Issues
“We are not only building a brighter future for our youth, but we should build that future with our youth.”-Jeremy Doochin
As a Director, Jeremy’s top 5 priorities will be to:
· Engage, train, and integrate young leaders into our campaigns, while working with existing student coalitions through the use of practical online communication tools like Facebook and Google.
· Build new coalitions with businesses, faith based groups, labor unions, students, and Americans from all walks of life to lead decisive political campaigns against climate change.
· Provide effective leadership training programs (with low entrance barriers) for our chapters and groups to recruit, engage, and develop new activists to win our conservation and political campaigns.
· Increase efficient communication between the National governance structures, our chapters, and groups through the establishment of an online Sierra Club activist network, while increasing the role that our local activists play in national decision making.
· Balance the budget, provide much needed C4 funding to our chapters, and invest in long term conservation programs to protect our wild lands and secure a clean energy future.
Youth
Youth involvement is essential to the success and future of the Sierra Club. Jeremy is a strong supporter of integrating young leaders into the Club, and his work with students and adults on numerous boards has prepared him with the knowledge and experience to effectively recruit new student leaders and volunteers for the Sierra Club. Students all across the country are mobilizing into powerful student environmental groups. To continue its heritage of environmental protection of the world’s resources, the Sierra Club must increasingly extend its arm to these student groups to work together on environmental campaigns. This youth focused initiative not only means offering more opportunities for youth to work with the Club, but developing new campaigns that reach out to youth, such as the Cool Cities and the Inner City Outings. By bringing together adults and students, we synergize an extensive knowledge of our political system, fundraising, and long-term planning with an unbridled enthusiasm and excitement that brings out citizens in the thousands to our Capitol.
The Sierra Club must reach out to work more closely with its Student Sierra Coalition on critical issues such as climate change, energy campaigns, and the protection of our wild lands. While it is essential that we keep student groups and the main Sierra Club autonomous, the two groups can win more environmental campaigns if they combine their perspectives on issues. We can achieve this by increasing the Chapter interaction with young leaders through the development of new programs that reach out, cultivate, and provide funding and resources for our young leaders. For example, we can create programs that train college students to speak to elementary, middle, and high schools about environmental issues, and then plug these students back into campaigns. And we can support programs that promote environmental issues and activism to young leaders right out of college. Increasing our interaction with young leaders is an essential component of the 2008 Take Back Our Future Campaign. Of course, one of the best ways to encourage students to be active within the Sierra Club is to have young leaders that can represent those students on Chapter Executive Committees and the Board of Directors.
Grassroots Leadership
The real heroes of the Sierra Club are all of the volunteer group and chapter activists who are setting the foundation every day to protect our environment. The Sierra Club is a strong and powerful organization because of our leaders and grassroots structure. In order to ensure that we have strong leadership, we should provide the best tools and training to our grassroots leaders by continuing to support programs like the Leadership Development Program; these programs should be made more affordable for our Chapters. We must ensure that we take the time to equip our local leaders with the best resources possible to win our environmental campaign. This means increasing the number of our leadership programs and the accessibility to our groups and chapters in order to permit leaders to more effectively recruit, train, and mentor new volunteers and leaders. We must guarantee that our focus is on developing our grassroots base, and continue national funding in support of chapter programs, training, and campaigns.
Communication
Effective communication between the national Sierra Club and our chapters and groups is essential to the operations of the Sierra Club as a whole. First, the Board of Directors priority is to represent the members of the Club. This means that the Sierra Club at the national level must increase contact between its grassroots members at the chapter level. As a Director, Jeremy would concentrate on ensuring that the chapters have a large input into Club policies and the management of the organization. As a director, to develop our organization, Jeremy would increase the flow of information from national to grassroots levels and recruit local leaders on the ground to help make more of the decisions. The Club must continue to work with local leaders to help develop the results of Project Renewal. By increasing communication, we will also strengthen unity and autonomy of the individual Chapters, while providing a supporting structure for those Chapters.
Reaching Out
To win our environmental campaigns, we must reach out to local businesses and corporations and extend our hand through the use of nontraditional techniques. In order to be most effective in our environmental policies, we must use all of our resources to our advantage. This means increasing our interactions in political and business realms with individuals with which we might not ordinarily work. Our environmental morals shall not be compromised and the Sierra Club should continue to stand firm on its principles. However, we must tailor more time and effort to reaching out to nontraditional allies of all parties. To create effective climate change legislation and energy policies, we must use all of our resources, and this means expanding our strategy to work with everyone that is willing to sit down at the table. (read more) Even though many of these groups may currently oppose us at the time, our dialogue with them and our recognition of their positions, even though we may oppose them, will ultimately provide the basis for environmental change in the future. Real environmental change comes from first changing awareness. Changing awareness is most effective when discussion takes place in a non threatening exchange of information. By sitting down at the table to work with businesses and politicians, we will be forging strong Club relationships that will be necessary to make future political strides in the way of the environment.
Diversity
Diversity is essential to our Club mission. In order to better represent America, we must look more like America. The Club should embrace a diversity not just of race or ethnicity, but the diversity of ideas and experiences. Each person is a valuable member to our environmental mission. Each person has a plethora of ideas and strategies, and with a greater variety of thought comes a greater number of ways to deal with our most critical issues. The Club can greatly benefit from the exchange of experience, beliefs, and strategy that comes with diversity. In order to fully support the Club’s Diversity Statement, it is essential that the Club take a pro-active stance; Jeremy has the experience and knowledge in working with diverse groups to effectively help make diversity a reality within the Club. Embracing diversity means approaching new groups and reaching out to the community. It also means offering diverse persons the opportunity to improve the environmental conditions in their neighborhoods. It means continuing to reach out to low income neighborhoods and showing them how together we can bring about justice by opposing the landfill proposed for their backyard, or standing up against the nuclear power company that wants to build outside of their neighborhood. The Sierra Club is about reaching out to diverse and concerned citizens and uniting them to realize a better future.