Dear Friends and Organizations Aligned with AEL,

This letter comes with sincere wishes to all for a safe and happy Thanksgiving Day.  We give thanks to you for all the work you do for our common good and invite you to give to an important AEL campaign.  Y

We’re thankful because Alliance for Environmental Leadership (AEL) is celebrating three years of advocacy and collaboration this month. What an incredibly productive and paradigm-shifting three years it has been. We’ve grown our alliance to 16 organizations and are delighted most recently, to welcome Catalyst and Nevada County Climate Action Now to our collaboration. We’ve elevated citizen awareness of and participation in local governance to unprecedented levels.

Meaningful participation in local governance is our civil right. However, when time and time again, our participation fails to affect elected officials’ decisions on land use, societal and other issues, we wonder if our civil rights are being denied and if meaningful participation is even possible in the current environment. What steps are necessary to redress this concern?  Citizens may call upon the Grand Jury or State Agencies for intervention; or seek redress through courts of law, a path that is costly and impractical considering the number of decisions that concern us.

Another approach is to achieve that “tipping point,” where the interests of our smaller groups of committed citizens can together, bring about the land use and societal change we want to see. You are likely familiar with the U of PA Study that found that a committed community was able to repeatedly bring about societal change in the views of the power-holders once it reached 25% of the total population.  A key element of the Study is that the tipping point of the overall group effected meaningful change when only 3% of that committed 25% devoted themselves to proactive participation. Proactive participation of the 3% is all of us coming together – developing coherent proposals (like our CISGP), building relationships with elected officials and speaking collectively at hearings. Working together, we aim to reach that 3% critical threshold. We’re so close!

We think the key to achieving the “tipping point” is engaging Generation Z, Millennials, and younger Boomers in our Alliance. We need active engagement across the generations to achieve the 3% – which will, in turn, affect election outcomes, to fill seats on Boards and Commissions and be the essential critical mass  at public meetings. We have a plan for building cross-generational participation across AEL’s family of organizations.

I’d like to introduce Shane Hanofee whom AEL hired as our Social Media Director. He’s going to help us engage more young people in community advocacy. He’ll be using social media platforms and messaging specifically targeting the younger generations. You’ll be seeing his educational postings for AEL on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. He’ll be amplifying AEL’s website www.enviroalliance.org, the Enviro Events Calendar, and Action Alerts. He will contact you, our member organizations, in the next several weeks to talk about events and information-sharing.  These efforts will  improve all of our Google and Facebook algorithms, which will grow our outreach to exponentially to more people. So next time you submit an Action Alert or post an event on the AEL website or on your own site, it will reach exponentially more of our community.  Like the acorn, we will grow until our branches reach across the community.

If your organization has been wanting a more effective online presence, this is a great opportunity to chip in and have the hard work done on your behalf. We’ve set up a GoFundMe page to support AEL’s social media outreach. The more we raise the more we can do. See the GoFundMe link for details.You can contribute securely at www.gofundme.com/f/social-media-for-the-tipping-point or by sending a check to the Planning and Conservation League Foundation ℅ Alliance for Environmental Leadership,1107 9th Street Suite 901 Sacramento CA 95814. Your donation is tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.  For today’s and for future generations, we thank you for your support AEL’s “Tipping Point” campaign!

Together, we’re a stronger voice.

Sincerely,

Leslie Warren, Chair

Alliance for Environmental Leadership