USA efforts are taking off- and I am nervous

Guy S

website team CRAGger Islington

Dear Shannon and Marcia – I’m overjoyed that MCAN are launching this project. Whilst it’s always nice to see your ‘own’ idea spread and spread, the absolutely overriding priority is cutting carbon emissions – and whoever does that, under whatever banner, is doing sterling work in my eyes.

I hope that the CRAGs can offer support, advice and help to MCAN’s work – and we hope to learn from you too. From what you tell us, it sounds like the MCAN scheme is rather like the work done by international charity Global Action Plan. They, too, run a programme of working with neighbourhoods over several months to reduce households’ carbon emissions and rubbish. (So you see, no group has any real monopoly on this line of work!.) Where CRAGs might be able to offer support, as you point out Shannon, is through continuing the process beyond the initial few months. I would really, really stress that personal behaviour change takes a long time to achieve and requires habit formation over a long period. 4 sessions may or may not be long enough – I would be very interested in the results and hope MCAN will be recording them. Similar results for CRAGs, of course, are also on their way, as different groups complete their carbon years.

It would be truly amazing to get a dialogue up and running on this forum (or any other) between Brit CRAGs and US equivalents. I for one am very happy to help pass on information (e.g. re. other similar schemes that I come across in other countries – of which there are some; watch this space) and see how far this whole approach can spread internationally.

I am frequently delighted to find more and more people pulling in the same direction on this… Thank you, thank you!

Without jumping the gun I think that there is a way this could work really well. First of all, Massachusetts seems to have a good model for recruitment, delivery of the goals of the program, and some sort of personal pledge. The CRAGs follow up on commitments with measurements of direct energy usage from actual bills which are audited at the end of each carbon year. Perhaps MCAN has some followup also- I assume they must. But the CRAG mechanism is built around the idea of auditable records.

Congruencies: The mechanism is in place here to direct people to the MCAN efforts. The mechanism is also in place to report successes from the viral groups. Anyone who becomes a member of a CRAG state group can post to its forums; each state forum could support multiple viral CRAG groups. I don’t know if this would work in the case of MCAN because they may have their own thing going but it is something to consider for the US CRAGs. I think that the CRAGs and other efforts could complement each other because there are a number of Climate Action Networks (like the Chesapeake Climate Action Network in our region) that could operate in a similar fashion with an adjunct CRAG. We could adopt/modify the training materials used by MCAN if they are amenable because frankly mine were thrown together in a month and are rather amateurish. What would be needed for this to happen with Massachusetts is that one of their volunteers would need to administer a CRAG for Mass. I don’t know if they want to do this but it is worth thinking about.

The workbook that all MCAN small group participants will use is named Low Carbon Diet, published by the Empowerment Institute. Their web site is www.empowermentinstitute.net. There is a lot of information on the site. Their program has been sponsored by several municipalities or county governments over several years, and its success analyzed in articles available on the site. Cool Cities is promoting it now, also on the site. There is a free online teaining offered on July 26 from 7-9 PM, advertised both directly by the institute and by the Cool Cities parts of the site.

Looks to me like the time is so right for organized individual action that all over the place there are movements to empower it, although some of the major global warming organizations are still focusing organized individual action on lobbying government to change the laws in various helpful and necessary ways.

A single copy of Low Carbon Diet is $12.95. There are levels of discount for bulk orders. There’s also an offer of rebate for orders coming through a link from a registered organization’s web site, for fundraising. I read that funding is important. Portland, OR had raised $50,000 to run its large program, the example cited. They explain what funds are needed for. (MCAN knows this need and is assembling funding – that’s what I’m volunteering to help with.)

There are downloadable PDFs on the Environmental Institute’s web site for training small group leaders, plus the online training session I just mentioned, led by the author of the workbook and CEO of the Institute, David Greshon. You should find just about all the information you need on the site to get started. I liked the philosophy explained in one of the articles I read, about recruiting “early adopters” and buiding toward a “tipping point” where everyone gets on board. The neigborhood approach to recruiting small groups also looks very good, given how people actually get involved in things and why, which I saw documented in another article, reporting an evaluation, on the site.

Feel free to post this email on the CRAG website.

Guy S

website team CRAGger Islington

This is fascinating – and shows that, to the ignorance of us Brits, people in the US have been thinking about personal emissions reductions for quite a while. If you take a look through some of the files on the Empowerment Institute website, you see that Portland’s first neighbourhood-level ‘low carbon diet’ initiative was back in 2001. (See
http://www.empowermentinstitute.net/files/LowCarbDiet_article.pdf).

So whilst it’s obviously taken a while to spread as an idea, thinking on either sides of the Atlantic have not really been so different! I think this underlines the need for more international cooperation and dialogue.

david

website team CRAGger Sevenoaks

I like the idea of setting up “early adopters” in communities who then outreach into their wider communities. CRAGs are well suited to the former role, because they work best as (relatively) small groups, but CRAGs will have to adopt alternative methods of their own (eg public workshops or meetings) or pre-setup programmes if they are to outreach successfully – rationing oneself is still seen as rather extreme by the majority. In our local area, we are playing with the idea of a partnership with “Low Carbon Communities” for outreach.

It’s interesting the emphasis you put on funding. We’ve had a bit of a debate here, and the general consensus so far has been that it’s not so important. It does make the process rather ‘DIY’ (as you put it) and is a hurdle for new groups, but the process must give members better ownership of their groups and be an empowering experience in itself. On the other hand, funding training of small group facilitators could help along this process: we have a group here called COIN (www.coinet.org.uk) that does a similar thing – which actually helped to start off one of the first CRAGs (Oxford).

Are there cultural differences here? I mean, is the level of local activism higher or lower in the US than in the UK, and how does it differ between states? In places where there has traditionally been less local activism, lack of training may be a much greater hurdle, and funding for it consequently much more important.

I think an existing nonprofit with staff and overhead would need money regardless of the effort in order to keep up the infrastructure of the organization, where an upstart group like ourselves with no full-time staff could get away without it- until we reach a crisis where the site admins can’t afford the amount of time it takes to adminster the effort part-time. I suppose that is when you start to think about money. I noticed also that MCAN is affiliated with groups like PIRG, which tend to focus heavily on fundraising efforts in relation to program activity- though I could not say if they use a similar model.

There are definitely things to learn from the MCAN proposal (based on the work of the Empowerment Institute) and I am desperate to find a few quiet hours to ruminate the Empowerment Institute site. I came across COIN some weeks ago and was very interested. There is something to learn from all successful efforts.

The beauty of the CRAGs as I see it is that they are complementary to a lot of other efforts. They are at their root a networking and tracking device that could be a component of many strategies. The employees of a place could form a CRAG. A sports team, church, civic group, neighbors, non-profit, etc. could all do it. I love the DIY element as well as the free-form nature.

We have a large activist element in the US. I am not sure how I would compare it with the UK, not having any experience with it. For example in my town we have several activists with signs on their properties protesting the war in Iraq. There are marches with hundreds of thousands of people on the Capital on a routine basis. There are small groups like the “Women in Black” who hold peaceful protests in local parks against the war effort. I think perhaps something I can say about activism in the US is that it focuses on protesting the ills of some other group of people and that it is less focused on changing from within.