Hullo everyone!
This is a little message from the school strikers to all the lovely adults and organisations out there wanting to know how you can support us:
First off, we want to thank you for offering to help. As a grassroots, student-led network, we appreciate offers of support for our rapidly growing movement. In the past month, we have been flooded with beautiful messages of praise and offers of support. It has been incredible and we want you to know how much it means to us that adults have our backs in this big struggle for climate justice.
Given the volume of offers we are getting, we thought we would share some thoughts on things we find useful and things that we don’t:
Things we’d love your help with:
Promotion: if you have platforms through which you can share our messages and actions, we’d love you to do this. However, please be mindful of not speaking for us and instead just share the things that we have said or done, e.g. emails, social media posts, blogs, photos etc. Here is our promo content for the March 15 #ClimateStrike. If you are able to throw some cash behind promotion and advertising for our strikes and actions, please drop us a line. You can find other resources here.
Communications: we’d love your help with media support, video production, graphic design, and digital tools to help our decentralised national network to organise better. We will always shape our own messages and content, but we’d love help with getting this out and about in the world. After all, when we’re not striking we’re at school for at least 6 hours per day.
Logistics: we are planning a bunch of exciting actions and more big strikes in the lead up to the Federal election and beyond. If you can offer us help with gear (e.g. sound systems, stages etc), materials for banners and signs, and other equipment to help make our actions and events more awesome, that’d be so cool.
Introductions to influencers: if you know or are an influential person or group who can help us get out our messages more widely, please drop us a line. The more people hear from us and spread our demands for urgent climate action, the more pressure we can build on our politicians to act.
Putting deniers in their place: we don’t want to feed the trolls - after all they are just a noisy shrinking minority - but if you see unhelpful comments about us online or offline, please feel free to speak up in support of what we are doing.
Things we don’t want you to do:
Use us to boost your brand: our power lies in our independent, non-partisan, grassroots, and youth-led voice and actions. Please don’t make statements that suggest you are officially partnering or aligned with us without asking us whether this is ok.
Politicise us: please don’t align us with your political party. We are a non-partisan movement and always will be. We will continue to push all politicians and political parties to take the action necessary for a safe climate future, including 1. Stopping Adani, 2. Moving Australia beyond coal and gas and 3. Getting us to 100% renewable energy by 2030. We will never align ourselves with any politician or party.
Use us to fundraise for your work: our network is driven by the voluntary contributions of school students and parents. Please don’t use our achievements to fundraise for your organisation. It’s not really fair and makes us look like we are controlled and funded by external forces when we’re totally not.
Make decisions or statements about us, without us: please don’t put out requests or messages on our behalf without asking us. If you are asked a question about us, please pass it on to us so we can respond. If a decision needs to be made about our work, involve us in the conversation - we’re super keen to learn and be involved. After all, part of the problem with the climate crisis is that the people in power are making decisions about us without us.
Lecture us on what to do: we 100% appreciate that we are all still young. We absolutely want to learn from the experience of others with more experience than us. However, we hope you will do this in a sensitive way that creates space for our own ideas to flourish and bloom. With all due respect, adults have been discussing and campaigning on climate change for decades yet the climate crisis has only gotten worse.
Let’s combine our respective strengths to forge a better path ahead.
We would love to hear any ideas you might have and are excited about what we can achieve together. With climate impacts raining down around us, Adani promising to start digging their coal mine any day and a Federal Election around the corner, there has never been a more important time to bring fresh, new ideas and action to the movement for climate justice.
We are so humbled to be fighting this fight shoulder to shoulder with you all.
Sincerest thanks and appreciation
The school strikers for climate action xx
PS: you can contact us at: [email protected] - this is monitored by volunteers so apologies if we don't get back to you straight away.