We're going to talk about something which I think is probably an objective that most of us share, which is making all of our services that we provide online accessible to all members of our public, even those who are using adaptive technologies of various sorts. And I hope it's useful because it's a slightly different approach than we have done with other library projects and initiatives, and so I thought it was worth talking about. I think, oh, I shouldn't also say who we are. Sorry, I'm Suzanne Wands. I'm Associate University Library and for Digital Strategies and Innovation at the Harvard Library, and this is Claire Marco. Claire Marco, I'm Associate Director for the same thing at Harvard Library. And so we're here to talk about a task force that we just recently wrapped up focusing on an evaluation of our, the accessibility of all of our public facing systems. And so this is an objective that we've had for many years. We are also trying very hard to make sure that all of our physical spaces are as accessible as they can be to all of our users. But we recently got a real injection of motivation from the university, which in the spring passed a new university accessibility policy for online materials. And this was both sort of simultaneously surprising and not surprising. So it wasn't surprising because this has been a concern for all of us on campus. And many of us were already taking strides and actions to make sure that our stuff was accessible. So the library had been playing a fairly strong, I think, leadership role on campus in this area. In 2015, we opened a user research center on campus, which as one of its main goals was to allow for the testing of products using adaptive technology equipment that we have in the lab and providing an accessibility testing services that anyone on campus can use and that the library has been promoting very strongly. Likewise, the Harvard University IT, the central IT for the campus had adopted an accessibility policy for their work and had created a contract writer for all third party vendors that was around accessibility standards. So there was a lot of strong interest in making our stuff good and usable by all. But it was Harvard remains a very decentralized institution. And so adoption of these standards and policies and contract writers was very much school by school. So people could decide whether or not to uphold these standards or not in the way that they chose. So it was surprising in a very good way that the university decided to pass a campus wide mandate that all of our online services should attain certain accessibility standards by December 1st, 2019. So that gave us a nice kind of short window to test all of our stuff, which, you know, is good because everyone needs a deadline. So that was great. And for me, it was particularly great that I have someone who's very good at working to deadlines on my staff that I could turn to and she came up with a really great and innovative way for us to very quickly in an action biased manner and evaluate all of our systems in a way that would make it hopefully easier for our technical staff to really understand what changes need to be made and build up a community of people who really understand what good accessibility practices are overall. So Claire, I'm going to turn it over to you. So as Suzanne said, we all understand that this work is really critical. And I know that's been a topic of interest for some time at this particular meeting, but we wanted to get to a place where we truly treat accessibility as a first priority, not secondary. And while auditing and documenting accessibility issues sounds boring and like it's going to result in a long list of someone to do items for someone that will be on a backlog and be prioritized at some point, that doesn't really feel like putting accessibility first. That doesn't feel like setting a priority. So what the idea behind this project was, is what if we modeled the way of treating accessibility remediation after the way that we do digital product development at Harvard? So we think that that starts with the people. We wanted to look at the people who are actually making digital content for our users. So that's not just the library of T group. Also reference librarians who are creating lib guides and academic technologists who support faculty, experts from special collections who are making digital exhibits. We wanted the task force to be as diverse as those groups. And then as Suzanne said, help kind of establish a culture and a group of people who understood the importance of this work and how to do it in an actionable way. So this is the folks that were on the team. We chose motivated people. This wasn't about representation of different groups across the library. It was who's interested, who's motivated. And we communicated a clear goal for them, but then let them self-organize as much as possible. We wanted to acknowledge that we were trying something new and that that might be scary. So we partnered team members together based on what we knew about them and their expertise to help build autonomy so that they felt empowered to make decisions and self-efficacy, that they could make those decisions and then iterate on them throughout the course of the work cycle. And despite this large scale of this project, we actually had a pretty narrow focus. We were only targeting public facing user interfaces supported by the library. So all staff side interfaces are not part of what's required under this policy. Not to say that we aren't going to then iterate on this approach and apply that to the same support for our staff. But in order to prove this as a proof of concept, we had that narrow scope and we grouped our common types of user interfaces together. So things that were built in common, you know, coding languages, things that had similar vendors backed. We grouped them together and assigned them to these teams, two or three people in each team. And we gave them the goal of documenting all of the issues, but not all of the instances of those issues. And that becomes important in a moment. So we didn't have an existing framework for accessibility remediation and we did a landscape review and we found many great VPATs. That's the voluntary product accessibility templates out there. But since we wanted to think differently, not just about the outcome of the work, but how the work was done, we turned, as I said, to the way that we've been doing product development. And so we looked for agile principles that we could apply here for these types of policy changes or non-technical changes in the library. So we wanted to use a scrum framework that would give us a time box approach. And for anyone who's not familiar with agile, the agile manifesto in the room, the first principle I've already articulated, which is build projects around motivated people, give them the environment, the support they need and trust them to get the job done. So that's why I keep referring to the team first. A couple of other agile principles that we brought into this project delivering frequently. Here we aren't delivering working software, but we were delivering in terms of the issues that we were documenting with a preference to a shorter time sale. So we did two-week sprints. Again, not development work, but time boxing, bringing business people and developers together daily. So we did a daily scrum. We had a one-hour public demo that we invited other people to where people could show the issues they found, talk about particularly confusing issues, things that were tough for them to document and guide each other on how they approach that work. And then we did a team retrospective at the end of each sprint as well. So we wanted to reflect on how we could be more effective, what was working, what wasn't. And we didn't have strict timelines for people as they were looking at different products. Oh, you have to do this one in sprint one and this one in sprint two. Again, we let them self-organize. So sometimes some of the teams work very quickly through maybe a smaller product and others would take longer and we allowed the retrospective to guide our conversation about that. So we did have some lightweight tools, although we allowed people to self-organize. We didn't want them to start from scratch. We wanted to make it easy to get started so that actionability piece. So we had done a previous review of our main library catalog, Hollis. And so we used a template for a workbook for that, you know, keeping track, documenting