 and thank you everyone for being here. One of the things I love about global trainings is that sense of being part of a globe. So if you, as Lee said, want to introduce yourself in the chat and maybe also say what time of day is it where on your part of the planet that's kind of a visceral way for us to experience ourselves as being part of a globe. I'm gonna today talk about some theory behind campaigning and my own experience of it as well as stories that I've learned from from around the world. And I would love for your participation. I recognize a lot of people are choosing cameras off for a variety of reasons, but I hope you'll use the chat or even come on and share your thoughts at different points because I think this really is a session where we can learn from each other. I'm gonna start with some stories and the first story I'll tell is my own experience of becoming an activist. I was in the Peace Corps in Botswana in Southern Africa in the 1980s right after college and that was a really transformative experience for me living in Botswana for two and a half years. Botswana is right next to South Africa which was in the midst of major, major political struggle. And so my teaching mentor was a South African refugee and through the 1980s, I got to know other South Africans and hear about their struggle and it was very politicizing. So I came back to the United States really wanted to be an activist and then had a lot of frustrating experiences to be honest. I would show up to like a big march or a big protest on an issue and then feel like nothing really changed. And for many years, it seemed like every protest I went to was about a different issue than the last thing. Every time the United States invaded another country, there would be a big protest but then it wouldn't really make a difference. So I started feeling kind of cynical and disempowered to be honest. And it was meeting a group that really used campaigning the idea of having a focused sustained effort of change specific change over time that really changed my understanding of how people can make a difference. And that was especially important as I started working on climate change because we need to be as effective as possible. We don't have that much time to make the changes we wanna make if we want to really avoid the worst scenarios. And so I'm really excited today to share some of those lessons about how to be more effective, how to use our time well. And I'm gonna start with telling some stories but before I do that, I just really wanna glance at the chat because it's so fun to see people coming in from Madrid. Where it's the afternoon, someone in Paris, Slovenia, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 8 p.m., Mumbai, India. That's terrific. Thank you all for introducing yourself and I hope they'll keep coming in. I'm gonna, let's see, share my screen just to give you some pictures of some of the stories that I'll be telling. And I mentioned living in Southern Africa and so I want to start with a South African story. When I was there in the 1980s, there were these massive, massive marches but as I started reading the history, I began to understand that it wasn't just the massive marches that resulted in a dramatic change in the political structure, it was really campaigning. So one of the formative campaigns was called the Defiance Campaign and for those who don't know, so South Africa was colonized by the British and the Dutch and there was a large European settler population so that once kind of the direct colonization was over, there was still this racial hierarchy where whites basically ruled everything, had most of the wealth. And in the 1940s, there was this moment where things might either liberalize or they might get worse and instead they got worse and a very fascist political party was elected by the white population in 1948 that started really doubling down on racist laws. And there had been a political movement, the African National Congress had already existed for decades by this point, but they were not campaigners. They were mostly African elites who would occasionally write letters to London complaining about the situation in South Africa asking for British leaders to do something but they weren't using the kind of strategies we're gonna talk about in this workshop. What started to change was in the 1940s, there was a new generation that brought a different energy and a belief that we have to take things into our own hands. And so one of those young leaders was Nelson Mandela who's in the middle of the picture on the right smoking a cigarette. He was part of the ANC Youth League and the youth as in the climate movement sometimes bring new energy and ambition. And so they had this idea of really directly resisting the racist laws that had been passed. So this campaign in 1952 was really groundbreaking for a couple of reasons. They decided on a strategy of having people non-violently break racist laws. They decided to do it as a coalition between blacks, Indians and whites and to openly defy laws. So the picture on the left is at one of their planning meetings and these three are up singing kind of the ANC theme song. Well, just that by itself was illegal under the segregation laws for blacks and white to be on stage together, let alone singing a subversive song. And so during this campaign in 1952 8,000 people were arrested in South Africa. They were not successful in changing those laws immediately but what was important about this campaign was that it galvanized people in a new way. The ANC's membership went from a few elite Africans to tens of thousands of people joining. It really became a mass movement. It showed people a way that they could fight back and make an impact. It showed them a way that they could work together. It showed them that there could be cross racial coalition and it really brought to the fore this younger generation of leaders. So I pointed out Mandela on the right. I'll also point out the white guy in the middle on the picture of the left is Albie Sacks. It was over 40 years before Nelson Mandela actually became president of South Africa where they really had a total transformation of the legal system. And Albie Sacks was one of the people who wrote the new constitution and ended up on the Supreme Court. So this might be sobering for climate activists because the arc of change was so long but I wanted to start with it as an example of a campaign that really made a difference without necessarily winning what they wanted in the short term. The second story I wanna start with is more recent and they did win what they wanted relatively quickly. It was the right to drive campaign in Saudi Arabia in 2011. Manal Al-Sharif was one of the most prominent leaders. Like the defiance campaign, this campaign was based on the idea that there's this big system with lots of things that are wrong and we're gonna highlight that in this case by just choosing one thing. So in this campaign, they just picked the issue of driving and said, the law says that women can't drive. We think that's ridiculous. So we're just gonna drive. And of course, many of these women have been educated in the West had experienced driving. And so Manal Al-Sharif drove and had a friend videotape it and put it on YouTube. So then it got on Twitter and Facebook. Of course, the Saudi government took the videos down but that actually helped get international attention. And then the New York times wrote a story about it. Al-Sharif was arrested and released a couple of times but the whole situation and especially as international awareness of it grew put the Saudi regime in a dilemma. Either, oh, and so of course then what happens is other women start driving too, right? So some of them were brave enough to videotape it and post it but many didn't wanna take that risk but they were willing to take the risk of driving. And so there's this feeling that the government is not in charge anymore. So they have a choice. They can either start arresting lots of women and get worse international press or they can ignore the situation and more and more women will drive and they will look stupid for not enforcing their own laws or they can change the law and pretend that they're like more liberal than they actually are. And so that was the choice they made. So this was a campaign that won in overturning the rule that women couldn't drive. So I wanna pause there and just think of those two stories or other stories that you know and please put in the chat any thoughts you have about what are some advantages of an ongoing targeted campaign? And by that I mean a campaign that picks a piece of an issue with a specific demand, a specific decision maker that you're challenging and that works at it over time, not just one big protest but something that really works over time. And I'm gonna go out of screen share so I can read your comments more easily. Welcome from Tanzania and Jobar Kenya, Nigeria. Great, welcome. So for anyone who missed it okay, great, thanks Frank. If others wanna put advantages of this type of campaigning, one advantage is it's easier to follow all developments for the media. Frank, would you be interested in unmuting and explaining a little bit more what you mean about that? I won't put people on the spot if they don't want to be but I'd like to say something about the story. Yeah, I think in this sense maybe in the Saudi sense it was in the end almost helpful for them because it made them look much more liberal than they were and that also led to some glowing profiles of the new leader of Saudi Arabia that