One Person Can needs regional helpers!

Can you spare a little time? Would you like to be the One Person Can helper in your local area?

Imagine a time in which practically everyone is very aware that climate change threatens us all and they do everything possible to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Climate-friendly government policies become inevitable because the voices of millions of householders carry more weight than the voices of self-interested lobbyists. Unsustainable industries are replaced by climate-friendly ones simply because people choose to buy only sustainable products. In such a society, everyone would know that their individual actions and voices are making a difference because they can SEE that everyone else is taking similar actions. Visibility of climate-related actions might not be the only ingredient, but without wide visibility such as cultural shift would not be possible.

Hopefully a variety of means will increase the visibility of safe-climate actions. One Person Can attempts to do so by providing two main visibility mechanisms: the survey of actions and the graphs showing the results so far. For these mechanisms to "work", ideally everyone will be invited to take the survey, and everyone will see the accumulating results. To achieve that, One Person Can relies partly on word-of-mouth publicity and social media, but it also asks for the support of organisations that already have channels of communication that reach large numbers of householders. When requesting support, it helps if the person asking is local and/or has some sort of personal connection. Would you like to help One Person Can by championing the project in your local area?

Things you might do

- Talk to either a Councillor or the Environment Officer at your local council or shire and ask them to promote the survey to local residents and publicise its results.
- Talk to your local State and/or Federal MP and ask them to publicise the survey and its results within their electorate, perhaps via the newsletters they already send to all local residents.
- Arrange for an organisation that has lots of members to be listed as a "participating group", meaning that they ask all their members to nominate that group when they take the survey and have their own result graphs showing the numbers of actions taken by their members. This might be a school community, a sporting association, a community group, a university department, a professional association, or any other sort of group that you (or people you know) happen to be involved in.
- Speak with the Managers of companies that employ many people in your area and ask them to be listed as a "participating group", meaning that they promote the survey amongst their employees and have separate graphs showing their employees' results.
- Pin up One Person Can posters on community noticeboards.
- Anything else you can think of...

Of course anyone who shares the One Person Can vision can help by doing any of the above, and I originally had not thought of asking for people to volunteer as regional helpers, but a supporter from NSW recently put up his hand to take on the promotion of the project within his area of Sydney. This is wonderful! With a network of similar helpers all over the country, One Person Can could quickly become huge, and have a real chance of quickly building an effective level of response to climate change.

If you would like to help, please email me at the address shown in the blog header. Regional helpers could share promotion materials and tips, and we'll see what evolves!

Can you help One Person Can go viral?

Durban talks too little and too slow? Fortunately there are millions of "ordinary" people taking the bottom-up approach.

One Person Can needs 12 minutes of your time: 10 mins to take the OPC survey yourself to make your own safe-climate actions visible, and 2 mins to help OPC "go viral" (place a link, share on FB, or whatever works). http://www.onepersoncan.org/index.aspx

The already-converted (if you're reading this, that probably means you) are already doing plenty and don't need to see the One Person Can project in order to do what you do, but the almost-converted and slightly converted DO need to see the massive number of safe-climate actions already being taken - otherwise they'll probably continue to think that one person can't do anything about climate change, or continue to forget about climate change because they don't think anyone is doing anything.

Let's see how quickly the OPC counters and graphs grow!

Current count: 423 Australians are taking 10,076 safe-climate actions (as of 13/12/11)