the issues. But we ran open to changing and adapting that framework across the project. So we had these workbooks for issue tracking. We allowed teams to set which page types or which parts of a page they were looking at to document very few things. The area of the page, the issue description, the WCAG criteria, the person or group that they thought would be responsible for the fix and then adding any notes or screenshots. And all we were asking them to do was we use the site improve extension and a manual review just of keyboarding, zooming in to increase the page size and checking for captions or transcriptions. That's by far not the only way to have done this, but by telling people that was all that they were required to do. We actually found that some people who had more expertise would go beyond. We had a non-sided person on the team who did a JAWS review of a lot of things, not because that was a requirement for this work, but because that would help enhance the findings that we found. So we thought strategically and with that kind of mindset about really what is required to make this actionable, not what in the best world case scenario of whatever true accessibility means could we do. So again, about halfway through the project, we moved from just trying to be action oriented and getting started to setting priorities. We wanted to think about our findings and how we would translate those for the people who would actually be carrying out the remediation. And as Suzanne mentioned, some of those people were on this team, but they work with and our colleagues with other people who were not. And so we wanted to think about how the work that we were doing would translate for those folks. So we again, my priority is the team here. So I won't go too deep into this, but we use a series of high performance team protocols developed by someone named Richard Kasparowski. If you all are in the agile space, his work is based on what Jim and Michelle McCarthy had done in terms of the core commitments. And the focus of that is really psychological safety in a team environment. And it starts with positive bias, the concept of freedom, self-awareness, connection, productivity and error handling. And I have a whole other talk about that that I can do. But the reason that I mention it is I was keenly aware of the emotional labor involved. This work, accessibility work has a significant impact on people's lives and that can feel very inspiring and make people want to get involved, but it can also be create a lot of fear and anxiety about am I qualified to be the expert in the room saying whether or not this is a major accessibility issue. So I wanted to give the team a sense of support and autonomy. As far as Harvard Library was concerned, there were no better experts in the room than or among our staff than the people in the room who, again, were motivated individuals that we brought together to do this work. One of them is the head of UX and digital accessibility who reports to me. So yes, there were experts in the room, but we wanted everyone to have that same sense of setting priorities. So our prioritization framework was very light and again was was developed by our head of UX and digital accessibility. She found support in the work of Carl Groves. If you're familiar with Carl Groves, we only had three categories. High impact, medium impact and low impact. So high impact users will be unable to perform important system tasks or unable to understand important content if the item is not repaired all the way down to low impact, which is an inconvenience, but users will be able to accomplish all tasks. Oh, I should say we also looked at some great work that's being done at Duke. They have some great web accessibility guides as well. So when we were looking at this high, medium and low, we also looked at the idea of is it a barrier or is it a usability issue? Is it what is the feature that we're talking about in this issue? Is it really important to the user's experience of this page? Is the content that's being conveyed by this essential? And then looking at conformance level, is this a single A or double A WCAG issue? That was critically important for our vended solution. So if the audience that we're communicating back to in terms of remediation is a vendor, we want to make sure that we can say here is the criteria that we're talking about and here's the conformance level that we're not meeting. And as Susan said, Hewitt had done a lot of work to try to get sorry, our Central University IT had done a lot of work to try to get these accessibility writers into all of our vended contracts. So we want to make sure that everyone's holding up their end of the bargain. And then we wanted to continuously integrate our work with effort. So the world didn't stop just because we were reviewing our systems for accessibility issues. We had ongoing enhancements and development work that was happening, but we wanted to make sure that people, again, had that sense that they were examining issues across page types. They were looking at what the user experience of a particular system would be. And we didn't want to have to the the remediators have to re review and reconstruct every issue in order to understand why it was a problem. So that was how our setting our priorities transitioned into how we communicated about the the issues. So when we communicate about our product development, we use a content strategy framework where we highlight who the audience is for this, what the goal is for a particular page or system, the value proposition, what's needed to educate the user validation and a components list. Again, we can talk a whole series about content strategy, but we wanted to apply that same thing to our communications artifacts. We wanted to be strategic about how we talked about the work. So this is an image on the left of sorry, on your right of a cover sheet. So the first communication artifact we generated was a cover sheet. And we imagine this as a one pager that a developer or content creator might use as a motivator for the work and a reminder of the impact of the work. This was not a document that in and of itself would give everyone everything they needed to fix the problems. But it would, because it was focused around a user story, it would draw your attention to things that were critical and important for users encountering this system. So I just want to highlight a couple of pieces of this beyond the accessibility user story. The next thing is that frequently occurring issues list. And again, with our priority on making this actionable, we wanted the folks conducting remediation to know not only, okay, what are the critical issues, what got that high level in the rating, which is down below in the summary. But if something is frequently occurring, in many cases, it could be one fix that would have a broad impact across the system. And so bringing those to the attention of the remediator was really important. Again, for that feeling of self efficacy, if I fix this one thing and it fixes it in 20 places in the system, I've just improved someone's life. The other area of interest here is the quote from the reviewer. And this again is to maintain the human connection between someone who took time out of their work. This was one of those other duties as assigned pieces for work of work for people who otherwise have full time jobs to say, I looked at this system, and I looked at it not just to say that you did a good job or a bad job, I or to document a list of issues and give you more work to do. I did it in a context. And so it really gave that opportunity for reflecting on the broad findings, maybe not something completely specific or that was borne out clearly by the individual issues as a list. And I should say also in terms of the psychological safety here, a lot of the people on the team doing the review are the same people who built these systems initially. So I have members of my staff who were viewing their own work and reviewing the work of other people in that room. So to say, hey, we're all humans and we're all doing our best and we're trying to make these products more accessible. That was a common mantra for all of us. And then lastly, as we moved from that first piece, that first design artifact, we then had the idea that we needed to communicate the value proposition to our leadership audience. So this is a draft of a dashboard or a placemat, as for some reason has become the term we're using here that was born out of sharing the