Climate Changemakers
Climate Changemakers is a growing community of volunteer climate advocates. We push for more immediate, bold, and just climate leadership from our government to meet the scale and urgency of the challenge. We’re nonpartisan, but we’re not afraid to get political. Our two-pronged approach involves advocating to elect climate candidates and pass climate policies. And our big wins are piling up!
The volunteer-powered and community-centered Climate Changemakers ethos stems from our origin in the My Climate Journey (MCJ) Slack, where ambition, innovation, and collaboration are north stars. In the summer of 2020, a handful of MCJers coalesced to think strategically about how to bring more climate-concerned people into the work of electing a pro-climate-action U.S. Senate. After all, political climate action is one of the biggest levers to accelerate climate solutions, but relatively few people are civically engaged.
According to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, 29% of Americans “probably” or “definitely” would participate in political action on climate…and only 1% are currently participating. That leaves 28% of Americans who either lack a place to plug in, arewaiting to be asked, or wonder if the effort is worthwhile.
Effective advocacy takes longer than a few clicks, and at Climate Changemakers we’re removing the friction to meaningful political action on climate. We host weekly “Hours of Action”, drop-in Zoom events where changemakers join together for productive, facilitated coworking sessions. Our electoral actions run the gamut from phone banking to letter writing to fundraising. Our unique policy advocacy playbooks blend best practices and innovation; we’re contacting our members of Congress, publishing opinion pieces, setting up constituent meetings, key stakeholder outreach, and more.
In our Slack community, changemakers get organized, swap resources and ideas, share opportunities, celebrate wins, and find inspiration to go bigger. Some volunteers go above and beyond, putting their expertise to work behind the scenes: building community infrastructure, facilitating Hours of Action, spreading the word, and tracking our collective impact. This is the transformative power of volunteerism and collective action at its best, driving systemic policy change.
Volunteers, voters, potential voters, friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, candidates, and policymakers—we’re meeting them all right where they are, and asking them to make climate action a greater priority, to lean in more, to be a climate changemaker.
