Challenges

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Go Beyond Challenges is one of the four pillars of the goBEYOND and is about offering adaptable projects for campus organizations that want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while engaging their community. The goBEYOND Challenge is the cornerstone of this pillar.


2009/10 Program Planning

At the 2009 goBeyond Project Development Summit, participants had an opportunity to give feedback on the future of the Challenge Pillar. We knew we wanted to develop a tangible emissions project, but we didn’t know what it was going to look like. There was a lot of ideas on the table: a residence reduction challenge, a inter-regional challenge competition, a neighborhood challenge where students would provide weather stripping and other energy reducing household goodies to student housing, and a House Challenge where people would challenge their house mates to emissions reductions.

With so many ideas, our challenge was to pick one that would be successful, and to develop it over the summer. The feedback we received was a need to work on better mechanisms to follow up with challenges at the local level, a need to improve our website back up and email retrieve-ability. Our new emissions reduction program would be a “Where you Live Challenge” – a working title for a projects that combines aspects of the residence challenge, the house challenge and the neighborhood challenge – as well as successful programs like the Sierra Clubs Carbon Emissions Reduction Circles (or the CERCle program).

Lessons Learned

We have identified the following as core lessons that we have learned from our experience with the first year of the Challenge Pillar:

  • Need to make sure that the Challenge fits to the capacity of campus groups
  • Make sure that the Challenge can scale up and develop group capacity
  • Must be ready before September
  • Make it fun and engaging
  • Ensure that the Challenge creates networks that are bringing people together to create collective solutions
  • Improve the follow-through for Challenge participants, including both on-campus activities, email retrieval and follow-up, and opportunities to go beyond

Broad Framework

We will continue the Personal Challenge and develop a "Where you live Challenge" that is rooted in the House Challenge prototype and allows neighbourhoods, residences, and other kinds of groups to set Group targets for themselves. We will also develop our infrastructure to help people go beyond climate-neutral by working together to solve problems. Finally, we will focus on sharing stories and showing people that they are part of something larger than themselves in order to motivate people to change and spread the change.

Goals and Objectives

2009/10 Challenge Pillar Goals and Objectives:

Result Goals:

  • Achieve measurable GHG emission reductions in our areas of focus (transportation, food, and home) that can be compared by region
    • Objective: # of people that take the Challenge
    • Objective: percent and absolute change in GHG emissions by area and region
  • Challengers will take diverse opportunities to go beyond
    • Objective: # of opportunities to learn about local, provincial, national, or international issues
      • Event participation, email views, survey, facebook week of change
    • Objective: # of opportunities to volunteer with groups for local, provincial, national, or international issues and # of people who follow-through to volunteer
      • Use a good maps system to have people show where they are volunteering, events, email views, survey, facebook week of change
    • Objective: # of opportunities to vote and give feedback on local, provincial, national, or international issues and # of people who do vote and give feedback
      • Directly track

Process Goals:

  • Hop social networks and hop from engaged people to people who are not educated on the issues and/or who are not yet inspired to act
    • Objective: # of people who do Green Plan Workshops in their communities and # of people who attend those workshops
    • Objective: # of people who take the House Challenge to their homes and the # of people in the homes
    • Objectives: # of people who set a group target and the # of people and homes in their group who participate
  • Connect students/staff/faculty with each other and with the community
    • Objective: # of student clubs or groups engaged
    • Objective: # of departments engaged
    • Objective: # of local groups engaged
    • Objective: # of community-campus events and organized and # of people attending
    • Objective: # of train-the-trainer Green Plan Workshops organized and # of people attending
  • Develop capacity to organize and support collective action with local roots in neighborhoods and communities
    • Objective: # of Challengers on regional listservs
    • Objective: # of opportunities to go beyond by supporting local action given to regional Challengers

Challenge Timeline

The following are two timelines for the Challenge Pillar. The first is a potential timeline for someone that we connect with to take the Challenge. This is a potential timeline because there are several other ways that we could connect with someone and then several different possible "ladders of engagement":

  1. Take the goBeyond Personal Challenge by using the online calculator
  2. Receive an email and attend a Green Plan Workshop and/or learn more about green planning on the goBeyond blogs in the "Changes" section
    • Declare how you're going beyond on facebook, materials, etc.
  3. Go beyond by hosting a Green Plan Workshop in your home, dorm room or workplace and distribute an updated version of the House Challenge to the participants.
  4. Follow up with a collective target for the group and measure changing impacts through the carbon calculator
  5. Go beyond by
    • learning more about climate change issues and action through listservs and campus events,
    • get involved in linked projects,
    • and take opportunities to vote and give feedback about your preference in local, regional, provincial, and international issues
    • do a monthly Spread the Change Day message announcing how you're going beyond on facebook, twitter, email, IRL