cover sheets with management in library technology services, responding to their feedback and then doing another content strategy and sketching session around what would leadership want to know about this project as a whole, not about an individual system. And as you can imagine, the early sense that we got, you know, that Suzanne was able to communicate with leadership was, you know, people wanted a score. How accessible are we? Who's to blame? What's the bad system? Right? And we wanted to give them some of what they wanted, some of what they anticipated getting out of this work. But really, we wanted to put put forth the principle that accessibility is never done. And therefore, the impact of this work was more about how we did it and how it aligns to our product development lifecycle and how we can put accessibility first than any one finding or any one system. It will obviously help us to allocate resources in the future and figure out how staff need to swarm on our particular system. And Suzanne can talk a little bit more about when you want to make those communication artifacts that that communicate your value proposition. You also want to make that actionable in terms of the next steps for this work. So that, yeah, you guys got to see that draft of the placemat for library leadership has actually seen. Yeah. So that's exciting. But yeah, it is doing the work in a transparent way. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly, which is great. So we are in the process now of developing an action plan. The as Claire said, the library technology services managers who will be overseeing the staff for doing all the remediation have now with Claire and with Amy as well. And so have seen the cover sheets have signed off on the work being added to the backlog. That university accessibility policy gave us in a very important grandfather clause, which was basically that all of our systems that were alive before December 1st are OK. But any new systems we bring up will need to be in compliance. But we're trying to go beyond that and really on the spirit of the policy rather than just the date of December 1 for new systems. So we are going to be remediating the high priority and median priority action items. And then we also just learned a lot about using this model going forward for other types of library work and university work. So with that university accessibility policy, a lot of departments who haven't given as much thought to this as library heads were kind of feeling like they didn't know how to even get started. So we are sharing this model with the University Accessibility Office and the what is it? Digital Accessibility Services offices, which is a brand new office so that they can use it as a way to communicate with others and an unapproach that they could use to evaluate their systems and services. And in the library, unless on, you know, I think Claire said a great job of showing how we can use this as we create our new digital products to make sure that accessibility is front and center from the start and not as a tag on. But also beyond that for non technical projects, I think it really is a great way to show team projects, committees, dare I say, that there is a way that they can be a little bit more action focused. So this that using some of the agile principles of like having a daily stand up just in the morning, we did that on slack, super easy, just very quickly. Here's what I'm going to be able to do today, or I'm not going to be able to look at this at all today, just so people were kind of like constantly had it on their radar, constantly were accountable for what they could or could not get done in any given sprint. And then the demos were, you know, instead of people coming to a committee meeting a month after they had said they would do something and say, oh, I never got to do that. You know, in the demo, everyone would go around and talk about what they did and show it. And it was a very a very non threatening way to do that. And when people said I couldn't get to it, it was like, OK, we understand that happens all of us. So it was a really, I thought a really great environment and really great way to show people that that's a that's a way to get work done. And then one, you know, cleared a couple of things that she could talk about for hours. The other thing that we could talk about for hours is our content that we have digitized. Not all of that is accessible yet. So it wasn't part of this evaluation system. Again, anything that we have digitized before December 1st is kind of grandfathered, but obviously we would like to make as much of our content fully accessible as possible. So for the past two or three years, any av materials that we have digitized with caption, for example, and the University has put aside some money for retroactive captioning as well. So we're going to be sort of a process that end users can request things be captioned. So we're going to be launching that and then we will just be gradually sort of chipping away at making more and more of our av materials captioned and fully accessible with that we have how many minutes for questions? Five. Five. We're probably at time. So thank you so much.


Hi everybody, good afternoon, good morning, good evening, wherever you are, and welcome to this webinar which is called Use Your Power. My name is Lucy Karena, I use the pronoun she and her and I'm going to be your trainer for today and this webinar is, we're going to be running this webinar on repeat twice today, this is the second time we're running it, we're also going to be running it twice next week, so if you've registered more than one slot there's no need to join twice, you're here now. So this is our first time running this webinar today, so we've run it this morning and we're running it today, we're running it again twice next week, any feedback you have at the end of this webinar is going to be really appreciated. So first of all you'll notice that you are muted at the moment and you're going to be muted for the call because there's a lot to go through and we're expecting quite a lot of people but we are going to be communicating a lot via the chat box, so I'm inviting you all to open up the chat right now and we're inviting you to give your introductions into the chat, so type your name, your age, your country or city, where you are at the moment if you're comfortable doing that. Do make sure when you're typing into the chat that you're typing to all panelists and attendees, that means that everybody on the call is going to be able to see your introduction which is what we want, so do type in your intros and during the webinar as I said we're going to be using the chat box, you can type anytime into the chat to communicate with me, with your fellow participants. We also have something called a Q&A box which is a question and answer box, so that's for any questions that might arise during this webinar that you're afraid might get lost in the chat, make sure you type them in there so that they don't get lost and we'll try and answer them live if we can or we'll save them till the Q&A session at the end. There's another tool that you can use which is raise hands, so there might be times in the webinar when I'll ask people to give an example or I'll invite people to speak into the mic, raise your hand if you want to do this and I'll take you off mute and you have the floor. We're also going to have a poll during this webinar, you won't be able to see that yet in your zoom window that's going to kind of pop up when I launch the poll, but do note that if you're joining us via voice call you won't be able to take part in the poll but I'm going to walk you through what we're doing. So I want to say hello, there's, wow, lots and lots of people joining, so we have, oh gosh, who do we have? We have Omar, Mohamed, Shanti, Valentina, Rajiv, Anna, Gonzalo, Mag, Klyn, Mike, Alejandra, Pia, Omar, Min, Rachel, Sylvia, Serena, Shash, Mohamed, Kamlesh, Natasha, Diva, Stacy, Ana Maria, Sai, John, Chloe Lee, Kamlesh, Robert, Roti, Alejandra, welcome to everybody, it's amazing to see you all joining from all over the world. I want to introduce you to our tech person today who is Monica, so say hi, Monica. Hello, my tech skills were failing and I wasn't coming off mute there for a moment, but I'll do better as the webinar goes on. Hi everyone. Thanks, Monica. So yeah, Monica's joining from Johannesburg. She's here to help you if you are having any problems with any links, that kind of thing with