Current Projects
Sending students to Power Shift 07
All across the country, tens of thousands of young adults are rising to confront the global warming challenge. Over the past two years, more than 300 of our colleges and universities have demonstrated their leadership and determination to create a clean energy future by adopting innovative policies that reduce their carbon footprints. As the efforts of youth are achieving dozens of clean energy victories in cities and states across the nation, it is becoming clear that young people are better positioned today than ever before to advance an inspiring new vision for America.
On November 2, 2007, thousands of young adults will converge on Washington, D.C. for Power Shift 2007, the first-ever national youth summit to solve the climate crisis. Youth of all backgrounds will use their experience from local and state level climate change movements to create a fresh, positive, and inspiring vision of the future, one focused on our potential to overcome the challenges of the 21st century, build a clean energy economy, achieve energy independence, create millions of green jobs, increase global equity, and revitalize the American economy.
Power Shift will take the climate movement to new levels. At this conference, leaders of our generation will share ideas, learn new skills, make new connections, establish a national voice for our generation, and send a united message to our national leaders: we are moving beyond the same old special interests, empty promises, and inadequate results to embrace a new paradigm that leverages our strengths and achieves what is possible for our future. Something incredible is happening.
Contact Sammy Kanofsky (samantha.kanofsky@pomona.edu) or Allison Rossman (allison.rossman@pomona.edu for more info.
Focus the Nation
Focus the Nation is based in educational institutions, but also is engaging Americans in their churches, mosques, synagogues, businesses and civic organizations. The intent is to focus the growing concern in the country about global warming, and to create a serious, sustained and truly national discussion about clean energy solutions, linking students and citizens directly with our political leaders.
During the spring, summer, and fall of 2007, Focus the Nation teams will be creating campus dialogue, sponsoring talks and debates, integrating discussion of climate solutions into curricula, and drawing in faculty from across the curriculum. From Oregon to Ohio, and Alabama to New Hampshire, professors will focus on global warming solutions in their classes, and travel with their students to interdisciplinary discussion sessions and forums. Because Focus the Nation will engage thousands of organizers, and tens of thousands of educators, millions of students will have the opportunity to be involved.
Focus the Nation will culminate January 31, 2008, in the form of national symposia held simultaneously at over a thousand campuses, places of worship, businesses, and other venues across the country. On that day, each Focus the Nation team will invite local, state and federal political leaders and candidates for office to come to campus and participate in a non-partisan, round-table discussion of global warming solutions. US Senators and members of congress, state representatives, mayors and city councilors, all will be receiving dozens of invitations to speak about global warming, from over a thousand institutions nation-wide. Every campus will also vote on their top five national priorities for global warming action, producing a campus-endorsed policy agenda for the 2008 elections.