were maybe not so well-deserved and he put all the activists in jail as you probably know after he changed the law. But I think like the specificity of the issue makes it super easy for media to follow. The New York Times tries to assess whether Saudi Arabia is more liberal or not but they can always, and that's a difficult assessment to make but they can always assess whether the driving laws are still in place. But I think it makes it easier to follow. I think that's also the reason why Amnesty would focus on one activist as a symbol if we're a group of activists better than an entire system of speech and association, et cetera. Yeah, that's great, thank you. Let's see, some other comments here from Anasasia from Ukraine. Advantage is you have a higher chance of winning the specific issue. Right, if you tried to change all the laws in Saudi Arabia at once, that's gonna be a tougher fight. And that may have been one of the challenges of the defiance campaign is that they took on a whole group of laws at once. Yawande, please correct me if I'm saying people's names wrong. It's a realistic approach, not getting overwhelmed by all that is wrong. Focus, small wins are something to celebrate. That is a really important point. Campanning can be daunting and depressing sometimes. And so having those small wins, things that you can show that you're building power is really important for inspiring people, recruiting new people, gaining confidence that changes possible. Yeah, that's all really true. And Pika, I'm reading these out loud just in case it's hard for anyone to read the chat that sometimes happens depending on what technology people are on. There's such information overflow these days and so many important issues that it's easier to get and keep the audience's attention if you repeat the message often in different ways. Great, thanks. Anybody else wanna come on and share some thoughts about the advantages of campaigning? If not, I will just go back to screen share. I think all the things that, oh, go ahead. Oh yeah, I was just gonna say, like when you do campaigns, sometimes you grow your engagement from stakeholders that you might not have thought would join your efforts and then you can build out your team further and have more people to strategize with gain partners and allies. Yeah, thank you for that. And in both of the stories I told, I actually forgot to say this about South Africa, but in both of them, gaining international allies was a benefit to the activists because the things that they did were dramatic enough to get international press. And I wanna acknowledge on this call, especially that we have people from different places who are operating in really different circumstances and some are more dangerous than others. And so how people think about campaigning is gonna vary depending on your situation. But especially if you're in a situation where violence or imprisonment are real concerns, that factor of having international allies can be really helpful in providing at least some degree of protection. It's not a guarantee, but there are lots of stories where having international attention helped to avoid potential violence. So I think there's lots of things to say about this. This is one of some of the things that I would highlight and I think it relates to some of the things you all have said. We can be more effective when we focus activist energy, even though there may be many, many, many problems, if we do a little bit on all of them will be less effective than if we focus. Campaigning also takes initiative away from power holders. There's a kind of activism that is just about reacting to or protesting what power holders have done. And campaigning is a way of saying, we are gonna choose our own timeline. We are gonna decide when we act and it's not based on responding to what someone else has done. It can really build pressure over time. It can make a concrete difference in people's lives. I mean, being able to drive as an example, but sometimes those little wins are not only a chance to celebrate, but they actually matter to people. It can build momentum for the wider movement and develop leaders for the wider movement, which is one of the reasons I started with the Defiance Campaign in South Africa. On the face of it, it wasn't that successful in terms of winning demands, but it was really successful at developing leaders and building momentum for the movement. So let's just pause and acknowledge, what are some of the reasons people don't do ongoing targeted campaigns? I just mentioned one of them, but I would love to hear from you all. Again, you can put things in the chat. And I think we're a small enough group that if you really wanna speak, just come off mute. And I'm open to that as long as it doesn't get too crazy. Let's see, Anastasia, go ahead. Let's see your hand up, hand up. Hey, so I think that very often people don't do the campaigns because I believe one of the reasons could be that the thing, the matter is urgent. And then also, sometimes people might not be aware that how to do the campaign or that haven't come up, like they don't, yeah, or they don't know that you can actually do a campaign. And sometimes they can be just impatient probably. They want this change now. Yeah, so I think these are like the major reasons for why people don't campaign sometimes. Yeah, I wanna like highlight a few of the things that you said, like people don't know. I think that was really true for me. Like no one in school said like, oh, here's how you could be a social activist, right? The version of history was all about what the leaders did. It wasn't about what grassroots people did. And so that's why trainings like this are really important. So people can learn stories. And then once you know a few stories, you know to look for others because I guarantee like every country here has some history of people doing grassroots organizing that we can tap into, but most of us are not taught that history in school. So Pika mentioned there's such information overflow these days and so many important issues that it's easier to get and keep the audience's attention. If you, oh wait, no, sorry, that was from before. I thought that was in response to why not campaign. I think that's also true though for why people don't. As someone in the United States, I'll say that after Donald Trump was elected president, he said something outrageous and offensive like every single day. So every day people went and protested on some different thing. And it was especially new people coming into activism. It was hard to convince them that they would be more effective by picking one thing than responding to everything because there was so much on Twitter and whatnot. And Frank points out the situation is too overwhelming. The issue feels too big. Yeah, I think it's sometimes a sense of fear and franticness that makes us not campaign that makes us feel like we have to respond to everything at once. Hi, I'm Tracy from Jamaica. For me, I feel like there's just so much information going around and it's being shared by just about everyone, you know, by the government, by just random persons who think that this is the real information. And so it's almost like, okay, why bother? And then there are so many people who do not know because when you engage, I mean realize that they don't actually know the truth. But then it's like, oh my gosh. Like it just feels like it's just a lonely road, you know? To come up with this, to do the right thing because other somebody is gonna trumpet the government is gonna do it because there's money in it and it just feels so overwhelming to make that move. Yeah, thank you, Tracy. I think that's another reason for international gathering. So we have to remember we're not alone even though it can feel that way sometimes. Thank you. And Mercy says sometimes the moment to act or galvanize for change may be too brief. Yeah, that's interesting. I think I would argue that one advantage of campaigning is that we create our own moments to act. But it is true that some moments are more ripe than others, right? That there are moments when the public becomes really galvanized and there are moments when repression really increases. And so sometimes acting in that in-between space can be especially fruitful if people are ready to grab the opportunity. All right, I'm gonna go on with some more stories and with some more kind of principles of campaigning and invite you to kind of translate this to whatever your own circumstance is. But I wanna talk a little bit about how we choose a target, how we choose what we're going to focus on when there are so many issues. And this story is from the United States from the civil rights era. These four young men got known as the Greensboro Four because they were from Greensboro, North Carolina. And I know you all probably know US history better than we're taught history of other countries, but in case you don't know, in that era, the American South had very similar segregation laws to South Africa where it was illegal for these young black men to sit at the counter and order a cup of coffee in the US South. So in the North there was segregation that wasn't by law, but by kind of practice, but someone could order a cup of coffee if they were black in a restaurant in say my city, Philadelphia, but not in Greensboro, North Carolina. And that applied to many, many things about where people lived, where people went to school, et cetera. So Joseph McNeil actually at Christmas time went to visit family in the North where things weren't segregated legally. And then