Nonprofit Profile: 350.org meshes social networking, community organizing

by Emily Gertz

Published October 06, 2008 @ 08:19AM PT

Jamie Henn's voice is calm and upbeat over the phone from San Francisco.  He seems to have taken in stride his transition from student at a small Vermont college to international environmental activist.  Perhaps it's because 350.org, the San Francisco-based group he co-coordinates, has already learned a lot about how to share the load.

"My job is to do a lot of outreach, coordinate central strategy," says Henn. "But most of the strategy comes from people in the communities," who organize around one simple idea: that atmospheric carbon dioxide must be cut from our current 385 ppm (parts per million) to 350 ppm -- by 2030, ideally, but definitely by 2050.  It's a "safe level" at which the climate could stabilize, says Henn, and the world could avoid hitting "climate tipping points" that might cause destructive chain reactions.

"350 came from a lot of recent science, led by [NASA climate scientist] James Hansen, looking at what might be a safe level," says Henn.  "It's a big challenge but we think that will motivate people" to tell their political leaders that 350 ppm must be baseline goal of any future climate change treaties and legislation.

350.org's web site (which is online in nine languages other than English -- including Chinese, Japanese, and Russian -- thanks to help from volunteers) features an online archive of actions from across the globe, each with a Google map pinpointing its location. These entries, created and updated by the local volunteers who organized the events, are the backbone of 350.org's "open-source organizing" effort.  Anyone is welcome to use the ideas documented on the site, and to share their own.

350.org is also on flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites (including Change.org) -- where people can connect directly and build strength in numbers.  "We present the tools, and bundle together conceptually as a toolkit," says Henn.  "We're trying not to re-invent the wheel."

Using existing internet tools is also cheap -- presumably diminishing the group's fundraising needs.

Pared down to just "350," the stop-global-warming message is elegantly simple, and seems to translate across cultures and continents.  One photo on 350.org's web site shows over three dozen Indian youths kneeling on a paved sidewalk to form the pattern 350, reaching up towards the camera with big smiles.  In another, a team of Far North winter trekkers -- including a sled dog -- led by explorer Will Steger showing off a banner reading "350" from Eureka on Ellsmere Island, Nunavut in the Canadian High Arctic.

And in the "350 Craft Challenge," the group partnered with the online crafting world.  One knitter's contest entry was a nine-foot black scarf with a pattern of green "350s" and red downward arrows.

The group's web site is notably lacking in details about how to cap emissions, trade carbon or auction carbon credits, or even how to save polar bears.  Such policy issues are the bread and butter agenda of traditional green groups, but in 350.org's view, they motivate only the committed core of the environmental movement, and convey to everyone else that stopping global warming is too big, too complicated, and maybe too boring to get involved with.

Although its ultimate goal is to influence global warming policy,350.org's advocacy strategy tries to merge tried-and-true community organizing techniques with up-to-the-minute trends away from formal advocacy organizations and towards joining networks.

"We looked at ... new ways that people were organizing themselves -- more open, more accessible than traditional environmental groups," as well as how the internet could magnify the geographic impact of a small full-time staff, says Henn. "We remind people of all the different networks they already have at their disposal.  Churches, book groups, schools -- built-in networks in place that they hadn't thought about as places to work on a political issue."

"The best ideas tend to come from the people in the networks themselves," Henn says, "[and we] use the web site to broadcast them out.  Then there's more potential to act quickly and strongly."

The Middlebury College graduates managing 350.org are veterans of Step It Up, a 2007 effort founded by journalist and Middlebury scholar-in-residence Bill McKibben.  Step It Up organized nationwide demonstrations demanding political action on global warming; 350.org, with its global goals, is the successor to that effort. McKibben mentored the then-students in running Step It Up.  More recently, he has been traveling around the nation to promote the 350 ppm goal -- which he called "the most important number on Earth" at a recent talk in Traverse City, Missouri.

"If there is a reason for the existence for the Internet, it is not for people to play poker in their pajamas," McKibben said, according to the Grand Traverse Herald.  "It is so that we could take this number and spread it all the way around the world."

"We have no choice but to go through this window and pull the world along with us," said McKibben, "It is the moral problem of our time."