The following is the rough timeline for the Challenge Pillar from the perspective of goBeyond organizers:

  1. Provide training for groups on outreach and capacity building
  2. Outreach for the goBeyond Personal Challenge, connected to getting feedback on the Six Ideas for Cross-Provincial Collaboration (really need a catchier name for this...Six Big Ideas?) through September and October
  3. Send out emails with opportunities for Challengers to go beyond from September on
  4. Organize the first Spread the Change Day of messaging out how people are going beyond
  5. Deliver Green Plan Workshops in October and November and encourage people to sign up for the House Challenge
  6. Do Share the Change Workshops in November and sign up Groups to take the Challenge

Programming Elements

The following are potential programming elements:

goBeyond Website Update

  • Have a box on the front-page of the website invite people take the Challenge
  • Have a pop-up screen on the Calculator and on the Change Exchange that invites people to take the Challenge, explains what it is, asks them for their info, and asks them if they want to receive emails from us
  • Update the calculator numbers
  • Add an electricity conservation checklist that shows people how good their conservation practices are
  • Add an ability to change provinces and get accurate GHG numbers
  • Create a new group function that allows people to form and join groups of people that are taking the Challenge and trying for groups targets

Major Outreach

  • September and October will be prime periods for doing Challenge outreach.
    • Challenge outreach should give people things - like cookies or applies, and be a fun experience for the volunteers.
  • We will provide training and materials on Challenge outreach
    • Challenge outreach training should include training on how to scale up the organization and build capacity efficiently
  • Spread the Change Day!
  • Outreach modes include:
    • Facebook, twitter, youtube
      • Make sure people on Facebook are inviting their friends simultaneously
    • Tabling
    • Events (Party for the Planet!)
    • Classroom speaking

Green Plan Workshops

  • The Green Plan Workshops would be offered to people that have taken the Challenge
  • Workshop would serve to build communities of people taking action, give people knowledge of problems and solutions, and set group emissions and action goals.

Give useful prizes - like weather stripping, home reno kits - and offer them as prizes to people who attend work shop Bring food

Suggested Components of workshop (time: 1.5 hours):

    • Intro - 5 minutes send out sign up sheet
    • Video intro about climate change, impacts, and solutions - ask Bonnie to update Teach In video with less teach in more climate change - 5 minutes
    • Discussion: What Climate Change Means to you (Pair and Share - 10 minutes
    • Calculate Footprint - 5 minutes
    • Discussion on Personal Impacts 15 minutes
    • Mapping service webs : discuss the concept and group exercise. Either have people suggest services, or we could map out one or two services and associated materials. this portion think piece to connect with need for larger system wide change. 20 minutes
    • Group Mind Map (based on REgional solutions topics0: Looking at local projects that could make a big difference. Bring in local goBeyond Rep 10
    • create a group target/action plan 15 - big piece of paper with action plan, everyone sign it. end workshop with group picture with the targets. email them the photo with follow up resources)
    • Next Steps 15
  1. buddy system - set participants up with a support network of one or two people. set next meeting then
  2. follow up meeting after deadline ( need to develop parameters )
  3. spreading the challenge

Follow Up

  1. get them to join goBeyond facebook group, blogs, troubleshooting emails
  2. Giving people the tools to sign their friends up for the Challenge and
  3. give workshop - email with resource links (video, calculator, workshop outline)

Objectives -want to feature other ways students can reduce their emissions -avoid being preachy - based on discussion and exploration -buddy system (match people up for support) -add section on consumerism (goods and services) -want to connect people to the idea of how personal change needs to meet societal change. -want it to be fun!

Timeline

  • Pilot workshop at UBC in first week of Sept (Angela and Tria)
  • Challenge Call next week - update peeps (angela set up)
  • flesh out service web and group targets
  • Follow up email/resources
  • New Names

Spread the Change Workshop

deliver first one at YAG

  • We want people to go beyond by signing up their friends and family to take the House Challenge and setting group targets for emission reductions and goals to go beyond.
    • In addition to the Green Plan Workshop resources this requires the following:
      • Conversation starting points
      • A way to set goals and targets
      • A clean promotional campaign about “going beyond” and doing more to solve the problem that gives people a broader sense of purpose
  • We can offer a train-the-trainer style workshop to teach people to sign their networks of friends and family up and deliver Green Plan Workshops
  • In order to get a good turnout (and media) we can advertise heavily on and off campus.
  • We could offer one Spread the Change Workshop in the following cities (maybe per semester, but most likely one):
    • Kamloops
    • Kelowna
    • Prince George
    • Nanaimo
    • Burnaby
    • Abbotsford
    • Victoria
    • Colwood
    • Vancouver
  • We can arrange tours for Novemeber and piggyback with campus visits and other trainings.
  • Also Novemeber would be a good time to give people tools to bring the House Challenge home over the holidays.

