Campaigning and Climate Change
"It's up to us!" Professor John Sweeney, Climate Change Expert. NUI Maynooth *Professor John Sweeney leads a number of nationally funded funded research projects examining various aspects of climate change in Ireland. As one of the contributing Authors and Review Editors of the recently published Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John shared with several hundred other climatologists the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. But remember, your peers and community are more likely to listen to and believe you than they are him!
Having heard from leading climate change expert, Professor John Sweeny, John Smith and Joanne McGarry from Trócaire’s Campaigns Team, and Hannah Evans, Trócaire’s Parish Outreach Team. What is your sense of climate change as a pressing issue in all of our lives? For this ‘action’ piece for the week ahead, the first thing to do would be to record your own thoughts. How you been ‘convinced + converted’? What will you change, if anything? It would then be very useful to get a sense from your peers or your colleagues or people in your community/parish what their view of climate change is. A quick ‘survey monkey’ (See www.surveymonkey. com) would be really interesting to circulate to your peers. •
Begin researching on Trócaire’s campaign? Is there anything there that grabs your attention? Is there anything missing in your view? You can view their material online by going to www.trocaire.org/uptous. Or by phoning Joanne, John or Hannah on 016293333. Say you’re phoning from a JustFaith group and you’ll be especially well looked after!
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What do you think – even at this early stagewould grab your community’s attention around climate change? What would get them active on it? What will ‘convince and convert’?
A little bit of prayer around this as you go would be essential. Where is your faith in all of this? What is your faith teaching you? In terms of the research piece itself you might consider: •
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A little bit of reading around the Church and care of creation. What does the Church teach? Does Pope Francis, in particular have anything to say on this? The Bishops’ Pastoral called the Cry of the Earth might be a good place to start in terms of getting an Irish Church perspective Check out who else is working in this area; look up the work of eco-congregation.ie for example. What are they up to?
Remember you don’t have to ‘do’ anything yet, or even ‘decide’ anything, it’s just about doing a bit of surveying and surfing to see what is out there and to get the creative juices flowing!
Social Media and the JustFaith Programme Blogging 1. Start! Sign up with a free hosting domain e.g. www.blog.com or www. blogger.com. Find one that works for you and just start writing 2. As you write, decide on where your focus is going to lie. What do you want the blog to achieve? Change in others’ behaviour? A reflection space to reflect on changes you decide to undertake? Or both? And don’t be afraid to challenge people. One of the best ways of doing this is about being honest about who you are! 3. Write from your own experience and learning so that it doesn’t sound ‘preachy’. 4. Sounds obvious but you obviously will want to get people to read your blog! Family, friends, you JustFaith group, fellow workers/students, people in the parish..... It doesn’t really matter in terms of numbers but you don’t want to be talking/ writingto the wall! 5. Use your Facebook page and Twitter to advertise your blog! Tweet and blog! 6. Take the time to respond to comments left so as to generate conversation and to make your ‘followers’ feel you’re actually listening to them as well! 7. Don’t lose interest or get disheartened. If you don’t stay committed, how can you expect your ‘followers’ to! Don’t stop believing! 8. Engage with other blogs! This is about connectivity and sharing after all! And this will generate more traffic to your blog too. 9. Short is sweet! 500 words maximum! Until you get more experience, keep it short (not Twitter short) but short enough to keep your readers’ attention! And convey information in descending order of importance - get all top line info into first couple of paragraphs, less important info in subsequent paragraphs. The reader should be able to stop after first few lines knowing what the story is about. 10. Enjoy! You’re potentially convincing and converting – don’t be afraid of the power within you to effect change in people’s hearts, minds and behaviour!
Twitter 1. Connecting with ‘multipliers’ to spread your message of change How do you do that - look at who you follow and who follows you and add people so you can connect with other people, groups and influencers in your area through twitter and promote events & evenings in the same way. Try to connect with similar groups who may want to connect with your work and you can build up a wider network. 2. To enhance your audience size beyond key people, groups and influencers that you can add directly, participate in #followfriday #ff to grow your followers and audience size to spread your message 3. If you are putting on a local parish event and to get publicity follow local papers and media and engage in conversation directly about your upcoming event - to this by using @ symbol eg. @localjournalist We are running an event 21 May, hope to see you there, on the day follow up with picture of the event send to @localjournalist great energy and community spirit at the ..... 4. Use pictures to engage audiences through ‘twitpic’ to upload photos directly onto your twitter account 5. Use # to make something topical and join a wider global conversation. Eg. You are running an evening on climate change #uptous #climatechange to spread your message. Look out for Trocaire # to connect to other volunteers in Ireland #justfaith #trocaire 6. Keep in contact with @Trocaire account about what you are doing. We can ‘retweet’ your message to reach a wider audience.
Facebook 1. Share photographs of events and meetings with Trocaire facebook page 2. You may want to set up a facebook group ‘Just Faith ...... Parish’ to communicate about upcoming events and to target wider community