: add as many people as possible and treat them like an email list. There are a few applications (Causes, Change.org) that seem to be working to change this, but for now that’s the general trend.

What are your experiences organizing with social networking sites? Can they be useful beyond being a sort of glorified email list?

Anyways, if you haven’t yet, add us on MySpace and make sure to sign your school up to participate if they’re not signed up already.

You’ve probably heard of MySpace. You know, MySpace. That thing you do when you really need to procrastinate?

If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably wasted more time on MySpace than you care to admit: denying friend requests from bad bands and fake profiles, commenting on your friends’ latest ridiculous pictures, looking for that one boy or girl you had a crush on in high school, etc.

Good news: now you can waste time on MySpace doing something that actually makes a difference: the awesome grassroots, global-warming-fighting non-profit I work for, Focus the Nation is one of three finalists (along with the Wild Dolphin Foundation, and Erin Brokovich) for this month’s MySpace Impact Award and we need you to vote for us.

If you don’t know, the Impact Awards are monthly online awards where various non-profits square off in a heated competition and America votes for their favorite (not unlike that one TV show.) The winner receives mad crazy skrilla (ten large) which would be huge for us, considering that we’re currently run out of an attic in Tualatin, Oregon (but soon, due to the incredible generosity of Lewis and Clark College, we’ll be moving into an attic in Portland, Oregon). Plus we’d get a heck of a lot of exposure from being featured on the Impact Awards site and in MySpace banner ads. To give you a sense of how big of a deal this award is, last month’s winner was one.org and they’ve got Brad Pitt as a spokesperson.

The theme this month is environmentalism, in honor of the Live Earth concerts, so it seems appropriate that a grassroots educational effort to fight global warming should win! The dope thing about this award is that you can vote, like, all the time. Once every day. Chicago style (NB, if you get that joke, you’re officially a political nerd).

Now, we don’t have Brad Pitt (yet), but we do have you, and you are all it will take to win this thing. Vote now, vote tomorrow, vote every day until July 20th. With the combined forces of the entire youth climate movement we can beat Jordin Sparks Erin Brokovich. Not that Erin Brokovich isn’t awesome and all, but really — she’s had a fair bit of publicity lately you know? She doesn’t need this like we do.

If you’re really a champ, add us as a friend and put us in your top 8. Your friends will think you’re way awesomer, and we promise not to send you comments about how to get a free Macy’s gift card.

I’m new here, and was planning on making my first post later in the week, but this morning I saw the front page of today’s Independent (referencing the most recent study from James Hansen and his gang–a truly remarkable outline of the science behind the climate crisis in relatively simple layperson’s terms) and realized that just as we can’t wait to start making serious reductions in our global warming pollution, I can’t wait to start writing about it.

So, hi, I’m Ben. Here goes.

[Note: you'll have to forgive the sense of shameless self-promotion in the following missive; it's just that the project I'm working on, Focus the Nation, has become a bit all-consuming. I'll be writing here (sorry, I still have a hard time using the word "blog" without giggling) about Focus the Nation and sharing some stories from groups around the country. But I will probably inevitably also write some more personal stories--what keeps me going and what frustrates me--as these have become inseparable from this project.]

In case you haven’t heard about it, Focus the Nation is a national teach-in on global warming solutions scheduled for next January 31st. But it’s a lot more than a teach-in. In one day, over 1000 schools will simultaneously hold events involving thousands of faculty and with the potential to reach millions of students.

Teams at over 500 colleges, universities and high schools all around the country have already started inviting speakers, booking large rooms, and securing endorsements from deans, presidents, and student and faculty governments. This is going to be by far the biggest global warming teach-in. But with your help, and the thousands of people already working around the country, it can be the biggest teach-in of any kind. Ever.

Continue reading ‘It’s Time to Focus the Nation’