The teens can’t go back out on the streets much, in order to save the planet. But they are Zooming, phone-banking, and working on their friends like crazy

Interesting report from the Guardian in the US, detailing how the Climate Strikers, the Sunrise Movement and others are adapting their protests to COVID conditions, which often prohibits against full street protests. We’ve put in bold below what their new techniques are:

In the 10 months since the historic protests, the Covid-19 pandemic has ravaged the US, making meeting and organizing in-person hazardous. Climate strikes, including a major three-day mass protest that was planned for Earth Day 2020 in April, have been cancelled.

But networks of youth climate activists have been regrouping, with a new focus on election campaigning with phone banks, social media and friend-to-friend organizing, according to interviews with organizers.

The stakes could not be higher for young people, according to Aracely Jimenez-Hudis, 23, the deputy communications director of the Sunrise Movement, a leading youth advocacy group on the climate.

“We are a generation that was really born into crises,” said Jimenez-Hudis. “We don’t have some golden age that we can look back on and feel that there is any kind of resonance with a call to normalcy because our normal has always been endless wars, has always been police brutality.”

…With the pandemic, Jimenez-Hudis said, the Sunrise Movement has shifted its electoral strategy to focus entirely on phone banking and friend-to-friend organizing – encouraging people to talk to their friends and relatives directly about the candidates they support.

“We still have lots of work to do to make sure that we get the right Democrats on the ballot, the right Green New Deal champions on the ballot for the election in November just up and down the ticket,” Jimenez-Hudis said.

The organization credits its phone banking volunteers for helping Jamaal Bowman, a former teacher who ousted a longtime congressman in New York, win his election and for tightening the race of Charles Booker, a Democrat in Kentucky who was hoping to run against the Republican senator Mitch McConnell.

…The organization recently started its #WideAwake campaign, encouraging local activists to protest outside the homes of elected officials. On Juneteenth, a local Sunrise chapter coordinated such a protest outside the home of Senator McConnell, demanding justice for Breonna Taylor, who was shot and killed in her home by police in Louisville, Kentucky.

…Rose Strauss, 20, a former organizer with the Sunrise Movement, said her time with the organization helped her understand the gravity of the 2020 election. She dropped out of college so she could dedicate all her time to the election and canvass for Senator Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire.

Once it became clear that Sanders was not going to win the nomination, Strauss and a few fellow activists began to dedicate their efforts to starting a new initiative called the Down Ballot Disruption Project. The program, held entirely over Zoom, aims to teach young people how to canvass for candidates in their local elections and how to build a community around their activism, especially on social media.

Young people can “change this election in massive ways. The only arena right now, because we can’t go and canvass outside, is social media. That’s where we know how to do stuff,” Strauss said. “We really need to make sure that the politicians who get elected this cycle are going to be the ones that are really caring about our futures.”

For activists with Zero Hour, the climate justice organization that coordinated a youth climate march in Washington DC in summer 2018, the focus for the 2020 election is less on getting individual candidates elected but broadly teaching young activists how to encourage their communities to get out to vote and educate them about the Green New Deal.

The organization, along with the National Children’s Campaign, launched the #Vote4OurFuture campaign in July, targeting youth activists in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania and Grand Rapids and Detroit in Michigan, two swing states.

The campaign was originally scheduled to be a bus tour in March, but coronavirus forced the organizations to change course. Now, the campaign is all about hosting virtual events like roundtables and webinars focusing on what the Green New Deal could look like in specific communities.

“We want climate change to be a top priority on people’s minds when they’re going to the polls in November because of the way it will impact people of colour and people living in those cities,” said Zanagee Artis, 20, the co-founder and deputy director of digital advocacy for Zero Hour.

While climate advocacy during the pandemic has largely been on video chats and social media, young activists are eager to get back on the streets. Fridays for Future, the global organization founded by Greta Thunberg, plans on holding a global climate strike on 25 September. Local chapters are working on what the protest will look like in their areas to accommodate local Covid-19 conditions.

Spencer Bregg, 17, an organizer with Fridays for Future NYC, said organizers are still working out the logistics of what the protest will look like, but the overall message of the demonstration will be to advocate for a “green recovery” and ensure that New York City continues to uphold its commitments to fighting climate change.

While the pandemic has left devastation across the city and in many other places in the US, activists are hopeful that coronavirus can provide parallels to climate change and show how a single crisis can affect everyone.

Coronavirus has “inspired a lot of people because it has shown us that the government can act quickly and efficiently to quell a crisis”, Bregg said. “That’s what this is: it’s a climate crisis. A lot of politicians say we can’t afford to do that, we don’t have enough time for this, but coronavirus showed us that we can have complete systematic change if we need to.” 

More here. And more on this story, from Teen Vogue and Gizmodo.