Friends,
Global Power Shift (GPS) is a new initiative that 350.org are undertaking to massively scale up the climate movement.
Six hundred people will meet in Turkey in June of 2013 to train and develop a coordinated strategy for the coming year. Then, they will go back to their home countries and organize national Power Shifts all over the world. It will be a series of truly unprecedented mobilizations to match the scale of the climate crisis.
Below is a quick overview of the desired candidates. First and foremost: people attending the GPS kick-off event in Istanbul will be expected to organize for the climate movement at a national level back home through 2013 and hopefully beyond. So, this requires people who are personally committed to the cause and have capacity to dedicate time and energy on national level organizing -either thanks to personal circumstances, resources/capacity within an existing group, or through new capacity-building/resourcing pursued in the context of organizing powershifts nationally.
Also, GPS will be primarily in English - special cases can be considered where possibly some sort of buddy-system can be developed for key people who don’t speak English, but hopefully most people will be highly comfortable in English.
Assuming that basic criteria is met, as much diversity as possible is in order:
- Groups/networks: people from different groups/networks - using GPS as a vehicle for initiating or strengthening relationships and partnership collaboration between groups/networks from the same country. For this reason, partners who already run powershift events/campaigns are encouraged to consider recruiting new partners to apply and go to Istanbul together to cultivate the new relationship/partnership potential.
- Movement experience: some participants are expected to be long-time leaders who will bring their wealth of experience/knowledge to the Istanbul event and to national organizing, but also new rising leaders with fresh ideas and energy are welcome.
- Skills: ideally, each team from each country would have some people in the group who excel in different elements of the following areas - though each individual doesn’t need to possess all these skills/experiences:
- Event organizing/logistics
- Campaign planning/strategy
- Grassroots organizing
- Action organizing
- Network facilitation
- Workshop facilitation
- Policy advocacy
- Online/web/social media
- Artivism
- Communications
- Background/Perspective: on the one hand, the event in Istanbul is expected to largely be a gathering of like-minded people from all over the world. That said, the organizers know participants will be coming from a huge diversity of international backgrounds, and they even want to encourage a diversity of backgrounds from within each country - some rural, front-line activists teamed up with urban, tech-savvy activists, for example. This will look different in each country context and what sort of people/issues/networks already exist in places, but this in-country diversity will strengthen the collective power moving forward.
- Geography: people from different parts of the same country (depending on the size of the country).
For more information, please visit the 350.org website and the campaign website.