when he came back to the South, he was just really struck with how ridiculous it was, he couldn't buy a hot dog at the bus station because he was black. And so he went back to his college friends who had been studying Gandhi and nonviolence in class. And he said, what could we do? What could we do that would be in that spirit of Gandhi to challenge the way things are? And so they decided to pick this one restaurant. Well, Woolworths isn't just a restaurant, it was a store that also sold like clothing and things like that, but it had this restaurant bar part. They said, we'll dress up, we'll wear our nicest clothes. I think they purchased something the first day so that they could say they were customers. And then they went and they sat down at the lunch counter and asked for a cup of coffee. And they were refused service. So they just sat there until Woolworths closed. People were so impressed with the bravery of this act and the symbolism of this act because a cup of coffee, it's kind of like driving. It's something that many people can relate to. And so then other students started doing the same thing. And it spread across the US South where in all kinds of cities, students especially were showing up taking over the lunch counters. It was a strategy that Northerners could support by boycotting Woolworths. Liberal white people could support by going to protests against Woolworths in other parts of the country. And at the very beginning, Woolworths said, well, this isn't our problem. This has to do with the law. We just follow the law wherever we are. But after several months of these sit-ins, guess what? Woolworths decided that they didn't need to follow the law. They chose to desegregate their lunch counters. So I want you to take a moment and again, use the chat or come off mute and think about what made Woolworths a great target. It was not just Woolworths that was segregated. Like I said, it was church, it was school, it was the buses, it was the Greyhound, it was the privately owned restaurant. Why pick this one company? Because they were a popular public space. That's one answer, yep. What other thoughts do people have? Everybody knows them exactly. And they don't have an interest in the racist laws. I want to sell coffee. That's a really good point. And I think that's worth remembering when we start talking about climate activism. Some companies or some institutions are just really in the business of doing the bad thing. But there are other companies that are supporting them where you can maybe come between them. Like their primary interest is in making money. And so if the activists are costing them that, then they can make a different choice. Any other thoughts? Yeah, I think those are all good ones. And I would just, okay, let's see. Mercy says people could relate exactly. So sometimes the most effective campaigns choose something like that that many people can relate to. So as an American woman, I hear like, what, they can't even drive a car in Saudi Arabia? Like that's something I can relate to. Gandhi chose salt in his great salt march as the symbol because everyone needs salt. The British salt taxes disproportionately hurt poor people, but rich people use salt too. So it was a symbol that people was kind of uniting. And the same with coffee. And I even bought something from the store. Come on, right, right. They were acting in a way that highlighted what was wrong and stupid about the system. So that's great. And the last thing I was gonna point out was the fact that it was a target that made it easy for other people to be allies to them. So if they picked a store that was only in the South, then the struggle would have only been in the South. But by picking a national chain, people in the North could kind of show up and so show support, which puts more pressure on the company, but it also helps you in getting press and things like that. That's great. I wanna say one other thing about choosing targets. Sometimes it's helpful to choose a target that's not who you would think of immediately. So this, I forgot to put the group's name, but this is the coalition of Immokalee workers. Immokalee is a place in Florida in the US where it's mostly immigrants, mostly Spanish speaking from Latin America, immigrants who are coming and picking tomatoes for big companies. And the tomato workers were treated really horribly. They were paid really low. They were not allowed to take breaks, like just to get a glass of water out in the hot sun. And there were many people who said like the way they were treated was very close to slavery, really abominable conditions. And the Immokalee workers were organized. They were organized labor trying to fight with the people who paid them, the tomato growers. For many years that was their target was trying to get the tomato growers to pay them more money and treat them better. But the tomato growers said, what can we do? We're selling tomatoes to big fast food chains, Wendy's, McDonald's, supermarkets. And those bigger companies will only buy from us if our tomatoes are cheap. So it's not our fault we're treating you so bad. Well, what the Immokalee workers realized was that they didn't have a lot of leverage with the tomato growers because those people had more power than them, but it was true that those people were afraid of the even bigger companies. So the Immokalee workers became successful when they actually aimed higher and they started with Wendy's. I know McDonald's is probably everywhere in the world. I don't know if Wendy's is, but all these big companies like Taco Bell, somebody shaking their head, you don't have Wendy's, but it's like McDonald's. Like all these big, big chains that like Woolworths, everyone knows. So everyone in the US knows Wendy's. Everyone knows McDonald's, everyone knows Taco Bell. And so the Immokalee workers started getting allies to protest those companies saying, we won't buy from Wendy's if you are buying these tomatoes that are picked by people treated so terribly. It was a really bold move to go to the bigger target, but it was actually very, very successful. They created like a whole, almost like fair trade kind of system where tomato growers have to prove they're treating their workers well in order for big companies to buy their tomatoes now. So there's last time I checked, like 11 major, major firms have signed this agreement, including Whole Foods and other Walmart, which is like a really, really big super store. And that has totally changed the conditions of the workers by going to the target that has a public image to defend and more influence and power really. So I wanna share a theory that I think has really helped me understand this and then encourage you to do some reflection about it. And I'm not sure how many people have heard of this, but it is called the Pillars of Power Theory or the Pillars of Support. And it came out of research by Gene Sharp on what helps dictators stay in power. And he realized that we sort of think of power more like a regular pyramid where the powerful are on top and everybody else is kind of smushed on the bottom. But what his research showed was that even a dictator or a major corporation, part of their power comes from other institutions supporting them. So the press, the military, the universities, groups like that that may be going along with a certain system, but if we start to convince those power holders, kind of like with Woolworths, like Woolworths ultimately wants to sell the coffee, you can remove them as a pillar of support for the system. So I'll just go back to the South African example. There were a lot of pillars holding up this really racist system. There were the segregation laws that the defiance campaign was protesting, but the press, that regime really controlled the press. So it was very hard to get stories saying what was really going on. You know, people needed jobs. So the regime kind of really tried to control labor. There were religious institutions that went along with the status quo, but then there were all these institutions outside of South Africa. The United States was one of the first ones to give a big aid package to this new really terrible right-wing government. There were big companies like Shell and Polaroid and Ford that invested a lot of money in South Africa or had factories there. And then international legitimacy can come from sports and all kinds of things. So after that campaign I mentioned, one of the things that shifted was there started to be more of an international solidarity movement. South Africa got banned from playing ping pong internationally. And you might think, well, that's silly. Who cares about ping pong? But it was part of a long campaign, the sports boycotts, to make South Africa look bad and to lose their illegitimacy internationally. After I came back from Botswana, I went to graduate school and this was a photo from the late 80s. There was a campaign at my school to get our university to stop investing in the companies that were working in South Africa. And on our campus, this campaign failed. Like this university never took their money out of South Africa. So as a young activist, it was another one of those experiences where I felt like, well, this didn't really make a difference. But then when I kind of went back and really understood South African history, I realized it did actually. It was part of removing that international legitimacy and removing foreign investment. So even though the divestment campaign at my college failed, it was part of a bigger movement where some of those campaigns won and it did really