Powershift

(Youth educating youth at Powershift...)

This weekend I attended a unique educational opportunity. The conference Powershift.

The conference brought 12,000 youth climate activists from all over the country to build the movement to end the climate crisis and lobby congress for change. There were panels, presentations, workshops, films, a career fair, grad school fair, lobbying training, and lobby day on Monday.

For my part, I opted to train participants in the ins and outs of Lobbying. The training was put together by Wellstone Action. These types of training programs, outside the standard curriculum of colleges and high schools are so powerful, that they tempt me to seek a career doing workshops and trainings rather than a career within the imprisoning halls of a high school. We shall see.

Some provocative questions stay with me whenever I go to conferences like this. What happens when you bring together are large amount of people around a specific issue, who may have very different ideas of what change needs to be made or how to make it. Thinking specifically about Powershift, what happens when the participants (and remember the whole idea of the conference is about empowerment) shift the power away from the organizers and come up with their own agendas? For example, a brilliant young woman fiercely questioned the environmental advocates who led our legislative briefing questions, saying the platform we were asking for was not bold enough to stop the most catastrophic effects of climate change. What happens when conference participants on their own organize direct action tactics that were not sanctioned or organized by the conference?

Furthermore, one of the major goals of powershift was social justice, equality, and dismantling of opression within the movement. To that end, there was strong representations of oppressed commnities at the conference, African-American youth from ecocnomically depressed areas, Native American reservation youth, to name two examples. But what was to stop the dynamic of having a mostly white participant body from continuing oppression. The occasional workshop on race or class privelege or dismantling oppression would most likely only be attended by people who are already allies. Even more, on the lobby day, where it would certainly be possible to have groups of 60 people meeting with 1 congressperson for 10 minutes, and factual knowledge and appropriate political discourse is prized, who is given voice, who takes voice, and what does this mean?

To learn morea bout the organizations involved with powershift check out:
Green For All-- pushing for "green the ghetto"...aka Van Jones
Energy Action Coalition--Youth led coalition of climate activist organizations
Sierra Student Coalition-Student run arm of the Sierra Club
National Wildlife Federation--one of the oldest conservaqtion orgs in the US