SSC Update ~ August 30, 2006

Table of Contents
Direct From DC - Jared's Update
Bring the Energy Film Festival to Your Campus
Stop Mountain Top Removal - Support the Clean Water Protection Act
Victory Lane: MCSEA's 20% Clean Power Purchase
Trainings, Funding, Speaker Tours and More!
Featured Resources: The Challenge Power Directory and Calendar

Direct from DC - Jared's Update
Dear SSC Nation,

This summer was an epic success- six amazing weeklong summer training programs (SPROGS) including our first environmental justice training in Los Angeles which we organized with Building Bridges to the Outdoors, our first Spanish-speaking training which we held in Puerto Rico, and our biggest SPROG ever - Pennsylvania '06! In addition, our national leadership gathering in New Hampshire attracted nearly 50 SSC'ers and just as many of our friends from the Energy Action Coalition. Talk about being primed and ready to organize!

What does all of this add up to? A national community of student leaders ready to do some historic organizing this fall who have an unprecedented array of resources at their fingertips to help them do so. All three of our new Campus Climate Challenge organizers have been hired and have hit the ground running. Eliza Simon is your National Campaign Organizer for the Challenge, based here in the DC headquarters. Kim Teplitzky will cover PA, OH, and MI for us from Pennsylvania and Maura Cowley will cover the Northeast for us from Boston, MA.

Together, we have some exciting upcoming opportunities to organize around, including the September 6th announcement on MTV's Total Request Live of MTV's Break the Addiction campaign partnership with the Challenge. In partnership with Sierra Club Productions and Participant Films, SSC staff will also be working with you to set up video showings on your campuses this fall. We've got An Inconvenient Truth, Who Killed the Electric Car and many more great films ready for you to show. These films are great opportunities to recruit new students and invite your campus decision-makers to discuss how your school can become a model of sustainability that does its part in meeting the challenge of our generation.

Add to all this excitement an exciting merger and we've got quite a recipe for success this fall. That's right, the SSC and the Climate Campaign have decided once and for all to join together under one organizational banner. Over the past three years, the Climate Campaign has had an incredible history, consistently pushing the envelope within the youth clean energy movement. In February 2003, they united the efforts of 10 organizations in the Northeast (including the SSC!) to create the first regional student network in the country focused on climate change. In June 2004, their regional structure served as a model for the creation of the Energy Action Coalition. In December 2005, the Climate Campaign registered over 150 youth delegates to attend the United Nations climate change negotiations in Montreal. And now, in August 2006, the story has come full circle as they have joined with the SSC to organize the Northeast around the Campus Climate Challenge.

Together this fall we have the potential to write one of the most important chapters in the unfolding youth climate movement. You can take the first step today by reading below and then contacting us to start a Challenge campaign, plan a video showing, or get an SSC training or presentation to come to your campus. Let's make this the year that we brought our movement to the fore of American society. We've never had a better chance than now - please don't let it slip away.

Thanks for all you will do this year,
Jared

Host an Energy Film Festival on Your Campus
Program your own film festival on campus featuring videos from serious documentaries to animated shorts -- all with an environmentally positive message about energy and global warming.
Sierra Club Productions in partnership with the Sierra Student Coalition will lend you the DVDs, send you tools you need to program the festival and encourage participants to take action! Hosting an Energy Film Festival on campus is a unique way to make a difference in your community. By using the power of film to educate your audiences you and your fellow students can influence everything from local energy consumption to campus policy. If you start planning now, you can organize the film fest to be a kick-off event for your fall semester campaign. If you're really ambitious, you can try to reserve the largest auditorium at school and pack it for a mid-semester event.

The festival is meant to be programmed locally with films that most interest you and your peers on campus. You can choose from films such as An Inconvenientt Truth, Kilowatt Ours, Who Killed the Electric Car, documentaries and shorts (comedy and animation) and maybe even the great energy policy speech scene from Naked Gun 2 1/2.

For more information on screening An Inconvenientt Truth, contact Yochi by calling 1-888-JOIN-SSC or reply to this email.

Support the Clean Water Protection Act
Since 1977, The Clean Water Act has barred industries from dumping waste into waterways. In 2002, the Bush Administration made a rule change which redefined “waste” in order to exclude debris from mountaintop removal (MTR). Since then, coal companies are dumping millions of tons of mine waste into nearby streams. The Clean Water Protection Act (CWPA) reestablishes the original intent of the Clean Water Act: to protect our waterways, not give industry permission to pollute and bury them.

Rise up with concerned citizens across the country to support the Clean Water Protection Act and end mountaintop removal coal mining. The ability to lobby your representative is one of the most powerful rights we have as Americans. Exercise it for the mountains!

• Write your congressperson in support of the CWPA! Lean more and send a letter.
• Join Appalachian Voices at MTR Lobby Week on September 9-13 in Washington, DC. Sign up to lobby your elected representatives on the CWPA end mountain top removal!
• Help the SSC organize a weekend to educate students about Mountain Top Removal site this school year. Write to kim [at] ssc.org and let us know you are interested in joining the planning committee.

