Since my last update, I have been working hard to get the New England Regional Outreach Team up and running. So far, it has been very successful. Some of the highlights from the last few weeks include: having individual calls with each of the chapters, having group calls with all of the chapters, working on communication strategies, working on creating a New England specific outreach guide, and working on creating a national Student Ambassador Program guide with one of my directors. It has been super important to stay in contact with all of the New England chapters when starting up this team so that every chapter can be on the same page, while allowing me to give the individual support that each chapter needs. After having calls with each of the chapters (Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New York), I created individual goals for these chapters based on the conversations that we had during our calls. You can view the document with all of the information that I gathered and the goals for each chapter by clicking here. After having initial calls, I got most of the chapters onto a call to debrief the individual calls and to explain the overlap that I was seeing between chapters' needs and successes. The notes from this call can be viewed here. This helped me to better define what the overall goals of the region are going to be. Each of the regions of the US are geographically, culturally, politically, racially, and socio-economically diverse and therefore, outreach strategies that work well in Texas, will not necessarily work well in Massachusetts. For this reason, I decided to take the national outreach guide and create a New England specific outreach guide based off of the national guide. I hope that this will give each of my chapters more direction when strategizing outreach for their events. This guide is still being worked on and will continue to be updated, but the current version can be found here. I have also been working on a communication guide for the New England chapters because many of the teams were having communication issues, whether that be with team members or be when trying to reach out to new students or schools. I complied a document that outlined strategies for common communication issues that is viewable here. The final project that I have been working on alongside the other projects is creating a more defined student ambassador program guide. USYCS had a previous student ambassador guide that had been made relatively quickly because we were in a bit of a time crunch, however, this new student ambassador guide is more clear and helpful to the many diversities that exist in our chapters and the differences between geographic regions of the United States. This document is currently not viewable by anyone outside of the organization and therefore can not be published in this blog post. In the next few weeks, I will be focusing on helping the New England chapters to start up student ambassador programs, focus on strategizing outreach beyond student ambassador programs, and on looking through applications and interviewing applicants for chapters which will hopefully be created in Vermont and Rhode Island. If chapters are started in either or both of those states, I will likely have to spend a lot of time onboarding and working with them to help develop their chapter. There is a lot that needs to get done before the Earth Day Strikes and it will be a very busy seven weeks, but I am looking forward to it.
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Over the past few weeks I have been working hard to get the New England Regional Outreach Team up and running. At first I had to find out who many of my chapters' outreach directors were, and after some initial confusion, I figured out who the directors were from MA, NH, ME, and NY. I still have to find the directors from CT and RI, but I have been in some. contact with their chapter leads who oversee the entire chapter. In the meantime, I have successfully been in contact with the chapter directors from MA, NH, ME, and NY. I have scheduled calls with MA and NH and I have also completed a call with ME. I am awaiting response from some of the people from the NY chapter before finalizing a call time with them. This past Sunday I completed my first call with ME and it was very successful. The call consisted of what was essentially a question and answer session so that I could get a good sense of the resources of the chapter and the limitations that the chapter faces. After the call I debriefed all of the information that I had learned and organized my notes by emerging themes and categories. By doing so, I was able to establish trends from which I created actionable goals for the chapter. as well as outlined some smaller suggestions and ideas to help with some issues that the chapter has been facing. This document can be found here. I have two calls this weekend; one with NH on Friday, and one with MA on Sunday. I plan to use the same process for both of these chapters since it seemed to work very well. In the meantime, I will continue to develop relationships among the chapters that I am working with. I hope to schedule a call with the entire regional team once I have had individual calls with each of the chapters. I hope that the New England chapters will be able to work together, each sharing ideas and expertise with one another so that momentum can build for the movement across the entire New England region. This will be especially helpful as we look to expand into new states and new areas within states.