Helping People Go Beyond

  • The blogs and Change Exchange will provide the primary vehicle for sharing stories and options for change
  • Use email lists to connect Challengers to our blogs and website
  • Use email lists to connect Challengers to initiatives from the other pillars
  • Use email lists to provide people with info and volunteer opportunities, and to give ask for their votes and feedback on issues that are relevant to them
  • Invite people to join the Dialogue listserv
  • Potentially organize "Conversations on Climate Change" on topics with a provincial tie-in through the blogs and dialogue listserv
  • Ultimately, our tools for helping people to go beyond can include creating toolkits for simple projects people can take on (ie like Sustainability ambassador program, turn it off stickers), with case studies in a simple package.

Event Bank

  • The Event Bank will be a list of possible events that groups could use to organize events on their campuses, and that would be updated and improved through feedback.

Program Development Workplan

goBeyond Website Update

  • Do a webiste review and update (Sean and Jamie)
    • Create a conservation checklist based on the PowerSmart materials [1]
  • Develop a plan for tracking the number of people that are taking the Personal Challenge, House Challenge, and signing up for a Group Challenge. This is intimately connected with the website stuff. (Sean, Jamie, Tria)

Green Plan Workshop

  • Do a resource review
  • Develop the Green Plan Workshop (Tria and Angela with materials from Jamie)

Spread the Change

  • Basically all of the points in the plan section above are in need of development

Help People Go Beyond

  • Sign people up to blog and provide changes for the Change Exchange
  • Develop the listserv systems and protocol to connect Challengers regionally and provincially
  • Develop an engagement plan for linking the Challengers with other pillars and voting and feedback mechanisms (Spencer, Jamie)
    • Another part of this is linking with the decision-making system that we've developed (Spencer, Jamie)

Event Bank

  • Develop the Event Bank by asking for sample events from our network, and doing complimentary research. Establish the Event Bank on the wiki. (Angela)

Case Studies

  • Research on people who are doing the network action well, Obama (Jamie) Be the Change and Acorn (Spencer)

Online Community Discussion Forum

The Challenge Group has a discussion forum on the goBeyond Online Community. You can find it here: Challenge Group Discussion Forum

2008 Programming

The following materials are from the 2007-2008 programming cycle.

The goBEYOND Challenge

The Challenge is to go beyond climate-neutral today so our society can become climate-neutral tomorrow. By the middle of this century – within the adult lifetime of today’s students – our global society must build a world that creates virtually no carbon emissions. The Challenge is to re-imagine our future together, take action in our personal lives today, and work together to make a climate-neutral future a reality.

How do you go beyond climate-neutral? Take responsibility for how you are spending the carbon budget by making choices and creating a plan to become climate-neutral. Take opportunities to work with people and organizations to create large solutions together.

Take the goBEYOND Challenge!

Residence Reduction Challenge

Campus residences provide an ideal place to engage students in sustainability and energy conservation practices that they will take beyond residence life. Firstly, living in residence offers a once-in-a-lifetime experience for students, many of whom are living on their own for the first time and cultivating their own unique lifestyles. By reaching students in the space in which they live, work, and learn, we can give them the tools to develop more sustainable habits in their daily lives. Secondly, residences also act as microcosms of larger communities, allowing students to contribute their own strengths to sustainability issues. These actions positively affect the larger community as residents help their campuses reduce their overall energy footprints.

Several Residence Halls have sustainability programs. If you would like to learn more, or are interested in starting a program on your campus, please contact mbaynham (at) campusclimatenetwork.org

Invent the Future Contest

Invent the Future will create an outlet for youth to express innovative ideas on behavioural or technological energy conservation and climate change solutions through a video or essay contest submission. In partnership with BC Hydro and GIFTS Film School, Go Beyond will provide support for students who would like to make a submission, and offer resources and networks for those that would like to take their idea and make it a reality. Submit your ideas now!

Image:Itf emailv4.jpg

Resources

Links

Check out the history of the development of the Challenges Pillar!

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