Citizens' Climate Lobby

Citizens' Climate Lobby is a grassroots environmental activist group that helps people engage with their government representatives to pass climate and environmentalist policies. The primary focus has been passing a national carbon fee and dividends—i.e. polluters pay a fee, which incentivizes reducing pollution, and that money goes back to individuals, which offsets things like higher gas costs. Additionally, at time of writing, another major focus is making it faster to get permits to build new clean energy infrastructure. Local chapters also often have other initiatives, on their own or with other local groups, such as helping families switch to more energy efficient heating, or getting local governments to build better pedestrian, bicycle, and public transit infrastructure.

If I recall correctly, I got connected with CCL Rochester through the Rochester Climate March. I had been concerned about climate and environmental issues more or less since I was old enough to be aware of them, but in elementary school, adults in my life focused much more on individual actions—recycling, using less electricity, driving hybrid cars, etc. I hadn't previously been in the loop on many specific national policy proposals until college, so I hadn't had specific things to write to my representatives about.

After folks in CCL Rochester helped me get more comfortable writing to and calling my representatives about things like the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act, and generally making some of the minutiae easier to understand, I wanted to help others, so I got more involved with the social media team as well as in-person tabling at events.

Coming from doing communications and social media for STAR, STARfest, and Second Avenue Learning, I was already versed in the platforms CCL Roc was using or wanted to make greater use of. I helped draft posts and create associated graphics to raise awareness of local initiatives, direct people to actions they could take, communicate data in digestible ways, and of course let them know about upcoming events.

After being the primary person posting to most of the social media feeds for a year and a half or so, the Coordinating Committee offered me official leadership of the social media team. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic moving most actions online, I continued serving in that role after moving to the Boston area—through the end of 2021.

At the same time, I started connecting with the CCL Boston and Boston Metro West chapters. There again, I looked for where I could help the social media team, becoming the primary person managing the Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter profiles. I also refreshed and reorganized the Linktree (and generally spruced up and improved consistency and interlinking between profiles), and later set up a Mastodon profile on the same instance as the CCL national account to try to retain followers who left Twitter after various Elon Musk actions. I also set up a Bluesky profile to potentially help people who left Twitter for that platform reconnect with us.

Of course the meat of what I do has been writing posts and creating graphics, much as I did with CCL Roc. Additionally, as I have gotten involved with other local groups with overlapping interests, I have helped facilitate connections—for instance, coordinating having a leader from Cambridge Bicycle Safety speak at a CCL Boston chapter meeting about the important pedestrian and bike infrastructure projects on the table for the 2023 election, and then helping get information cards to CCL volunteers to help distribute around the city.