Zoom. And just to let you know we are recording this webinar, so this is really mostly for you, like if you would want to watch it back, if you miss anything, and we'll also be putting a recording up on the website for other people who missed the webinar. So I think let's get started. So first thing, I want to make sure that you all have a pen and paper for this webinar because towards the end we have a little bit of a workshop. I'm also going to ask Monica, if Monica, can you link, can you put the link for the presentation slides into the chat box? And when Monica does that, yeah, I'm going to invite you all to click on that now and open it, because not only is this going to be a resource for you after this webinar, but it's also full of links that I'm going to be referring to throughout the webinar. So you can explore these as we go along, if you like. So the objectives for this webinar, by the end of this hour, you're hopefully all going to have a better understanding of how to use your power, what is your sphere of influence, what are the most impactful actions you can take for climate justice right now. And hopefully you'll all be aware as well of what are these kind of priority issues in your regions, what are some of the regional or national campaigns that you can contribute towards, and how to connect up with other activists where you are. So the agenda for today then, first of all, I'm going to run through how you can get involved with what's already going on. Then we're going to see where you can go if you want to build your skills and knowledge to kind of better inform you on what action you're going to take. We're going to talk a little bit about systemic change, why we want systemic change, not climate change. And then we're going to delve a bit deeper into your situation. So what is your power? How can you use it in a way which is going to have an impact? And then towards the end, I'm going to run through some more resources that are there for you. And hopefully we're going to have time for a question and answer session. So the first part of this webinar is going to include quite a lot of information. So don't worry if you miss anything, we are recording the webinar, you'll be able to watch it back. Also, if you have the presentation slides, you'll have all the links to come back to and explore further. And then the second part of the webinar from sort of use your power, this is going to be more of a kind of interactive workshop. So we always kick off these webinars with a poll to kind of see who's here, what's the kind of experience level. So hopefully this will have just popped up onto your screen. So I'm inviting you to start filling that out straight away. And again, noting that if you're joining via voice call, I'm afraid you won't be able to participate in the poll, but I'm going to walk you through some of the questions right now. So the first question is, have you been involved in a climate action event before? So either no, I'm brand new to this, or only the climate strike, or I've been involved in more than one climate action, including the climate strike, or I've been involved in climate action before but didn't join the climate strike. And then we're asking, are you already connected up with other local activists?  So whichever one seems most close to your situation. So I'm going to give maybe 10 more seconds for people to fill that in. So eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Okay, so I'm ending the poll now. And hopefully you can now see the results there on your screen. So it looks like around a third of you on this call are completely brand new to this. And another third of you have only been involved since the climate strike. So I want to say a really special welcome to all of you for stepping up, for joining this call, for wanting to find out more about how you can get involved. It's really exciting. And there's also some of you who are kind of maybe regular climate activists. So you've done this before. So you're also very welcome. And only some of you are connected up with local groups already. And a lot of you look like you might be planning to join a local action group, which is very exciting. So thank you for participating in the poll. So we're going to start off by talking about what you can do starting with those existing campaigns and activities that you can get involved with. So the first thing that you can do. So for those, those of you who said that you're not yet connected to a local group, and you'd like to join one, there is a link. If you have the presentation open in your browser, you can see the links in the notes beneath the slide. So you have the option you can join a local group near you. There's an interactive map that you can put in your location. And you can find out what's going on near you and how to connect up. You can also, there's also a link which is inviting you if you can't find a local group near you to consider starting your own. And we have a ton of resources there if that's what you want to do. I'm going to try something which might get a bit chaotic, but should be kind of fun. I would like you to put a start in the chat if you're joining us from the Pacific, Australia or New Zealand. And I'd be really surprised if anybody actually is because I think it might be the middle of the night there. I'd be very impressed. But if you are, there are some links here about the campaigns you can join in this region. There's Pacific Power, which is transitioning to 100% renewable energy. There's Stop Adani in Australia, so Stopping Coal. And in New Zealand, there's a great campaign called Fossil Free Banks, which is calling for a bank that guarantees a complete cut of corporate ties with a fossil fuel industry. And I want to give a reminder here that New Zealand, like a lot of countries all over the world, is actually striking on the 27th. So this Friday, actually, there's things going on. So keep an eye out for that. So next up, we have Africa. So please put a star in the chat if you're joining us from Africa. And I'm expecting there might be a few more people there. Yeah, it is pretty late in the Philippines. So I'm not surprised that many people haven't joined us from that region. But if you're for Africa, you're invited to join the Africa VUCA campaign. So this is Resisting Fossil Fuel Infrastructure. It's about blocking that infrastructure that the fossil fuel industry needs to operate in Africa. So you'll find the link just there. So Monica's joining us from Africa. Renato is joining us from Africa. So welcome. I hope everybody's cheering them along from your couch or wherever you are. So next up, put a star in the chat if you're joining us from Latin America. So this is a big year for movement in this region. We have the COP25, the UN Climate Talks taking place this year in Chile. You can join the Zero Fossil Movement by clicking on these links. So Latin America represents, we have, oh, Renato's from Peru, Martha, Alejandra, Giuseppe, Christopher, Gonzalo, Rachel, Alejandro, Ana, Matthias, great. So you have those links, how to join the Zero Fossil Movement there. So now put a star in the chat if you're joining us from North America. So in Canada, we've got the Our Time campaign that's calling for a Green New Deal. If you're in the U.S., you can join actually the We Are Unstoppable call, which is taking place tomorrow. There's a link to the registration in the slide. That's going to give you more detailed information about joining the movement in the U.S. So follow that registration link, book yourself in. So, oh, I've lost track of where everybody's from. But hello, everybody. Maybe Chloe, Michelle, Daniel, Anna, Alexis, Roshi, Shelby, Valentina, Amy, Anastasia, Margaret, Steph, Morgan, John, I don't know if you're from the U.S. or Canada, but Darius is welcome. That's what you can do. So star in the chat if you're joining us from Asia. So there's a lot going on in Asia. The main kind of campaign that we have going across Asia is calling for an end to coal. And then we have a couple of national examples. So in Indonesia, you can get involved with the fossil free campaign. In Japan, we're focused on divestment. So removing the finance, removing the social license that's kind of propping up the fossil fuel industry in Japan. And movements in the Philippines are blocking all new coal, oil, gas projects. So welcome to everybody there. Diva, Maglin, Shanti, Din, Krusan, Palpasha, Rajiv, Maglin, Sumit, Muhammad, Shashani, and Priti. Welcome. That's what you can get involved with. And now, star in the chat if you're joining us from Eastern Europe, Caucasus, Central Asia, Turkey. We've got the Cities for Life campaign that's happening across this region or Cities for Climate, which is happening in Turkey. So that's what you can get on with, that you're my neighbours there in Eastern Europe.  