weaken the legitimacy of the apartheid regime. So when things changed in the early 1990s, it looked like change happened really, really fast. It looked like all of a sudden Nelson Mandela is gonna be president after he was in jail for years and people who weren't paying attention thought like, oh my gosh, this is a miracle. But it wasn't, it was decades of people working to remove these pillars of power. So when I think of this in terms of climate change, I have to remember that we're not at 1952. We have had people working at the pillars of power for decades. And my hope is that like if you were in the mid 1980s, it felt like this system was never gonna change, but then change did come. So I want us to switch to thinking about what pillars of power prop up the fossil fuel industry. And I'm gonna stop sharing so I can read your comments more easily. Oh yeah, what we're doing in Ukraine to fight Russia, we target the EU, UK, US to stop buying Russian goods, in particular fossil fuels. That's a great example. And the campaign I work on is against Vanguard, which is one of the biggest investment companies in the world and we went and we brought sunflower seeds to represent Ukraine and the climate movement and handed them out to employees. And Vanguard did like pause buying Russian oil, right? So that's a great example of a focus that can invite international support easily. Frank's fossil free football. Okay, that sounds great. So what about this question about fossil fuel pillars of support? So if we think of fossil fuel companies, whether it's Gazprom or Exxon or Chevron or what have you, what are the other institutions that make it possible for them to do the terrible things they're doing? So, and just rattle off, it's a really long list. Factories, okay. So factories are a particular part of that system that are using fossil fuels, is that what you mean? Go ahead and unmute yourself. Yeah, I just wanted to be a little more specific. For example, in Germany, the lobbyists say like, oh, let the fossil fuel lobbyists say, oh, we cannot get rid of Russian fossil fuel, fossil fuel in general, because we're gonna freeze the winter. So they shift the responsibilities to the households when in fact the biggest consumer of gas is industry. And 50% of the industry, the biggest consumers of the fossil fuel, the gas, they have the lowest employment rates, which is kind of crazy, nobody talks about it. But yeah, I mean, so, yeah, factories, we can target those factories, I believe, those that are the biggest consumers of the fossil fuel to, yeah, to fight this. And then, yeah, shift the focus. This is the right then what you wanted to hear, but yeah. No, that's a great example. And just to spin it out a little more, it's very like they want to put the blame on individuals, right? I know here, you have a protest and sometimes people will say like, oh, did you drive? Or did you use fossil fuels to get to that protest as if it's not easy for individuals to live apart from the economy that we're in. And it's also just not fair to blame us for climate change when companies, the ones making money off of it. But a factory is something that might be in between. Maybe they're making clothing or something. People need clothing, but you don't need to buy maybe clothing every day the way you need to buy food. And so they might be an institution that you can pressure to go green or to build solar panels or, you know, that they could be like a campaign against one of the pillars. It's part of what I'm going for here are like other institutions we can target that can make a difference. So Frank mentioned government administrations. Yeah, total or shell is still, it's still the norm supporting them. You know, so many places around the world, Shell has done crappy things and deadly things, but they have so much money that they've probably bought politicians on every continent, you know, and so highlighting that. To be honest, I think in the Dutch system, you're not even able to buy politicians. So it's even more stupid than that in the US, you know, at least they're bought. I'm from the Netherlands, but our politicians do this voluntarily. So they're super good in creating the image that Shell's interest or KLM or National Airlines' interest is the Dutch national interest. And there's many politicians, especially from the center and right, and also some from the left that do just buy that argument. So you need to undermine that argument. And you can do that from the outside, but I think people can also be very effective from the inside shifting those norms. That's great. That's a really interesting example when you can't even blame it on the amount of money in politics. That's very interesting. And that point about governments portraying their country's interest as being the same as a corporation's interest is a really insidious idea. You're reminding me of an Indian activist, Priya Pillay, who worked for Greenpeace India this was, I forget, several years ago. And she was supposed to go to London to give a talk and the Indian government grounded her plane and took her off the plane because they said she was going to go speak not in the national interest. And she gave this fantastic speech, which probably got more press than if she had actually just gone to London and given the talk. Where she said like her work was helping communities in India who were being displaced by coal. So who decided that the national interest is making money from foreign corporations often as opposed to the interest of those people who are suffering from coal. So I do think there's a narrative about whose interests are being served by what that is really important. Deborah from Brazil, thank you. Our tech support shout out mentioned state subsidies to fossil fuels are still crazily high, right? So that's the kind of thing a campaign maybe goes specifically against those subsidies. That's the kind of thing that could be highlighted. Let's just see if there's another one or two. And Anastasia, I'm not sure if your hand is still up from before, if you've raised it again. Any anybody else have one you want to point out? I'm thinking of this, the teams of lawyers, experts, and scientists that the companies usually have, but those ones are bought off. So I don't know if that counts as a separate institution, but it's crazy how you have your scientists, they have their scientists. You have your lawyers, we have our lawyers. So it's crazy. I really appreciate that, Mercy. And I think it's an example. Yeah, there are so many groups of people who get co-opted into working for industry. And there have been successful campaigns like going after some specific group. Like in the U.S. right now, I think there's a campaign just for the people who do PR for oil companies. And like, if you represent Shell and Exxon, no one else is going to take your business. You're not going to get any other business, because that is so bad. And so I think scientists are another group that could be highlighted. I'm just going to list a few here, a few other ones, but I think all the ones that you all said are really good. In some countries, it's the press. That was very true in the U.S. for a long time. Liberal media now are talking about climate change, but conservative media still are not. Unions can be a force for change, but sometimes the unions that work for the fossil fuel industry can be pillars supporting the industry. Universities, I was thinking of, as Mercy said, sometimes it's the, did I say your name right? Sometimes it's like they're getting funding for their science programs from the company, and so they're not going to criticize them. Sometimes universities have big savings or endowments that they invest in fossil fuels, so they can be a pillar a couple of different ways. I especially want to highlight money as an area where the climate movement has really started to focus more and more in recent years. Banks, asset managers like Vanguard, even insurance companies. Whether it's like the East Africa crude oil pipeline, and again, thinking about how can you bring in more people to support by highlighting the international companies that are going to make money off of this project in Uganda and Tanzania is one way. Or the Ukraine example, and I have another example from Peru later where indigenous people actually are coming to the United States in a few weeks to highlight the money that is invested in the company destroying their region. So all of these are ways that we can campaign more effectively if we start to think about who can we move. So I just want to highlight some of the ways this is playing out in the climate movement. There are many, many campaigns against pipelines. So a pipeline is like a piece of infrastructure that's necessary for the system, and it's a good way to mobilize people who live where that pipeline is slated to be because that can bring more people into the movement. Sometimes people aren't thinking about this stuff until the government wants to take their land and chop down their trees. But it's a very concrete way of interrupting. And in the US pipeline fights like at Standing Rock have been really important in highlighting indigenous rights issues. Sometimes campaigns focus on interrupting the transportation of fossil fuels. So I love this photo and this story from the Pacific climate warriors in Australia. And a shout out to Daniel Hunter who's one of the people who helped to organize this week of trainings. He was doing a training with Pacific climate warriors and they were thinking about what symbols in your country could be really