Policy Section: The Four Steps to Winning Policy Victories
The policy track of the campus climate challenge campaign will focus on developing and winning approval for specific policies aimed at reducing your campus’ global warming pollution.
The key thing that can help you be successful here is your “ask”. The “ask” is the actual policy proposal you want your administration to adopt. An “ask” can range from requiring all university computers to be shut down at night or getting 100% of the school’s energy from clean power.
Although the ultimate goal is to reduce your school’s global warming pollution down to zero, we recommend that you choose an ask that your administration will be willing and able to implement by next year. We also suggest that you avoid complicated asks that will take longer than a year to implement. This way, your group can end the year with a solid victory under your belt that will build momentum for next year. Taking this approach will also make it more likely that your school will take more ambitious steps down the road - our experience at schools like Penn State, Middlebury College and other schools that have done a lot is that the smaller victories helped build administrator’s enthusiasm for ratcheting up their ambition level.
This doesn’t mean that your shouldn’t enthusiastically get behind and participate in efforts by the school to undertake more comprehensive and complicated efforts, including inventories of the school’s global warming pollution, task forces, etc. We simply recommend that you prioritize shorter term asks to keep the momentum rolling over time.
This section of the toolkit is designed to help you figure out what your ask should be and how to takeit from just an idea into a concrete victory!
We suggest you break your campaign down into four steps:
1. Decide Your Ask.
2. Submit Your Ask.
3. Build Support for Your Ask.
4. Win and Implement!
“Saying that a country that can double the speed of microchips every 18 months is somehow incapable of innovating its way to energy independence - that is for sissies, defeatists and people who are ready to see American values eroded at home and abroad.” – Thomas Friedman, author and economist
1. Decide Your Ask
We recommend three steps to deciding your ask.
Step 1: Review Your Options:
We have already drafted sample policy proposals for you. Download them from www.climatechallenge.org and familiarize yourself with them and to decide which one you think makes the most sense for your campus. A brief summary of the options are listed below.
* Renewable Energy: To get as much of the university’s electricity from renewable energy, either from purchasing renewable energy from the local utility or by generating more energy on-campus from on-site solar panels and wind turbines.
* Conservation/Efficiency: One of the most cost-effective ways to reduce your campus’ usage of dirty energies. This can be as simple as policies to turn off all university computers at night, replacing all university lighting with compact fluorescent bulbs, purchasing more efficient appliances, or more comprehensive building construction codes.
* Transportation: Decreasing usage of fossil-fuel-powered transportation, using alternative fuels and/or upgrading to more efficient vehicles. Commuter travel to and from campus, is usually the largest source of emissions, so encouraging and supporting a shift to alternative forms of transportation, such as buses and carpools, to campus can have a large impact on total transportation emissions.
Step 2: Meet with the “Top Six” people on campus
After you have eyeballed a couple of options that your group is excited to push for, you should reality check your goal by meeting with the “Top 6” people on campus who’s support you will ultimately need and see how they react to your idea.
A sample meeting agenda and more on who you should meet with is located in the appendix.
Your goals should be to see if your policy idea passes their laugh test (if not, do they have a better idea?), and to figure out who the decision maker is and what will persuade them to accept your ask. Don’t make this too complicated. Here are the types of people you should probably meet with: the campus facilities director, the chair of the sustainability committee (if one exists), and environmental studies or engineering professor who is concerned with the issue, the Vice President for Business Affairs, the Student Government President, and other environmental or political groups.
Step 3: Decide on a policy
After you’ve done your meetings, it’s time to decide what policy you will advocate for. This decision should be based on your conversations with key players (what is most feasible politically?), and the types of projects that your campus would be realistically able to implement when limiting factors such as resources, available space, and weather patterns are taken into consideration.
Step 4: Develop your strategy:
Your next step is to figure out what exactly will it take to convince the decision maker to adopt the policy. Some tips on how to develop your strategy are in the appendix.
“We are living on this earth as if we had another one to go to.” ~ Terri Swearingen, Author, “The Long War With WTI (Waste Technologies Industries)”
2. Submit Your Ask
At this point, you have done all the leg work to get the campaign off the ground. You met with your Top six and figured out which proposal is best.