Yeah, Europe. So the fossil free divestment campaign is going strong across Europe, kind of pulling that rug out from beneath the feet with the fossil fuel industry. If you're in the UK, you can also join the push for a green new deal, some exciting stuff happening there. If you're in Germany, fossil free Germany is organising some webinars as well on the 7th and 9th of October. So follow the link, book yourself in for those. So hello, Victoria, Omar, Serena, Pia, Natasha, Kelly. Welcome. That's what you can get involved with. And lastly, do keep an eye out for the next global mobilisations taking place. So Fridays for Future is going to keep striking every Friday. Extinction Rebellion are planning two weeks of resistance, starting Monday 7th of October. They're also running an ongoing campaign, sorry, they're joining a campaign which is called Buy 2020, which has actions planned at the end of October. You can check out by clicking that link. You can find the links to these campaigns by clicking on those logos in the presentation. Sign yourself up, make sure that you can receive updates. So the next thing you can do is skill up. So learn new skills, get familiar with campaigning and the concept of climate justice. So first of all, you can do this by joining one of the regional webinars that's going to be taking place in the next few weeks, which is hosted by 350. So, oh sorry, Janice, we didn't ask about Caribbean, Bermuda, other island nations. I don't know Monica, which region, I'm not familiar with the 350 regionalisation, but which region do we usually host those nations? Do you know? Well, the Pacific island nations we did mention in the beginning, but then the Caribbean countries work with our Latin America team. So that's why we didn't separate them. I see. So Janice, if you follow the links to the campaigns happening in Latin America, that should cover those island nations as well. So first of all, with the skill ups, you can do this by joining one of the regional webinars that's going to be taking place in the next few weeks. So these are hosted by 350. We've got webinars planned for Europe, Africa and the US and Canada. So make sure you're on all those email lists, keep an eye out on social media and on the website. So for Europe, the date is yet to be confirmed, but in the US, we have that, we are unstoppable webinar next Friday, October 4th. In Canada, we have what's next after the strikes, which is a webinar happening next Thursday, October 3rd. And the Africa VUCA webinar for new organisers is still to be confirmed, but maybe on October 4th. Also, we have a whole site dedicated to trainings, to building skills to make change. So for example, we have this great website trainings at 350.org. You can go through, you can take these kind of skill ups like climate change science 101, having climate change conversations. Also, if you follow this link to go fossil free, there's another whole ton of resources, for example, on how to run a fossil free campaign and loads of kind of like templates, step by step guides, which you can go through as well. So those are all for you to kind of explore. So now I, I'm going to give you a little bit of an introduction to the kind of action that we're going to explore. So action that's going to lead to system change. So I'm just going to just quickly check the chat for any questions. Renata, if you missed the movements in Latin America, hopefully you can, oh yeah, Monica said you can see them in the slide there. So do, do open that slide up so that you have all those links there. So no more business as usual. You might have heard this phrase over and over again. And over the last months, and particularly with these climate strikes, we've seen the climate movement start to kind of change tactics. We're seeing more disruption, more strikes, more direct action, which are sort of becoming the norm. And we're seeing action that's better reflecting the urgency of the situation. And this kind of action is actually very strategic because by disrupting systems such as education, such as industry, our streets, our infrastructure, we're recreating a crisis on the ground in practical terms, which is far more difficult a crisis to ignore. So it's more difficult for those in power to ignore us. And we call the 20th of September, day one, because from now on, we're going to see an escalation of this action everywhere at all levels at the local, the national, and the global. So many of you have joined this call because you're deeply concerned about climate change. Maybe you're already very conscious about your impact on climate change. And this concern affects maybe decisions that you make in daily life about what you eat, about whether you walk or take the car, about whether you remember to turn out the lights, for example. And this is all very important if you're already doing these things, do keep it up. But you may have joined today because maybe you feel like this isn't enough. And this can lead us to feel kind of powerless and hopeless. Because we're not just consumers, right? We're human beings with human rights. And we're citizens with democratic rights. And actually, our consumer power is tiny compared to that power that we have when we assert these rights. So the pressure to make individual lifestyle changes also comes from a place of guilt. It can exclude or shame people who don't actually have the option to source their food locally or organically to use an electric car. One quote I like to kind of come back to here is that the aim is to work towards better systems, not to exist in this system as superior people. And that's by a writer called Zoe Williams. And it really kind of brings home that, you know, in order to change the system, we can't afford to tinker around the edges anymore. We need to make deep emissions cuts within this tiny time frame. And when only 100 companies, energy and mining companies are responsible for 71% of emissions in the last 30 years, it can feel kind of pretty futile, right, to change your light bulbs. So to make an impact, we need to end this fossil era itself, if we're actually to have any hope of seriously addressing the climate crisis. And it's not even just about fossil fuel companies own emissions. I wonder if anybody here knows how long fossil fuel companies have known that global warming is happening and how long they've known that it's caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Does anybody know how long? Yeah, Shashini says since the 80s, Exxon knew since the 70s. Exactly, Anna. Yeah, and Kelly and Margaret, it's since the 70s and Pierre. So actually, yeah, Exxon knew, Shell knew, they were doing research into this since the late 70s, early 80s. Shell even released a documentary in 1991, which predicted rising sea levels, famine, climate refugees as a result of burning fossil fuels. And it's actually eerily accurate, their predictions. And you can watch the whole thing. It's actually on YouTube. I don't have a link to it. But if you type in Shell 1991 climate change documentary, it's scary stuff. And instead of acting on that information and changing their business plan, they've spent millions of dollars, potentially billions over the years, funding climate denialist think tanks to spread misinformation about the causes of climate change, and even about its existence. And not only that, but we know that one of the reasons that we're in this emergency situation now is because action on climate change has been has been obstructed and blocked over the past decades. Yes, decision makers of rich countries are to blame, but they've been lobbied aggressively for decades by the fossil fuel industry. And this industry has rigged the game. It's captured our political spaces to block any real action on climate change. So the documentary, I can't remember the exact name. It's by Shell. I should have got the link for you. But if you type into Google Shell 1991 documentary, it's available on YouTube to watch. So even so, every single year, these companies still receive billions of dollars in public money in your taxes to further explore, extract and burn more fossil fuels. And then and this is, really the injustice of