powerful in doing a campaign. And their traditional wooden boats were one of those things. Like this is deeply important to our identity as islanders, as our traditional boats. And so along with Australian activists and plastic kayaks, they went out and were able to blockade and close for a day like one of the biggest coal ports in the world by interrupting the transportation. And so part of what's important about this kind of really bold tactic is most groups can't sustain doing this every day. But if you have a sustained campaign that has drama sometimes, then that can kind of help getting attention to your cause. As I mentioned, a lot of people now are going after banks. Banks are a much safer target. Banks really, really care about their public image. And so they're like sometimes the bank will just shut down rather than arrest people, at least in the United States, that's my experience because they don't want bad press. They are harder to interrupt in the dramatic way because so much money flows around the world electronically. You can't stop the money from moving the way those brave folks stopped the coal ship. But they are very susceptible to public pressure. And like the Woolworth's example that they really care about is making money. And the fossil fuel industry is not their only business they're invested in. And so there's this potential for moving them. And then this is the example I mentioned before. The Achar people in Northern Peruvian Amazon have been fighting to protect their land from the oil industry for a long time. Multiple companies have been going after their land. And Petro Peru is the one that they're fighting now. This picture is several years old from the Guardian. But this is an ongoing fight. So sometimes those pillars of power can be a piece of a fight rather than a whole campaign. So their main target is Petro Peru. But as I mentioned, they're coming to the US in a few weeks. And the group I work with campaigning against Vanguard is going to host an action where they're going to demand to speak to Vanguard about Vanguard's role in channeling money to this company as an investment firm. So I'm going to glance at the chat one more time. And then we're going to get in small groups. And I would love to give you a chance to talk to each other. There's so much wisdom in this group, including the people who have been staying on mute. I really hope that you'll come off mute for the small group discussion and meet folks and learn from each other. We're going to, let's see, take I think about 10 minutes to talk about what are you struggling with in your own country? What are the injustices or the climate villains that you'd like to topple? And then to think about this tool of the pillars of power, what are the institutions holding the status quo in place that you could maybe chip away at that might be vulnerable to change, kind of in the way that Woolworth was vulnerable to change more so than the laws themselves. So let me just see if there's any clarifying questions before we take a little time to do that. Great. So I'm not seeing any clarifying questions. Are we about ready to go into small groups? We are ready, yep. All right. Well, have fun and we will see you in 10 minutes. I'll send a little warning like five minutes out and I assume you're going to help each other share the time. Yes. So sending you out to the groups. Thank you. If there's anyone having trouble getting into a small group, I would love to hear about some of the things that you all talked about and if we can start with an invitation to people who haven't spoken much yet, that would be great. If anyone is willing to come on and just tell us a little bit, either about your own situation or any themes that came up in your group. Musa. Okay, yeah. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm sorry? I said good afternoon. Oh, good afternoon, Musa. Good evening. Yeah, my name is Musa Tonko. I'm from Nigeria. Yeah. So in the small room, we discussed inovarian issues. For example, I've informed them of the situations we have right now in Nigeria. We are now in a transition period. We are planning for election next year by February. So the country is right now in a tense situation. Campaigns are going on, presidential candidates making their promises ahead of the next year election. By February, God willing. But I have a very serious question that I raised in the group. The solar energy that we have been exploring, for example, in Nigeria, we have a solar energy potential, a big potential in Nigeria. So now my worry is about the solar panels. They say they have a large span. After some years, they are expected to expire, for example, after 25 or 30 years. So now, is there any plan that we have on ground on how to dispose this solar panel? Because I see maybe after 30 years, maybe a kind of a junk or a nuisance to the environment like the way we have with the plastic. So I don't know if there is a plan or any kind of a sustainable plan that we're going to dispose this solar panel. Or maybe there's a plan to recycle them, I don't know. Thank you. That's a great question that I don't have a great answer for. It could easily be the focus of a campaign to get into place, a mechanism for that. It could be something that creates jobs in the future to set up a way to recycle solar panels. If there's someone here who has a good answer to that, who wants to put it in the chat, that would be great. I'm sorry that I don't have an answer for that. And I want to especially acknowledge that there are serious justice issues in the way our economy works now that we really need to address as we change off fossil fuels and not just change the kind of energy we use. So for extracting minerals in ways that still take people's land and pollutes their waterways and then if we're taking the leftovers and dumping them also usually on poorer people's lands or countries that don't say no, that that will not be the kind of change we really, really want to see. Speaking for myself, but I think a lot of the climate movement has realized that we want to get off fossil fuels but we also need a bigger change. We don't want just new injustices with new technology. We want a different way of doing things. So yeah, cutting down on consumption is one part of that. More efficiency, whether it's factories or homes or whatever is part of that, there are a lot of pieces to that but making sure that things are disposed of responsibly is a great question. It's not really the focus of this workshop. I'm sorry to say. I'm curious if there were other campaigning things that came up in the small groups, especially new ways of thinking about who to target when you're trying to take down a big industry. Anastasia, is that what you wanted to speak to? Well, it's not that I got new ways. It's just deeper insights I could say after everything has been said so far. I just realized that I should really think more about the government, targeting the government and indeed targeting the factories and also the banks, more in particular Swiss banks. I mean, I'm in touch with Swiss activists who, yeah, Switzerland is famous for its neutrality and for its banks. And it was great to hear what you said about the banks that they are like a safer target. And I'm just looking forward to sharing this inside with Swiss activists to get them on board again. Yeah, so, yeah. And then I got also, Mercy has shared with me fossil fuel treaty. As I understand, it's like a campaign that pushes cities to cut down. I'm not sure I guess Mercy can say more what it is about, but something that can help me in the campaign is like, as I understood, it's like the cities cut down or refuse from fossil fuel, the whole cities or something or universities, yeah, institutions. So that's a great insight. I'm going to look into that. Yeah, thank you. And what I meant about banks being safer like is explicitly in contrast to some of the governments that you all work in, right? There are governments that are killing environmental activists. And so we need to grapple with that really harsh reality. And Shell has that track record in Nigeria too, right? And those industries that care about their public image tend to be safer in that way. Like they're more susceptible to pressure. Any other small group insights that people want to share with the whole group? All right, so I have some more points to cover, but I'd also really like to know what's on your minds like if there are questions that you're thinking about that you are hoping that will touch on. So maybe I'll just share like four of the topics I'm thinking about and have some stories, but I would love to have people like add in the chat. Are you part of a campaign now that is struggling with getting stagnant or are there particular things that it would be helpful for me to address? Please drop them in the chat. And we can pause kind of periodically to see if there are questions or comments. So I think these are four kind of key questions to ask, whether you are thinking about starting a new campaign or maybe you're in one and you're just kind of assessing where you're at. So the first question I really highlighted, who are you trying to pressure? Who is your target? If you just go after changing the whole system or changing multiple decision makers, it can be really hard for them to feel the pressure, but picking someone who has the power to do what you want them to do is a really key part of campaigning is to keep that pressure on certain decision makers. It's also really good to be clear about what you want them to do. And there's