This is not just another fundraising letter. We want to remind you of all the services we provide to help YOU protect your community from corporate polluters. After all, Energy Justice Network exists to empower, inform, advise and support grassroots activists to win victories -- transforming communities from dumping grounds for dirty energy and waste industries into vibrant places where clean solutions can flourish.
How we help you win:
Community Organizing Support and Advice - We've "been there and done that" and can help you get a community group organized and on a path to victory. We can help with strategy development, outreach plans, how to use open records laws and public hearings to your advantage, social media strategies, corporate research, designing flyers and websites, and much more.
Getting Networked! – We can put you in touch with other grassroots activists who you might want to know in your area, or those elsewhere who have fought the same company, technology or fuel, so you can learn from their experience. We also use conference calls and email discussion lists to help you connect on specific issues. We have lists on natural gas, nuclear, coal, several types of incineration (separate lists for trash, biomass, tire and poultry waste incineration), ethanol biorefineries, electric power transmission lines and more.
Information / Research – We document the problems with technologies that communities face, making complex info into useful factsheets, powerpoints and articles available through our newsletter, Energy Justice Now, and throughout our Energy Justice.net and EJnet.org websites. We have access to legal and science journal databases, and data from industry conferences that we can tap to help you.
Speaking / Trainings - Need a speaker, trainer or workshop presenter? We do trainings for students, community groups and conferences on a range of topics and skills. See Mike and Alex's topic lists for a guide.
Limited Legal and Technical Support - We help communities stop polluters with local ordinances, and understand many complex technical and legal issues.
Energy Justice Map - Our interactive mapping site tracks existing, proposed, closed and defeated dirty energy and waste facilities, the corporations behind them, and the people and groups fighting them. It allows you to share information on polluters you're fighting, let people find your group through our site, and learn what polluters are in (or planned for) your area.
Our new JusticeMap.org site is the first to enable easy race and class demographic mapping, and is being integrated into our mapping site, so you can easily build environmental justice maps, showing if polluters are targeting low-income or communities of color. Our newest EJ mapping tool allows you to evaluate environmental justice trends in entire industries.
Policy Analysis and Development - With an eye for loopholes that would allow polluting industries to continue to harm communities, we've pushed to strengthen energy, waste and climate policies at all levels of government, and among our environmental allies.
Working with Students and Youth - We have a long history with the student environmental movement, from working with the Student Environmental Action Coalition since the 1990s, to co-founding Energy Action Coalition in 2004, to founding state-wide student environmental networks in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Our new Energy Justice Shale Initiative has brought students and recent college graduates together in a group house to work with shalefield residents fighting fracking, compressor stations and pipelines in the most fracked community in the nation, in northeastern Pennsylvania.
An Energy Justice Shale Convergence is planned for mid-March to train students and others to support local residents in Susquehanna County, PA. We have other campus organizing resources compiled here.
Activist Calendar - Share your events on our calendar! It's the only one to organize events by geography, so if you sign up for our map and want event updates by email, you'll see all the major events, and only have to see the local ones for your area.
Action Alert System - Tired of using online petitions like change.org where you don't get all of the contact info from those who sign? So were we, so we made our own system, which Energy Justice member groups can also use (joining is free!). You'll get the full contact info from all who sign, and can target state or national legislators by district, or other email targets. Unlike change.org, the message will go to the target, and direct from the signer's email. Messages and alerts can include links and images, too! Contact us if you're interested.
How do we provide all of this with a skeleton crew of two full-time and four part-time people and almost no overhead costs? Let's just say, we're good at what we do, and are the best investment you can make to support grassroots work over the coming year! Please make a generous donation of $15-150 for 2015. Regular, monthly donations (no matter how small) are even better!
...and if we're the ones who should be supporting you, please be in touch and we'll join you on the path to victory!
Happy Holidays!
Mike, Traci, Aaron, Alex, Josh and Samantha