Now is the time to submit your ask to the decision maker. You can do this in three easy steps.
Step 1: Take Sample Proposal and Localize:
In the sample proposals, we’ve indicated the places that you will need to localize, but of course, use your own judgment about what is most appropriate. The key thing we recommend is not to feel like your proposal needs to include everything. Remember, the school should already have the expertise to make your proposal happen, so put the ball in their court to figure out the details. It would be a good idea to show the finalized proposal to one of your best allies from the meetings for suggestions.
Step 2: Submit with Cover Letter To Decision Makerand schedule a meeting with them:
Most importantly, you want to submit the proposal to the right people. Now is the time to refer back to that strategy chart you made (see appendix for details). Ideally, you can just submit your proposal directly to the person or people who are bottom line responsible for making the decision. Chances are, however, that you will not have direct access to the people, but instead, will have access to the people directly below the decision maker. Your objective is to submit your proposal to the person closest to the ultimate decision maker who you think will also the most supportive. That is up to you to figure out, but let us know if you need help!
We suggest submitting the proposal in person and via email. As soon as you submit the proposal, schedule a meeting with them to discuss the proposal in person.
Step 3: Meet with the decision-maker:
You’ve done a lot of great work so far and now is the time to figure out if your proposal is likely to get passed by the end of the year. Use this meeting as a time to pitch decision-makers on the Campus Climate Challenge and what you are looking to do. Ask lots of questions about what has been done in the past and anything that is being planned now. Your main objective is to get their advice on the best policy that you should advocate for. Check out the appendix for a sample meeting agenda.
“Human beings and the natural world are in a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and the animal kingdom, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know…a great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required, if cast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on the planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.” ~ World Scientists’ Call for Action, 1997
3. Build Support for Your Ask
After you submit your proposal, you will most likely need to build broad campus support for your proposal in order to win its approval. This effort will be greatly aided by the education side of the Challenge campaign but the policy people should devote themselves to this after submitting the proposal.
Step 1: Figure Out Who’s Support You Need
Go back to that strategy chart you made. Who are the particular people and organizations you will need to convince the administration to adopt your proposal? Will it be the student body? The student government president? The Facilities Manager who the Chancellor plays golf with every Saturday? All three? How do you need them to show their support? Should supporters show up at a Board of Trustees meeting? A petition? Letters to the campus paper? An endorsement letter from professors? A student government resolution? Finally, How much is enough? Do you need to get the entire campus to vote in a referendum to endorse the proposal or is a vote of the student government enough? 5000 signatures on a petition or 500?
Step 2: Build Support With Various Constituencies On Campus
Most likely, there will be a couple of key constituencies that you will need to get on board, including: student government, faculty endorsements, students and student groups, the campus paper, and the student body. See Appendix for a better description of how to get these constituencies on board.
Step 3: Communicate This Support to the Administration
There is more than one way to communicate this support to the administration. You can quietly deliver the endorsements and petitions to them or you can make a big public delivery with the campus paper in tow. How you do this is up to you.
Step 4: Be willing to compromise and negotiate
As you get into this stage of the process, you will need to stay in close contact with the administration and be willing to negotiate. The proposal will probably not be adopted in its original form, so be clear what the most important aspects of the proposal are and go from there.
“If we don't quickly move to renewable alternatives to fossil fuels, we will warm up, smoke up and choke up this planet far faster than at any time in the history of the world. Katrina will look like a day at the beach.” – Thomas Friedman, author and economist
4. Win and Implement!
Once the proposal has been adopted, congratulations!!!
The next step is to work to ensure that the proposal is correctly implemented.
There are two guiding principles for implementing a plan:
1. There should be broad student and faculty involvement. We suggest that the university create a committee of students, administrators, staff, and/or faculty to take on the responsibility of overseeing the implementation of the proposal. There are many models for how this works; you can see some of them at: www.ClimateChallenge.org.
2. There should be a mechanism to track progress each year and over time. Each year, there should be a mechanism to track how much the school has reduced greenhouse gas emissions, evaluate the school’s progress, and revise the overall plan so the school stays on track. The Challenge website is set up for you to report progress every six months, or after each victory, and will compile the amazing success stories from across North America!