this tension, I think, in campaigning between wanting them to do everything and maybe not being able to reach that in your campaign or picking something really small and specific. So I started with two stories. The Saudi Arabia story was about just driving. So that's an example of how having one specific thing can help you win that campaign and have something to celebrate. Even though, as it was noted, people went to jail for it. It was something visceral, also like the coffee at Woolworth's. But there are other campaigns that might set more complicated demands. So the campaign that I'm part of now against Vanguard, I'm guessing that a lot of people maybe haven't heard of Vanguard because they're the money behind the scenes. They manage the money of 30 million people who want to save their money for later in life. And they invest it in stocks in Exxon, Gazbron, Chevron, companies around the world, Tata Cole. They're one of the biggest coal investors in the world. And the demands for this campaign are kind of complicated because in the long run, what we want them to do is stop investing in all of those bad companies. But we know that's not something they're going to do overnight. That is a really big ask. They have hundreds of billions of dollars invested in fossil fuel companies. And so we don't want to set our demands so high that we'll never win. But we do want to say that that is the ultimate goal. So instead, then there are also sometimes like interim demands, like specific things that they could do right now. And one of those is for them to, because Vanguard owns so many shares of companies, they get to vote when a company has an annual meeting. There's often issues that are voted on. And Vanguard has so many votes that they can control what happens, right? They could even, I've heard they have so much power because they have so much money, they could get the head of Exxon fired. So we want them to start using that power. They say they're worried about climate change. We want them to use their power to push those companies. So that's just an example of a campaign that has like things you can do now and things we want you to do eventually. And there's an advantage to that, but it also is more complicated. Like we just want to order a cup of coffee is a way more simple demand that people understand easily. So just to say that campaigns differ in this area, depending on what you're trying to do. Another thing to think about is leverage. Other than the fact that you're right, why should they listen to you? So I'm gonna come off screen share and tell a couple of stories about that and also check what's happening in the chat. Yeah, Yasha is saying that choosing one demand is difficult and it feels biased as a lot of things are actually needed to be done by decision makers. That's really true. It's what's hard about narrowing down demands. And it's easier sometimes to make progress if you pick something that you can actually win. So there's a real tension there. Many groups find if they win one little thing, then they build excitement, they build membership, they get press attention, so then they can win the next thing. That's what the civil rights movement in the US did. So the lunch counters at Woolworths were one campaign. Rosa Parks fought to desegregate buses in her community and another campaign. There were campaigns desegregating the schools, there were campaigns about voting, but they were all connected in trying to build this bigger movement, but they really focused on one issue at a time and that was actually a very effective way at shifting the whole big system. But it can be very difficult when there's so many problems. And like you said, people may feel biased, like why are you focused on Woolworths? Why not this other thing? Great. Are there any other questions or comments before I go on? The German government, the factories demand stop buying Russian fossil fuels and switch to clean energy. Leverage, it's unhealthy addiction. Russia has been manipulating them more coming. Yeah, so let me say a little bit more. About what I mean by leverage. So there's the people power that we're building. So that's leverage. There's the fact that we're right, you know, gives us some leverage. But then it's also, there are a world threat, the threat of nuclear catastrophe, right? The fact that, so I'm gonna spin out a little bit from what Anastasia is saying, the fact that many people are worried about Russia helps highlight this issue, right? So that is leverage. If Russia cares what the rest of the world thinks about them or Putin, I should say. So that's one of the things that is worth thinking about is choosing targets that actually care what people think gives you boosts your power, okay? So that's one of the things I was saying about the banks. Banks care what people think about them. So here's a story from the U.S. Governor Cuomo was the governor of New York before he was accused of sexual harassment, I should acknowledge. But several years ago, he really was thinking about running for president. And so as a governor, he really, really was interested in having the most positive image possible. He was a politician who went out to the public gatherings all the time because he was thinking about running for president. In the U.S., we call it kissing babies. Like there are some politicians who go out and go around and kiss all the babies in the crowd. And there are others who maybe they don't have any further ambition. There were other governors who, like maybe they served as governor and then they were going to retire. And so they don't care as much about having their future aspirations. But Governor Cuomo did and that gave people leverage in banning fracking. So I'm sure you all know, fracking is this terrible way of getting gas out of the ground. New York had not made a decision yet on whether they were going to do fracking or not. And Governor Cuomo, again, he wanted everyone to like him. So he was avoiding taking a stand. He didn't want to anger the gas companies, but he didn't want to anger the environmentalists either because he wants both of their support if he runs for president. So he was basically trying to avoid the issue. So New York activists used that as leverage, his desire to look good. And they started showing up everywhere he went. He couldn't go to any gathering with activists showing up and having signs about fracking. And I know that this is the thing that actually won the campaign because I have a friend who used to work for him. And she told me the story that there was this state fair where he called his staff to go to state fair at seven o'clock in the morning so that he could take a picture at the state fair before any protesters got there. But they still somehow found out his schedule and they were still there at seven in the morning. He couldn't go anywhere without the TV cameras and the press seeing the protesters. And so he finally announced to ban fracking in New York state which was a big, big win for the movement. I think sometimes what happens is activists then go to imitate what worked in a different place. We'll just try and do that here. But in some other states they didn't have that leverage because the governor wasn't thinking about running for further office. So that's one example of what I mean by leverage. One other example would be the first nonviolent direct action campaign that I was part of was against PNC Bank. PNC is a U.S. bank, a U.S.-based. It was I think the seventh in the country at the time. But it was one of the top investors in mountaintop removal coal mining which is this horrible practice where they literally blow up mountains to get the coal underneath. And at the same time PNC bragged their reputation was that they were a green bank because they like recycled in their offices or bought green energy or something. So hypocrisy can often be a really good form of leverage. If someone is saying A and they're doing B that is the kind of thing you can get like maybe the press to cover or that you can use to pressure them. And so in this campaign PNC also bragged about being founded by Quakers which is a small religious group that I'm part of and my group is Earth Quaker Action Team. So they bragged about being founded by Quakers and so then it made them look really bad when Quakers said no you are not following the values that you say you are. So they actually ended up taking down the part of their website that bragged about being Quakers. And they got very nervous about bragging about being a green bank because every time they did that they would criticize them and show what they were doing that was not green. So let me just see if there is more comments. Or questions about this that's really inspiring. Yeah I'll tell you more in a few minutes about that campaign and some of the targets we used. Any other thoughts about leverage or observations about what people are using as leverage in your own campaigns? Any questions about that? Go ahead Musa. Yeah well done but you know right now in Nigeria we have we're in the middle of a strike by the you know our university lecturers. So now we're talking about the leverage issue. So I think for the past six months they have been on strike and there is no any site of ending the strike. And the leverage they are using you know what they are having right now because you know that by next year we're going to have an election. So now they are trying to hold the government you know to run some you know that they know that the government now want to look good to the electorate. So now their demand is there