it, then they walk away with the profits, you know, we give them the money to do this. They walk away with a profit with an obscene profit as well. So, you know, let's be clear, when we talk about, you know, fossil fuel companies, we're not targeting the workers, the communities whose livelihoods and local economies rely on these companies, what we're calling for is a just transition of our energy system from a system that's driven by profit and endless growth to one that's driven by human needs to energy that's led by human lead, energy that's informed by the reality of our planetary boundaries. And this transition must be worker led. Energy should be in the hands of the people, not these big polluters, certainly not a handful of mega rich fossil fuel CEOs. So, we all know that that's what should happen, right? But how can we, how can you and me, how can the climate justice movement make that happen? So firstly, we need to reconsider how we view the power of the fossil fuel industry. So we have this kind of traditional way of viewing power. You may be familiar with this power triangle. So there's a few people at the top, the power flows from the top downwards, those at the bottom take orders from those at the top. But here's another perhaps more accurate way of seeing power and particularly seeing the power of the fossil fuel industry. So any observations about this triangle, anything at all, right into the chat. And particularly if this triangle represents the fossil fuel industry, what do you think this means? Yeah, so it's supported, right? Yeah, the industry is nothing without all of those people supporting it, we're holding it up. It's unstable, absolutely Daniel, it's unstable. So an oppressive system that relies on destroying our planet is unstable. A system that relies on a logic, you know, something that defies logic, like, you know, infinite resources on a finite planet, infinite growth on a finite planet, that that's unstable, it needs to be propped up, right, by these pillars of support. And these pillars can make the structure seem legitimate, can make it seem right. So if the triangle is the fossil fuel industry, you know, these pillars, what could they be? I mean, we've talked about one of these things already, we talked about subsidies. So funding, financial support, also political support, so policies that allow, allow fossil fuels to continue, permits, anything that keeps their political power strong, so access to the UN, access to your government, and so on. Also resources, so the actual access to the land that's needed, the access to those oil fields, the access to the tons of water needed in the mining process, and the tools and everything that's needed, the infrastructure. And also social legitimacy, right. So we accept them, they cultivate this image of providing a public service, like a necessary evil, if you like. You know, they sponsor research into our universities, they sponsor our museums, our art galleries, our football clubs, so that we accept that they're, you know, benevolent, they're an inevitable part of our daily lives, right. So for example, I mentioned the divestment campaign that's happening, you know, in Europe and Japan, across the world, which is getting schools, houses of worship, even big banks, cities, even countries to remove their investments from fossil fuels. And this is removing that finance pillar. But it's also removing the social license. So it's changing the way that we're viewing this industry. So instead of seeing them as this kind of necessary part of society, the public is starting to see them as something that's inherently globally destructive. So with the climate strikes and with this new kind of era of escalated climate activism, of disruption, we need to know our power, we need to know how to use it, and we need to know how we can disrupt these pillars, how we can lead to real systemic change.  We're going to focus on you and your community or communities at the local level. And of course, you know, the big mobilizations are super important, but they're not half as powerful if there's nothing happening on the ground for the other 360 days of the year. So other reasons why we like to have a local focus is really, we know that real wins can be achieved really quickly at the local level. So six months can really deeply shift ambition in a small city or institution, can get a win on the board. We know that local wins everywhere builds these preconditions for national and global climate action. And we also know that local struggles can be won by everyday citizens and volunteers. So these global level, the national level, even state level campaigns require staffing, require major funding, all sorts of resources to navigate these sort of complex power structures. But anybody can do a local campaign and win it. So also winning a local campaign is really the biggest impact that a single citizen or a collective can have on the climate. So I would like to give an example of a powerful victory that happened just last year. But instead of telling you the details, I'd like you to see for yourself. So what I would like you to do is to open the presentation slides at slide 30. So you'll see this video there. And I'm also going to ask Monica, are you able to put the YouTube video link into the chat? It's in the agenda guide. Thanks Monica. So this video is about three minutes long. And in a moment, I want you to watch the video. And then after those three minutes, we're going to discuss our observations. So I'm not going to play it for you in this Zoom window because we're going to have an issue with the sound. But so you'll need to open it in the link and press play yourself. So just to note before we start, unless you speak Portuguese, you might want to put the subtitles on. So you have to click the little icon that says CC in the bottom right of the YouTube video. Okay. So is everybody ready? We're going to start watching now. Okay. So for most of you, probably the video's just finished. So let's talk about that. So what are your observations? What did you think really struck you about this campaign and the way that it was won, the way that people brought this about? What did you think was most interesting, most impactful about the action that these communities were taking? So I want you to type in your answers into the chat now. Anything that really struck you or moved you about this? Yeah, so this involvement of a diverse group of people from all walks of life, right?  Yeah, absolutely. So they use social media to involve lots of different groups, but it wasn't just an online action, right? There was this kind of like, there was both offline and online actions. So yeah, people power. Yeah, connecting up to a sympathetic decision maker in the council, identifying that person. Yeah, local people uniting, being well informed of the impact, unity, inside and outside of formal spaces. Yes, absolutely. So in the city hall, the protest, so there's a kind of diversity here. So I want to collect some of these, some of these takeaways. So, Monica, if you're able to type some of these, some of these observations into this slide. So yeah, absolutely. So this kind of, so a diversity of actions, a diversity of communities coming together, you know, not letting this sort of lack of resources get in the way, finding a way of being resourceful, using social media, using different means, education, communication made a difference. Yeah, absolutely. They didn't have much opposition to deal with though. I mean, it's maybe it's not communicated in that in that video, but I know that in, in lots of states in Brazil, these kind of campaigns have faced a lot of challenges. So yeah, exactly. So I think you'll get this kind of idea. So yeah, having smart goals, having clear requests, getting together the whole community themselves. Absolutely. One thing that also struck me, which I'm going to talk about just very quickly is, is there's something that this, this campaigner says at the end, which is that he hopes that this is going to be an inspiration for other cities, right? So not just thinking about your own local community, but also how can this be contagious?  