Within the last week, there have been several internal conversations about the structure of our organization. There have been several concerns voiced about the power of the national teams, and in order to solve some of these conflicts, there were several ideas made. Although not completely finalized, it is likely that the national teams will stay as is and will onboard all of the chapter directors that correspond with that team. For example: all of the chapter outreach and partnership directors will join my team. This will open up a direct line of communication between the chapters and national. Also within the last week, before I even knew about these proposals, I had communicated an idea to my team directors explaining a possible restructure to my team. The idea was that each national team member would be placed in charge of a region that would include all of the outreach directors from that region. This would help each team member to have better defined work as well as being able to really understand the situation -- the strengths and weaknesses -- of each chapter's outreach and partnership work. Overall, the goal was to help our team work more directly with chapters and to enable our work to be both more efficient and productive. You can view my plan by clicking the link here.
I shared this plan with my team in a message that said the following: "Hi everyone! Last week I had proposed a potential new structure for how our team operates to Karen and Isra and they have asked me to share it with you all. Essentially the goal of the proposal is to improve how we function with individual chapters. The basic idea is to split the current chapters into 'regions' (basically just smaller groups of a few chapters’ outreach/partnership directors) and assign each of the national outreach team members to work with one of these groups. This system would allow each team member to become an 'expert' on the situations of each individual chapter in order to be able to identify and focus on the needs of each individual chapter. I think that it has been challenging to work with individual chapters because each chapter’s situation is so different and if we don’t fully understand what type of support each chapter needs, it will be difficult to find ways to help them. Splitting the work up like this could help make all of the work more manageable. This system would also help increase direct communication between our team and chapters, which is something that many of the local organizers are looking to see happen with all of the national teams. This would also help to reduce overlap, because it is not super helpful to have multiple team members working with one chapter and then having no one working with another chapter simply because we had focused on one chapter in particular. Also, just because you would be working with a group of chapters does not mean that we can not help each other out if something needs to get done. Let us know your thoughts, as obviously this is not a final plan and everyone should be able to have input". The team was very receptive of the idea and seemed to think that the plan would both help our team and help the chapters feel like they had more support from national. The group made a map to divide the chapters up regionally, and for whatever reason it worked out perfectly because all of our team members happen to be from completely different regions of the country and we were able to give everyone a group of chapters from their geographical region. This will be super helpful because the culture is so different across the country and because we each got the region where we live, we will better be able to identify with the needs of the chapters and the work being done. You can view our draft of the map below. I also had started a working doc for the team to brainstorm ideas of how this program could work and some of the next steps that our team can take. This document is viewable here. After our team had a call to discuss the proposal and semi-finalize the regions, I decided to start compiling a list of my region's directors. This was hard work, and I will have to continue to find some of the directors for multiple reasons: some chapters do not have outreach or partnership directors yet, especially the smaller ones; some of the chapters do have outreach or partnership directors, but they are not on the national Slack, which is a tool we use for communication; and some of the chapter's outreach or partnership directors do not have their role in their profile and I therefore do not know that they have that role. I will have to continue to dig around and will likely have to contact state directors in order to identify and contact all of the directors that I should be in contact with. The list that I have compiled so far can be viewed here. Since my last update, USYCS has gone through several internal changes which has prompted changes in my work. In the past week I had been working hard with the Iowa outreach director in order to help increase outreach for the Iowa primary strikes happening on January 31st. My work had largely revolved around finding partners to attend the events. The Iowa team had decided to focus partnerships on workers' unions with the hope that common goals could increase turnout to their event. In order to find partners, I extensively researched unions in Iowa. I worked through the AFL-CIO's website, a group that organizes unions across the country by industry. From that page I was able to access unions across a variety of industries. By searching through the industry-wide unions I was able to find regional and in some cases state based chapters of the unions. I compiled a list with these chapters' contact information to make it easy for the Iowa outreach director to access and correspond with. I also worked to draft an email that could be sent directly to the union organizers. I grouped my email list into two groups: the unions that I had found state contacts for and the unions that I had only found regional or national contacts for. By separating the list into two groups I was able to cater my email drafts to be Iowa-specific or to be more national based, often asking for a contact to reach a state or regional organizer at. Unfortunately, last night the Iowa team decided to cancel their January 31st strikes due to internal changes which caused a lack of preparation. In the coming weeks, my team will likely be reflecting and looking towards the future. At this time, we hope to continue to begin preparing for future primary strikes in other states such as New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, and the Super Tuesday states. I will continue to use my research in order to get connected with partners for each of these stats specifically. For now, my work will focus on the upcoming states such as New Hampshire, Nevada, and eventually South Carolina.