out you know on the table of the government they're now pressing you know that the government must meet all those men before they can go back to the classes. So now they are leveraging on the fact that election is coming up and now the government you know need to look good you know for it to be elected you know back again. So that is you know become a very serious issue now for the government and the government now cannot you know respond to all those demands but now they have to because if they didn't you know many electorate now we see them as very bad and they might end up you know losing at election in February. So now listening to your talk about leverages so now you know I just have you know it just you know appeared to me that yes exactly that's what the ASU in Nigeria is using. That's a great example thank you so much Musa and I think sometimes people think that elections will solve everything you know and you know I've gotten very cynical about election solving everything but what you're pointing to is that time period during an election politicians are more sensitive to pressure and to take advantage that that leverage is going to work during that specific time period. So that's I think a really really good point. You made me think of one other example and then I'll call on Michelle. My son was going to a college and when we went to visit it was the moment when students were accepted but they hadn't committed and in the U.S. College and University is very very very expensive and so it's a moment when the college is vulnerable they really want students to come who can pay and so we went and then the students who were there already interrupted this gathering greeting the new students to complain about the the financial aid system and the the charges the food charges were getting more expensive and it was hard for the poor students and they did this amazing job of using this moment when families had come they had not paid the University their checks yet but to highlight what was wrong at the University to push them to change that policy and using the new students coming in as leverage as like that is the one time per year that that University was most vulnerable because if they scared away even 10 students and they didn't get that money that would be a lot of money over the four years so I don't know if that example made sense to other people but but Musa what I appreciate in your story is is highlighting how a certain time period can give you extra leverage. Michelle, am I saying your name right if you want to jump in? Go ahead. I'm sorry Michelle. Thanks Eileen I just wanted to add something from the focus and form relations and can you hear me sorry my connection is a bit bad I hope you can hear me yeah it just maybe better like this yeah that's what I was going to suggest it's cool I'll try one more time I'll try one more time and keep it brief um so I just wanted to add um we also lobby policy makers mostly policy makers you mean policy makers um and one tool that we've seen is very effective is using a public opinion polling it's a bit less disruptive than what we've discussed before but so basically we do um different rounds of polling all across Europe and usually 10 to 12 countries and then with that we either do we usually do policy briefs and private notes to policy makers briefing them about basically this is how Europe feels about a certain issue and I feel like any demand you know influential if we have that polling data um as a backup for what we demand basically so I think it's always good as you said especially when there's a window an opening in the sense that there's a campaign or election upcoming but then yeah there's really more vulnerability that the politicians want to hear okay how does my constituency feel maybe how are our other constituencies in Europe feeling so it's something that has worked really well with us and has kind of also helped gain credibility these are the um mostly politicians we don't really focus the companies because we not really collaborating with them yeah thank you that's great thank you I really think it's great when we hear about like what's working in different places you know we can all learn from that thanks um and Pika says it's easier when the issue has universal appeal or utility here in Slovenia a water protection campaign was very successful in collecting signatures for a referendum when the previous government was very hostile to all forms of environmental protection so yeah that's just a reminder that there are very different kinds of tools that people can use in campaigning depending on what kind of targets you're taking on and also depending on what um what your group is up for um can you explain on utilities in the pillars sure um so I don't know I'm going to guess that this really varies by country that in some countries it's basically the government that does this um but I'm not you know what you can tell me it probably varies in the US um even between states it varies how do you get your electricity how do you get your water how do you get gas if gas is heating your home and so the group I'm part of equate or earthquake or action team had a campaign against our local electric utility because they um they were actually owned by a bigger company and most of the electricity came from nuclear or gas and they used to have a lot of coal and oil they they had cut out coal but they were still almost all fossil fuels almost no solar or wind zero point one four four percent of our electricity came from solar like ridiculously small and so our campaign was pushing you know I can try and get the money to put solar panels on my house but that's going to be so tiny the the utility was deciding where everybody else's electricity came from so we should pressure them to start buying more and to try to buy solar that was local because our state is very behind on solar and so that you took that campaign won some things but didn't want others we got them to give like a couple hundred thousand dollars to local solar jobs training locally they committed to start buying more from local solar they set up but they didn't even have a solar part of the company and even like if an individual wanted to put solar on their house it was very very difficult so my favorite line about this campaign because it was a campaign where we didn't win the big big changes that we wanted we wanted them to buy a lot of solar and they did a little more but one of the solar contractors in our area told me before your campaign they were 20 years behind and now they're only 10 years behind so it's kind of depressing on the one hand but the things they did were putting the systems in place so now that Joe Biden is president and there's new money for solar the solar change could happen more quickly so I think it's part of what's important to remember about campaigns is that even when we feel like we lost often there's something that actually is really helpful in the change we're trying to seek and we have to like acknowledge the loss and you know not pretend that we're happy that they didn't do more but I also think to keep people's morale like those stories of change that took a long time are important to remember so that we can celebrate the impact that we did have all right Michelle I'm assuming that your hand is still up from before so I'm going to go on with a few more examples if I'm wrong go ahead and unmute and Anastasia I think I'm just going to go on for now and then call for participation and get in a little bit so I want to tell a few stories of different kinds of tactics and I would love to hear what kind of tactics people are using wherever you are I mentioned before that my group equate our first campaign ever was targeting PNC bank and we chose it like I said because they claim to be a green bank while financing mountaintop removal they were also based in the state that we were in and so there were lots of these banks around so we did a wide range of tactics we did 125 tactics over five years before we won or 125 actions but the thing to remember is we were a very small group we had no full-time staff and this bank netted over four billion dollars the year that we won against them and really it was persistence but it was also doing different things so that they I think one principle that's important in campaigning is don't always just do the same thing over and over again because they might be really scared the first time you show up and build windmills out of cardboard in their lobby but then if you do that all the time they'll get used to it and it will be less effective so this is a photo from an action kind of early on where people built these kind of you know fake windmills to symbolize what we want to see more of is investment in renewable energy and signs explaining what was wrong with mountaintop removal coal mining this was a civil disobedience action where some people were prepared to risk arrest and other people were not and so the whole group went in together they sang songs they had speeches and then the police were called and the police said you can't stay here you're trespassing on private property so at that point now in many parts of the world the police might not warn you but in our city the police do warn you and give you a chance to leave before they arrest people and so all the people who were not ready to risk arrest went outside and kind of continued singing and supporting from outside and five people stayed and stayed until the police gave them a couple of warnings and then arrested the five of them and they were held in jail