Support Campus Climate Network

I started organizing with Campus Climate Network in fall 2022 when I was a second-year at American University.  After leading student protests demanding climate action during President Biden’s first year in office, on campus, my friends and I were trying to start a campaign to make our school cut ties with the fossil fuel industry.  It was hard to get our peers to believe in their own power and agency in our institution, especially after our efforts to win climate legislation at the federal level fell short.  We faced the challenge of the opaque financial and governance system that universities use to conceal conflicts of interest.  But we knew that universities were key players in the political ecosystem, and that students needed to be organized as part of the broader fight for climate justice.

CCN was founded in early 2022; I got involved in late 2022 and soon started volunteering as the partnerships coordinator.  In fall 2023, I recruited hundreds of students in the network to the March to End Fossil Fuels and helped organize a panel of student organizers at NYC Climate Week.  On a Friday in September 2023, around 50 of us gathered in a room on the west side of Manhattan and discussed our campaigns, why student organizing mattered, what tactics we were using to build student power and pressure universities to change, and what cross-campus coordination might look like. It was the first time I had had the opportunity to talk with and learn from student organizers at multiple different universities around the Northeast all in one place.  We were all facing similar challenges on our campuses and took away new ideas for campaign tactics, recruitment, and leadership.  Above all, I was invigorated by the realization that there were students all over the country fighting for the same things we were.

CCN was the community and organization that most shaped my development from student to organizer throughout my college and post-grad years, and it has done the same for countless others.  In my final year at AU, we mounted campaigns calling for the university to cut ties with fossil fuels and to fire corrupt consulting firms.  That same fall, I helped organize the first College Climate Gathering with student organizers at Brown University and other campuses.  After graduating in 2024, I spent my first year post-grad organizing two more College Climate Gatherings with CCN.  As a CCN trainer, I’ve given dozens of trainings to students on campuses all over the East Coast, coaching them on direct actions, inclusive coalitions, base building, and other organizing skills.

Since our founding, CCN has connected student organizers across geographies and invested in our leadership and capacity to build a powerful student movement shaping the political future.  As we face the rise of authoritarianism in the US, organizations like CCN that continue to build power for a just and thriving world for all give us reasons to have hope.  CCN has big plans to continue building student power across the US in the years to come, but we need financial support to hire organizers, run trainings, organize summits, and more.  Please join me in supporting CCN with a donation so that this critical work can continue.