<aside> 💡 This page contains a CCN’s organization strategy for the next 5 years, approved by CCN members by vote in spring 2024. It is the product of a February 2024 coalition wide survey and multiple long-form strategy discussions during the Spring of 2024 attended by CCN staff, Planning Committee, and Finance & Operations Committee members. It also includes a breakdown of the coalition-wide voting process for officially approving CCN’s organizational strategy.
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Our assessment of the state of the climate justice movement at large, the state of the student climate movement, and the specific challenges being addressed by CCN.
The student climate movement has experienced a notable shift since 2019, with a surge of momentum, especially as students have returned to forming in-person communities on campus. Building on the momentum generated by the fossil fuel divestment movement, today’s student climate movement is pushing new campaigns such as dissociation from the fossil fuel industry and Green New Deals for Campuses (GND4C), has taken important strides toward centering principles of environmental justice, and is receiving national media attention. There's a real excitement among student organizers who are well-positioned to drive change within universities.
Campus Climate Network (CCN) is representative of part of the student climate movement. We hold relationships with dozens of student climate groups, making CCN well-suited for building the power of the student climate movement, particularly in the US. At CCN, we are well-positioned to support members of our coalition to run Fossil Free Research (FFR), Fossil Fuel Divestment, and GND4C Campaigns. Fossil Free Research campaigns are especially strong and well-supported in our coalition.
The student climate movement grapples with weaknesses such as the elitism inherent in higher education, a reliance on a privileged base, and a historical lack of engagement with locally impacted communities. Structural issues like high turnover and burnout, coupled with a scarcity of developed leaders, hinder its effectiveness. A movement culture that is inherently skeptical of leadership can create a lack of accountability and undermine trust within hierarchical and nonhierarchical organizing structures.
To this point, CCN has lacked a long-term vision for building student power and has been more reactive to immediate movement ebbs and flows than proactive in creating and leading a strategic movement. Our coalition lacks expertise in campaigns targeting banks, decarbonization, and fossil free careers.
As an important part of the student climate movement, CCN faces threats of fragmentation, burnout, and repression of student organizing, underscoring the need for concerted efforts to foster unity, strategic focus, and increasing trust among our base. If CCN does not garner trust, and establish a movement-oriented culture from the bottom to the top, our organization faces a serious threat of losing buy-in from student groups across the country. An ambitious scope of work – including accommodating various types of campaigns and building student power on an international scale – could result in us taking on too much and not being able to obtain power and solve the problems we’ve identified to the fullest extent. Students in our coalition are bombarded with academic and professional tasks and digital media distractions, preventing us from organizing and base-building to gain the power we need to win.
By prioritizing training and fostering shared language, CCN can cultivate new leaders and establish a robust organizational framework. There’s an opportunity now to better align our movement with environmental justice principles – collaborating with and centering impacted communities in our narrative and campaigns and growing students’ understanding and practice of intersectionality. Also, organizers can take advantage of the structure-rich nature of universities to incorporate structure-based organizing traditions from union organizing. Due to our coalition’s makeup, we have an incredible opportunity to organize larger, national student climate protests and campaigns that put organized pressure on our institutions and centralize power towards a common goal.
The long-term future we’re working towards.
We are organizing and empowering a student movement to win a world where universities, free from the influence of the fossil fuel industry, are true climate leaders that invest in environmental justice.
When we win, universities will be forced to become more just and democratic institutions with better conditions for students, faculty and staff, build meaningful relationships with locally impacted communities, and harness their power to transform local and federal economies with real, people-focused climate solutions.
What we’re building in order to reach our North Star
👥CCN will cultivate a focused culture of trust. Our movement is a collective of people, and the stronger the bonds between those people are, the stronger our movement overall can be. By prioritizing and strategically enabling interpersonal connections, we can increase trust, solidarity, and buy-in, making our work more durable, less vulnerable to fragmentation, and more grounded in joy. We will also encourage and develop a culture where people feel empowered to say no to things and instill values of environmental justice across CCN spaces. Members in our organization will feel empowered to build relationships with one another through 1:1s . We build trust by practicing active listening, providing feedback, leaning into tensions, and assuming good faith. These acts will get us closer to creating a tight social fabric within our movement, leaving us less vulnerable to internal conflict, burnout, and elitism. Plus, it will make us well-positioned for increasingly larger and more ambitious coordinated actions and campaigns.
🎯Our organization will build collective and strategic discipline around shared goals. We will use the trust we’ve cultivated to build our power and discipline. ****CCN will hold empowering and exciting meetings that folks feel committed to because the meetings are genuine, important and efficient. Our sharp strategic analysis will focus on nonviolent direct actions and campaigns that have garnered collective buy-in from members. Our work as a collective will be centered on a shared vision that builds towards a North Star vision for a future we want to live in. We will show the country/world that we are a united student climate movement that is greater than the sum of its parts. Members of CCN will feel like part of a movement that reaches far beyond their campus grounds. Student organizers will not feel isolated in their campus-based campaign and instead will feel the united solidarity of a much bigger movement.
💪We are building our base across breadth and depth. We are a coalition of student-led climate justice groups that organize in solidarity with university staff, faculty, community members, and aligned social movements on and off campus. We are building across breadth by bringing new campus groups into CCN, with an emphasis on public universities, HBCUs, and other minority-serving institutions. We will emphasize growing our presence in the southeastern and southwestern United States. While we are not actively trying to organize groups outside the US, we will provide support and resources to international groups that approach us. We are establishing clear lines of communication within the international movement, and amplify the efforts of student climate organizers around the world. We are building across depth by reaching the entire membership of all CCN groups – not just 1-2 group leaders. We are developing new leaders. This includes growing the number of CCN committee members from currently underrepresented communities. In building this base, we are building an organized bloc of student power to win university-level demands at scale that is prepared to throw down for the climate justice movement in a moment of whirlwind.