So, you know, just to explain this kind of concept really, really quickly, you may have noticed him talking about, yeah, this inspiration. We do need this big top level change. So how can we achieve that with isolated wins? When you're setting up a campaign at the local level, it's not just about making things better for your local community. You can also think ahead. You can think about how change in your community can lead to change on a bigger scale, how you can use your example to inspire others to leverage change at this kind of bigger scale. And this is the one of the reasons that local campaigning is great. There's that opportunity for a win on a shorter time scale, which can then kind of snowball, right? So I'm going to invite you now to start thinking about your community, your sphere of influence. And if you've joined our webinars before, you'll know I like to break down the concept of local action and local community a little bit, so it becomes easier to identify who you can build collective power with. So we're going to do this little exercise. We're all part of many different intersecting communities. And for many of us when we hear local community, we think about communities of place. So your city, your town or village, your particular district or borough, your street or block, your apartment building, these are all communities of place and you might be part of many different communities of place. But we're also part of communities of practice. I'm talking about what we do every day.  Thanks so much clearly for for breaking down what smart girls are. That's very important. So you might also be part of a community of interest.  And also for many of us, we consider our communities of identity to be particularly important to us. So for example, your LGBTQ plus community, your diaspora cultural or ethnic minority community. As Amy says, you know, the disabled community as well, which often faces exclusion in activism. But as I experienced it often actually the most radical and hardworking activists there are out there. Your indigenous community, youth, that's a community as well. Parents and grandparents, you're a community as well, right? Absolutely. So these are really important communities to us. And we're often a part of many, many different ones. So your task, I'd like you to set your task. I'm going to give you 60 seconds.  And I'm going to give you one minute starting now. So you don't need to share into the chat if you like, but you don't need to. This is just for your sheet of paper. Okay. So hopefully it doesn't have to be a comprehensive list. But hopefully you all have a list of some communities, local communities, communities of place, of practice, of interest, of identity that you can think of. So my follow up question to you is how many communities did you count? I'd like you to type just the number into the chat. And this isn't a competition. It's not who has the most communities. Okay. So we have some people with three, seven, we have a variety. So yeah, it's usually kind of between two and 10.  But yeah, great. So lots of people have lots of different communities. So what I want you to do now is choose just one of them, right? So zoom in on one community that you think might be sympathetic to your course. So that you think you might be able to engage in climate activism. And we're just going to do a kind of exercise, an example. You can do this with all the other communities as well. But just choose one now. So do you all have one in mind? Let's go. I'm going to ask you now a few prompt questions. So for some of these questions, you may not have an answer, but that's okay. You can wait until the next question.  I want you to think about how does your community use or source energy? How do they get around? How do they source food? How do they access green spaces? So how do they interact with the existing systems? So I'm going to give you a few minutes to think about that, write some bullet points. So as I said, it might be this question feels a bit irrelevant to your community. That's okay. So what do I mean by access green spaces? Okay, so I kind of mean, do they have access to nature, to clean air, for example? Are they able to, are they able to, are there parks around or are they kind of, is your community mostly in sort of inner city where there's lots of pollution, that kind of thing? Does that make sense? So the next prompt question is how is your community impacted by or will they be impacted by climate change or harmful energy? So some examples here, you know, it might be that it might be that your community is, you know, your apartment building is next to a really busy road. There's lots of pollution. It might be that there's a coal power station plan nearby. It might be that your community is already being impacted by climate change or might be, you know, might be more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change for some reason. Yeah, absolutely. Amy, so indoor air quality as well as outdoor air quality, yeah, absolutely. Renato, my community actually harms the environment. So that's, so we're going to talk about that in the next question actually, Renato. So the next prompt question is thinking back to that kind of upside down power triangle of the fossil fuel industry. It might be that your community in some way supports the fossil fuel community, the fossil fuel industry in some way, you know, not purposefully, but maybe in some way they do. So which kind of pillars do you think that your community could actually disrupt, could withdraw their support from? So this one might be a little bit more kind of abstract, but thinking about things like, you know, if your community is your workplace, do you have a workplace pension that pays, that invests in fossil fuels, for example? Is there some kind of way that you're giving social license to, to fossil fuel companies, you know, who is sponsoring your research at university, who is sponsoring your local music venue or art center, these kind of questions? And which, and how could your community respond to that or engage with that? So now just my, my fourth question, bearing in mind your responses to these prompt questions, have a think about maybe what action you think your community could take, what collective action. So we're not talking about individual actions here, we're talking about, is there some kind of collective campaign or collective action that your, that your community could take? So you may have already thought of something, you may actually need a little while to sort of think about it or you may think, maybe I picked the wrong community to zone in on, maybe I need to think about something else. But if you do have an idea already, please do write it in the chat and let's have a look at some of these. So if you are typing into the chat, please do type, you know, who is the community that you've chosen? And what kind of action do you think that that community could take? So John says, local news, which fails to tie climate change to their weather reports. Okay, so are you a part of community that could actually address that, could actually, you know, could actually make a campaign so that actually on every single weather report, they're tying it to climate change, right? Shanti says, a Buddhist center to build consensus to close coal power plants, brilliant. So yeah, is that something that you could do with your Buddhist center? Could you actually, you know, get people together to build this kind of campaign and reach out to the local community as well? That sounds like a really powerful thing to do. Alia says, advocacy. So Alia, what community are you thinking about and how could you advocate together? What kind of unique angle do you have as a community that's going to leverage some kind of power? So Christopher says, travel community to deny a single use plastic, to use ground travel, i.e. public trains over plane, research accommodation. So when it comes to public transport and traveling, you know, what could you do to make sure that people do choose public transport over flying? Maybe it's, you need to make a campaign so that actually public transport is a viable alternative, right? So that actually public transport is more reliable, is cheaper, is more environmentally friendly, so that people are going to see it as an actual viable alternative. So yeah, Amy, yeah, contacting people in your local community radio station to do more coverage of news. Brilliant idea, I think. So, Renato's, your community is train engineers, so raise awareness of the harm you might be doing with your job. Well, maybe as train engineers, also, you know, trains, they're a much more environmentally friendly way of traveling than private cars, so actually maybe you have some kind of power there, you can actually build a campaign around that. So Gonzales says, parents of my kids school. Great, so start walking in the kids to school. I had a really great idea about getting the parents of a kids school together to plant trees, which is a really nice way of involving children in these kind of transformative actions and also educating and also, you know, making a statement as well. And how is that scalable?  