Hi everyone!
I currently serve as one of the Secretaries for the Student Association on the Morris campus, and we were having conversations on what kind of goals and events we wanted to have and we kind of came up with the idea of a climate strike.
I started thinking about it, and I decided on a couple of things: 1. that the strike would be more impactful if it wasn’t organized not just by the University, but by the greater community 2. the strike would mean more if we have a specific goal or issue that we want to raise awareness of or show to either the state or municipal government what we would like to see be done.
After talking to Chris, Susan, and Nic this morning we kind of settled on a couple of things. It makes the most amount of sense to come up with something to target towards the state government, and it makes sense to pick a topic that is appeal to farmers and that focuses on uplifting our community/rural communities in general. Our main idea is to focus on decarbonization, mainly renewable energy development and carbon sequestration. Those may seem like the most obvious answers when it comes to climate change, but there is actually a lot of stuff around it that can really benefit farmers and other rural areas. The city government has also started to exhaust what renewable energy plans they have control over, and getting attention from other players and showing that Stevens County is a place where people want renewable energy would be awesome.
I still think there are other goals to figure out, but I kind of see the steps of planning this as finding a day, speakers, and coming up with an outreach plan for Morris and the surrounding communities.
We should still decide what we want particpants to get out of the event, what kind of legislative process we want, and do we want to do anything afterwards to keep building the momentum.
IF YOU WOULD BE INTERESTED IN SHARING YOUR THOUGHTS ON HOW TO MAKE THIS EVENT BETTER, PLEASE SHARE. I would love to hear feedback from any and everyone who wants to share it. We will probably also set up some planning meetings and invite students from the University as well. If you have any thoungts or know someone who might be interested in helping, please pass on the message!