Victory Lane: MCSEA Pushes County Council to Purchase Green Power
On July 11, 2006 the Montgomery County, Maryland County Council unanimously voted to purchase 20 percent renewable energy for all county municipal buildings by the year 2011. In October of 2005, the Montgomery County Student Environmental Activists (MCSEA) held their first meeting of the year to discuss how they could make a difference in the fight against global warming, an issue they all viewed as the biggest threat to their future. The SSC group decided to launch a campaign to change how their county was powered.

Using the Sierra Club campaign-planning matrix, MCSEA set out to mobilize the large student base they knew cared about global warming, but didn’t have an outlet for their frustration. They presented a slide show to educate and empower students at seven local high school and community colleges in the county. Through their campaign, MCSEA collected more than 3,160 petition signatures, 90 photo petition pictures and met with Council President George Leventhal, who agreed to sponsor the resolution in February.

On April 29, MCSEA held a solar-powered rally on the steps of the county council building in support of their campaign, which included speeches by Council members, a live performance by a folk-hip-hop artist, and a street theater duel between a carbon producing smoke stack and a clean sustainable wind turbine.

Please join us in congratulating MCSEA, the SSC's August Group of the Month.

(Image provided by Erica Stout.)

Trainings, Funding, Speaker Tours and More
TRAININGS
Fall Student Environmental Training Academies
Whether you're already working on an energy campaign or are thinking about starting one on your campus or in your community, hosting an SSC Student Environmental Training Academy is an ideal way to strengthen your group, solidify your members, and give them the necessary skills to recruit and organize for a successful campaign. SETAs are weekend trainings that can help your group start a Campus Climate Challenge or Cool Cities campaign, or jazz up a campaign you're already working on. Each SETA includes foundational SSC trainings on campaign planning and organizational development. With knowledge and ideas in hand, you'll be ready to take on the administration, the city council, the state senate--basically, the entire world. All trainers, speakers, and relevant celebrities will be provided by the SSC and allied organizations.
If you are interested in hosting a SETA, please contact Nora Sharp, Trainings Committee co-chair, at nora.sharp [at] gmail.com to discuss logistics. A limited number are available this fall; contact the Trainings Committee soon for the best chance to host one.

Freedom from Oil Action Mini-Camps
Following the success of the Freedom from Oil Action Camp held this July in Paoli, Indiana - Global Exchange, the Rainforest Action Network and the Ruckus Society are hoping to set up mini-trainings at campuses and communities throughout the U.S. and Canada. Trainings will be tailored to suit your groups needs but could include sessions on: Climate Justice; Green Energy Campus Organizing; Strategic Campaigning; Media & Communications; Nonviolent Direct Action; Action Climbing Techniques; Community Organizing; Action Planning; Strategy; Sit Ins, Blockades & Support Roles; Banner Construction & Rigging; Political Theater; Legal.
If you want to bring trainers to your community or campus please contact Mike at mike [at] globalexchange.org

GRANTS and FUNDING
Campus Progress Action Grants
Check out these action grants from campus progress that range from $200-$1000 to support campus groups working toward progressive activism!

Red White and Green Climate Change Grant Program
*Deadline: September 1, 2006*
The Climate Change Grant is open to all young people in the United States between the ages of 15 and 25 as well as organizations that serve youth between the ages of 15 and 25. Applicants will be expected to develop and implement a service project about climate change that engages their community and candidates running for election in November 2006. The program welcomes projects where children and youth work in partnership with adults (parents, coaches, teachers, youth leaders, etc.), but projects should be youth-led. The service project must take place between October 1 and November 30, 2006. Youth Service America and the Civil Society Institute will award 25 grants of $500.

SPEAKERS and TOURS
A national tour of communities impacted by industrial pollution to call for safe solutions to unnecessary toxic contamination.
The grassroots focus of the tour is bridging environmental health and justice voices. EJ 4 All will set the stage for the collaboration between public health and justice to move beyond just saying no to projects to build strength and cohesion to our efforts for meaningful reform and community vitality. This tour is designed to highlight available solutions to our health and environmental problems. We want a new way of protecting ourselves from unnecessary dangerous chemicals; we want clean businesses that do not force us to choose between the health of our communities and economic development, and new political leaders who will fight for environmental justice for all!

Global Exchange Climate Speakers Tour
Voice from the Front Lines: Climate and Oil Affected Communities Speak Out. In September, Global Exchange is hoping to bring oil and climate change affected speakers from around the world for a very special gathering in New Orleans. After the gathering, speakers from Nigeria, Iraq, the Arctic, New Orleans, Ecuador and small island nations like Micronesia will bring their stories to campuses and community groups across the U.S. and Canada. If you would like to bring one of these speakers to your campus or community please contact Mike Hudema at mike [at] globalexchange.org

Featured Resources
The Campus Climate Challenge Power Directory includes resources for campus-based energy and climate change campaigns including examples of campus policies, victories, technical solutions and organizing guides. Rank the resources you use, and upload your own resources to share!

SSC Events Calendar
The on-line calendar is the spot to find events sponsored by the SSC. This fall's line-up includes State Clean Energy Summits Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and North Carolina as well an extensive listing of other student conferences sponsored by other organizations. If you would like to add an event, please contact yochi.zakai [at] sierraclub.org