overnight afterward three of them decided to pay a fine to kind of end the case but two of them didn't want to do that and so they actually went through like a whole court process and a trial to kind of speak about the issue so in this campaign we did 125 actions only several of them included arrests but most of them didn't most of them were things that people did not get arrested for one of the things that really helps in campaigning is to look for new ways to exert leverage so we realized that getting customers to move their money was a form of leverage for us and so we asked people to start boycotting PNC and not only did we ask people to move their money but we asked them to do it publicly so this was an action where there was a Quaker organization that had a bank account with PNC they went to close their bank account and we had like 30 people outside with signs bringing attention to the fact that they were closing their bank account in the end we moved about three million dollars which for a bank as big as PNC is a small amount of money but what was important about it was you know getting this publicity because there are other customers are walking by and seeing you know that people are boycotting PNC what's happening what is this issue and so they spend millions of dollars on publicity and that actually was a bigger risk to them than our little three million dollars which is a lot of money but not to a bank but but because they spend so much on publicity that that did matter to them I think another kind of tactic we used one of the principles we follow is escalation like if you're doing the same thing all the time they get used to that so what's a new way of bringing pressure and increasing the pressure that they feel so we started identifying board members of the bank who we could you know target in a special way and so one of those board members was a woman named Jane Pepper Jane Pepper was sort of like their green board member she was the head of this big garden this big really big annual garden thing in our region and was like an expert on green gardening and stuff and so we wanted her to start speaking up in the board meetings so there are a number of times where she was giving a talk somewhere where we would show up with signs I love this story because we found out that Jane Pepper was going to England and was doing this tour of English gardens that people paid a lot of money to go on this tour with her so we went to the Philadelphia airport to send her off and because our group really tries to take a positive tone even though we're challenging her and like embarrassing her on her trip you can read our signs or like be brave speak the truth you know because she was a person who we hoped would agree with us you know we had this kind of positive messaging but still interrupting her travel she somehow sneaked into the airport without seeing us and so there was this little let down like oh we missed her but because we're Quakers and Quakers are a very small religious group but there are Quakers in England so we called some of our English Quaker friends and they went and found her at her hotel in England so even though we missed her in Philadelphia these Quakers showed up with like chocolate to welcome her to England and then all this information about how terrible mountaintop removal coal mining is so they actually like found her at her hotel and had a long conversation with her and what's important about that is building this feeling on the board of PNC oh my god we cannot get away from these people like they followed her all the way to England even though it was just four people we know that then she's going to go home and she's going to call the CEO and say what is your plan to deal with this issue and then there there were other board members as well that we would either stop at their home or if they were giving a speech in public show up so that was a way of escalating the pressure by highlighting individual decision makers and then one of our final ways of escalating was actually just bringing more people involved and expanding to other states so we used our Quaker network to find other people interested in this and because we're a religious group we had silent prayer in bank lobbies which the bank managers don't know what to do with you especially it would look really bad if they try and arrest people just for praying for the planet they would kick people out but it kind of creates a moral dilemma for them so our biggest action was we had 31 different locations in different 13 different states where small groups of Quakers went into bank lobbies in most of them they sat down they had silent prayer in some of them they did singing or things like that and a few months later PNC announced that they were changing their policy and they were pulling out a financing mountaintop removal coal mining so that was one campaign against one bank it didn't stop mountaintop removal coal mining but it was one of a few campaigns that kind of helped galvanize this strategy of going after the money and there are now 30 major banks that are pressuring coal companies to get out of coal but they are now they're pillars of power who are using their own leverage to say to coal companies this is bad for our business to be associated with you you need to do better yeah I just threw Greta in there as an example of a campaign that went after something completely different you know saying like this is affecting you so we're not going to go to school parents tend to want their kids to go to school so that was a really creative way of thinking of a target and just to name that the Fridays for Future like there's again it wasn't just one time it was doing this campaigning over a long period of time and and building the number of people participating that has been powerful about that and I think I'll stop again and I'm I'd love to make we just have a few more minutes a little space to hear if there's any questions burning for people or if there are tactics you've used in your own situation that you want to share with other people but now it's kind of not that powerful Fridays for Future that's true I think the challenge of escalating is that you need to keep escalating so like if you build and build and then the bottom drops out then then the movement does move power and I don't think COVID helped at all you know that that's had an effect with a lot of groups um uh Frank why don't you jump in yeah I think I really liked the sort of questions that you that you need to ask is there is there a model you know or something we could read or look into to sort of analyze this for our own situation so I'm focusing on the on the football industry and I really still need to figure out where the leverage point who is actually going to decide what do we need to pressure are there models that you can that you can recommend to analyze it oh that's interesting I know Daniel Hunter's written a book for young climate activists which I think talks about some of these theories um I'm maybe this is a question for Lee's about follow-up to this like if I think of resources to share is there a way that a follow-up is happening or or resources are being shared with folks Lee's is going to speak at the very end so maybe I'll let her answer that then um yeah I mean the pillars of power is one of the tools that I've really found helpful with groups to just ask people to brainstorm like who are all the groups helping things stay the way that they are um and Anastasia I know you've been patient go ahead jump in real quick thank you I just wanted to show you this book it's kind of what you've been talking about um it's about hoping the activism about this victory is that like campaigns that probably you didn't win this particular campaign but it created like a platform for change for system change and basically this is what this book is about and I find it amazing because it's yeah it gives you hope and inspiration to keep on fighting so I strongly recommend this book to everyone I'm gonna type it in the chat it's basically like a bunch of small articles uh in chronological order that's great thank you and um thank you um for Debra for putting the link to the book I mentioned by Daniel Hunter um their paper copies but they're also I believe a free download on online um so if anyone has further thoughts feel free to jump them drop them in the chat during our last minute I'm gonna close um with one quote that I really love and again the example of a campaign that didn't win immediately um Gandhi's Salt March in 1930 I mentioned earlier he picked salt because it was a symbol uh it was also a symbol of British imperialism the fact that they outlawed Indians making their own salt so they could charge them a big salt tax it was this long walk that really gained momentum along the way but people made fun of it you know at the beginning in 1930 it was like 17 more years but before India got independence but that that marched that campaign around salt galvanized a lot of ordinary people and played a really key role that's easier to see in hindsight than sometimes if a campaign doesn't win everything you want it's hard to feel that um and this quote from Gandhi I think is just really important to remember um first they ignore you then they laugh at you then they fight you then you win and when we're in the early stages of that it's important to remember that we may be on a path to winning um but but good to have the long historical perspective so really grateful for everybody's participation and for the chance to connect with you all um so thanks and um