So, wow, there's lots of examples coming through. So I'm wondering about, I don't think I can read all of these out, but I'm seeing some examples of these sort of like lifestyle changes and what I would really recommend is thinking about, you know, if there is a sort of lifestyle change, so switching to walking rather than taking the car, that's not, you know, that's not an option for everybody, but maybe making public transport more accessible, that kind of thing. How can we make it so that it's not just you doing that, you know, it's not just you and a few friends, that it's actually everybody in the community and that actually you make it so that it's a whole campaign to make sure that everybody can do that, so that everybody has access to be able to do that. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so these are all fantastic ideas. And remember, we've only just zoomed in on one community here, right? I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to read out all of these, but they're all really inspiring and really great. But we're going to capture all of these in the chat as well. We're going to take all of these from the chat and I'm going to look through these and maybe reach out to some of you as well in email and develop these further as well. So this is just, yeah, as I said, one community that we've chosen. So how could you start engaging your community? These are just some ideas of how you can do that, you know, the best way is maybe just to start organize an open planning meeting, talk about what we've talked about today. We've got, you've got the slides, you've got a ton of resources as well. Think about setting up some kind of a discussion or workshop for your community. So a fast running out of time. This is always where it gets interesting. And then we start running out of time. Sorry about that. But I want to bring you onto, you know, the next steps, how we're going to put these into practice. So first thing I would like you to do is we have a Facebook group. And for those of you on Facebook, we set it up in the lead up to the strike for new people organizing for the first time. This group is for you really to share advice, to post questions, to get information. So Monica has just put the link to that Facebook group into the chat. You can click on that link right now. You can request to join. And as soon as I get off this webinar, I will approve you and you'll be in the group. And so what I want you to post in there is, you know, what are the three next three actions that you are going to take? So it could be joining your local group. It could be getting involved in a regional campaign. It could be joining the next global mobilization. It could be skilling up. So taking some of those kind of online webinars or videos that I showed you. It could be reaching out to one of your communities, thinking about making a plan. It could be thinking about all those other communities that you have kind of listed and thinking, what could we do there as well? And how could I link them up? And how could I bring people together? So please do join the group. If you're not on Facebook, you can always email me with your plans. I'm lucy.cadena at 350.org. And hopefully as you've got these slides, you won't lose that email address as well. And I just want to make sure that you have also the support that you need. So obviously, you're all familiar with the global climate strike net website. That's probably where you registered for this webinar. Also, we have a handbook, which is completely free to download. And it's really fantastic. Please do download this. You can get your free download in PDF here. It was just released in July. And it's really relevant to what's going on right now. We've got that training site, trainings.350.org that I showed you. And the fossil free website as well. If you have any questions, please do email me at lucy.cadena at 350.org or help at 350.org. So I'm afraid we don't have a huge amount of time, but I think we can take maybe a couple of questions if they are not too lengthy. So let me just check. Monica, do we have any in the Q&A at all? Rachel has just put a question into the chat box, actually. Rachel, would you like to come on the mic and ask your question yourself? I can unmute you if you'd like. Yeah, thanks, Rachel. Yeah, if you want to explain that, you might need to unmute yourself, Rachel. Is that working? Yeah. Hi. Yeah, so I live in Dominican Republic and there's a high level of poverty. Yeah. And I think that it can be a little overwhelming seeing climate change as an expensive option because you'd have to import supplies or being on an island. So yeah, I guess just ideas to shift people's mindset to see that as like a just I think people here have a hard time seeing long term goals versus just satisfying immediate need. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.  And actually probably, you know, mitigation, so like lowering emissions probably isn't like that as important because maybe there's energy poverty as well and that kind of thing.  But what I would say is, you know, certainly community action is important not just for taking action on climate change but also for climate resilience because actually, you know, the Dominican Republic is one of those very vulnerable countries, vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. So creating communities of resilience is really, really important joining people together there. I think that maybe, you know, maybe what you, one of the actions that you might be able to take is probably more like transformative actions rather than sort of actions of resistance against the fossil fuel industry. So actions such as, you know, like creating community gardens, creating sort of community resources, that kind of thing. And we have a really nice example actually. I showed you one video from the Fossil Free campaign. There's a few other videos from different types of communities, ones from the Philippines from a very isolated community in the Philippines who managed to fundraise for solar panels for their church roof. And the church kind of became like a community centre point where people could actually go charge their phones and all this kind of stuff. Bringing the kind of transformational solutions, I think, to people and showing, you know, showing that actually, you know, you can actually have energy sovereignty if you go down this kind of path. And I know that's not maybe, maybe I don't know the situation so perfectly where you are, but that's the kind of thing that I might recommend. I don't know if that's helpful at all. Cool. Thank you, Rachel. I'm really sorry, but we have run out of time. I knew that we'd do this. We run over. And I really don't want to miss all of your questions. So if you do have further questions, do join the Facebook group. If you have Facebook and you use it, post your questions there because if I don't have the answer, certainly somebody else will. There's a lot of experience within that group. We can all support each other. Do email me as well. I'm very happy to answer any questions that you have as best I can. And I really hope that I'll be able to see you again on another training soon. So thanks everybody for joining for participating. It's been really interesting and speak to you soon. Bye, everybody.


the Oluwavi Wuland or Barbara Rashid Akambi has declared that his vote buying cannot stop in the Nigerian democracy, whether with politicians around the system. He opined that the menace could not stop until the government did a needful and allowed the people to enjoy the dividends of democracy. The traditional rule as to that is, after Karsten's vote, as Unit 1 would too, in Iwatao, you will look a government.  The people get better with time and it's getting better and I really can't. I'm commanding the people, you know, the people. We need the people's vote, we can't. And I have told my people to vote, not to even go to any business or any government. They should not even stay in the house. The way they should be watching to me, the other way should come up. We need what's current, which is what's current as our voting rights. But we can show this as the other way.