Over the past few weeks, USYCS has rolled out our plans for Primary Strikes. You can see our launch video at the bottom. of this post. The announcement of our Primary Strikes means that the National Core Team, which I am a part of has been super busy working to prepare for our first strikes which will happen in a few short weeks. My team, the National Outreach and Partnerships Team has been focusing on researching and contacting more partner organizations and unions. Previously, we had been focused on finding general, national. organizations and unions, but with Iowa's strike happening in two weeks, we are focusing on finding Iowa specific partners. We have a huge spreadsheet that specifies and sorts out all of our potential partners. I have also been working a document that was recently sent to all of the state and colony chapter leads and outreach directors. This document gave a list of a whole bunch of ideas on how to increase community involvement in order to reach the most amount of people possible. Several Outreach Leads had reached out to my national team asking for more ideas on how to best go about outreach. Some of the ideas that I came up with include: community based education, spreading the word by word of mouth, engaging in community events, and reaching out to students at various schools and universities in order to reach the most amount of youth as possible. In the meantime, my team will continue to research partners and to connect with them in order to help power our strikes. In the last few weeks my work with USYCS has really sprouted. I have been in contact with both my team and the national organization. The whole organization is in a transition period and just last night we had a call with the whole organization in order to discuss the many changes that are occurring and to hear updates from each national team. I have also been working with my team to research and create a list of potential partners. This brainstormed list will allow us some direction for when we begin contacting and creating partnerships. I have also recently begun working on a partnership guide that will give both the organization and our partners some guidelines to follow for our partnerships. We will continue working on this for the next week and in the new year will begin using it to set up partnerships. Although this work is just beginning, I can see that my work is already making an impact. Excited for what is to come!
On Monday November 25th, I woke up to some very exciting news: my application to join the national outreach team of the US Youth Climate Strike (USYCS) had been accepted. I could not have been more excited and I had butterflies in my stomach all day long. I have always been interested in science, specifically chemistry, and in the past several years I have become really interested in social justice and policy making. These two passions had never really seemed very connected to each other until I went to a three week green chemistry research program where I learned all about the immediate connections between chemistry, climate change, and policy making. I knew that I wanted to pursue the intersection of these passions further, but I did not know where to begin until I found out that a group in Upton was looking for student representatives to help with their project to ban single-use plastic bags and food-grade styrofoam in Upton. I immediately jumped into the project, and when both bills passed at the town meeting on November 5th that I presented at, I knew that my work was only just beginning. A few days later I saw that USYCS National was opening applications for new members and I decided to apply, not expecting to get the position. However, I was beyond excited when I received the news that I. had been accepted to a position on the National Outreach Team, which is in charge of setting up partnerships and helping state and local chapters to get connected with partners and create strong and lasting relationships. I can not wait to continue on this new path as a part of Legacy.
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Overview of My InquiryFor my US Youth Climate Strike (USYCS) Inquiry I hope to learn what it means to work at the national level in order to organize and create change in our country. I will work with the National Outreach Team in order to develop partnerships around the country for the chapters of USYCS to be able to gain support from. I will work with my team in order to find partners and develop lasting relationships with them. Climate justice will not happen if we do not work with other organizations. The partnerships will help each state’s chapter to further develop themselves and create more of an impact on the state’s government leaders.
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