My personal motivations for participating in movement-building stem from a steady process of feeling empowered through collective action with climate justice organizers. I wish to share my experience to help illustrate the profound impact that I believe climate justice organizing is having in Canada and how it is developing a resilient, creative, and cooperative understanding of my relationship with ‘power.’  (This entry is part of a  blog series, where I reflect on my personal growth while working with others to collectively address structural forms of oppression in my community).

The year two-thousand eleven was an interesting year for me personally. My most vivid memory of that new year goes back to early moments of the Arab Spring, where I took a special interest in how people were organizing socially to address injustice. In particular, I took a special interest in the smart-mobs of the North African country Tunisia — or the necessary groundwork that was needed to maximize the impact of social media. This inspiring call to action from youth around the world had inspired me to take action in my community and I began seeking collective action.

After the 41st Canadian General Election, a moment in time that has changed my life, many Canadians began taking action and organizing for a social, economic and environmental justice. My role in this effort to organize fell within the mandate of the 2011 Canadian Youth Delegation (CYD) and I was selected as one of eighteen youth to attend the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) in Durban South Africa. The CYD was so much more than a simple youth climate justice advocacy group, it was a breeding ground for creative, inspirational, and effective action.

There are many places in the year 2011 that I could consider to be moments of politicization — driven to political engagement and action. One such moment that comes to mind is a workshop series hosted by the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition (CYCC) called Power Summer. In particular, Power Summer Atlantic, or the Atlantic Eco-Warrior Training Camp, was a collaborative project between the CYCC and the Sierra Youth Coalition (SYC). The SYC’s Youth Action Gathering was focused on high-school aged students, while the CYCC’s Power Summer was targeted at youth ages 18 and up. Not only was I attending as part of my commitments to the CYD, but also as someone who was completely new to this kind of community organizing. Many of my new friends from the CYD lead the preparation and organizing for Power Summer Atlantic, so by virtue of spending hanging out I was exposed to the process of organizing for an event — but longed for more exposure.

The training camp included training in popular education, action & strategy, communications, messaging, campaign planning, and other important organizing skills for social change, while building our collective understanding of climate justice and how we build a movement to achieve it. The three-day, weekend long camps used participatory, direct education to train the next generation of climate warriors and trainers. Upon learning about this kind of engagement in social change I was convinced that this was some kind of breakthrough in social change activism — a novel idea. One of the most inspirational workshops at the training camp was the one on a popular history of social movements. This is where I learned about the idea of having training camps across the country, strategically organizing for collective action, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s participation in Freedom Summer during the civil rights movement. I had learned that Power Summer, of which I was participating, was inspired directly by Freedom Summer and the Freedom Schools. After Power Summer Atlantic, I felt rejuvenated and inspired deeply for collective action to address climate injustice.

In the Fall of 2011, the Occupy Movement took hold in my community and I was eager to apply my newly acquired skills in anti-oppression, tactics and strategy for social change, but commitments to my employer and a focus on working with the CYD made it difficult to lend a meaningful contribution. However, the Occupy Movement and associated dissatisfaction with the greater social, economic and ecological conditions reinforced my commitment to the skills I had acquired at during the trainings in August. My focus was as a member of the policy/research working group with the CYD in Durban for COP17.

My participation with Canadian Youth Delegation in November-December of 2011 was a rich, fulfilling, and reflexive experience that deserves many paragraphs to fully illustrate its impact on my motivation as an organizer, so I choose to briefly touch on it in a general sense.

As a member of a highly organized team of committed, passionate and creative youth living in Canada, I contributed to an effective campaign to redirect the climate change narrative away from the Canadian Government to a frontline youth demographic — illustrating the imperative to put people before polluters. While the politics of the Canadian Government remain the same, I feel that our creative actions in Durban help to create more space for youth in Canada, and at the international level, to take action for climate justice. Canada still pulled out of Kyoto and, as a global pariah, is now an international symbol for inaction on climate change. While returning home to Canada, something in the airport caught my eye — something that I have mixed feelings about as I think deeper about what I means to building a global movement of solidarity.

Time’s declaration of 2011 as “The year of The Protestor” is a pretty broad statement. Riding from the high of a well-executed narrative-based campaign in Durban, I was initially excited to see that even the mainstream media had felt the need to recognize the importance of people protesting across the globe (Arab Spring, Austerity in Greece, the Occupy Movement, Indignados in Spain, and student protests in Chile), but it wasn’t long before my critical analysis began to set in and challenge what this kind of recognition meant for movement building at the grassroots. While thinking critically about my newfound “role” as a protester, or The Activist, I began to dig deeper to understand what building a global solidarity movement meant to me. What is my relationship with power? How is my understanding of power transforming? What kind of power do I seek? What does it mean to be an “Activist”? How can I contribute to building a climate justice movement where my life is not set aside? How do I relate structural and personal power? These are many questions I continue to ask myself as I seek to thrive as a fellow citizen, not merely survive and live a life of sacrifice as an activist committed to the abstract, the un-relatable, or ‘the cause.’ ~