Boulder.Earth: A Reflection

As we celebrate our first trip around the sun as Boulder.Earth (remember our launch party?) we are called to reflect on not only what we’ve accomplished this year, but how the heck we got here, and where we are going next.

Though Boulder.Earth has only been around for a year, the idea—fostering connection and collaboration around climate action in Boulder, Colorado—has been circling our community for a while now. Three years ago this vision materialized at a Boulder International Film Festival breakout that focused on community collaboration and engagement around climate action. Here is the agenda and topic overview from the very first gathering:

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Addressing Climate Change in Boulder
Community Wide Collaborative Climate Engagement + Action

Connectors, communicators (story tellers), and integrators (bridge builders)

April 16th Agenda
2:30 – 4:30 pm Co-creating Collaboration
4:30 – 6 pm Social Hour + Team Building

Dear all,

We are gathering in the boardroom of the Impact Hub on April 16th to discuss building collaborative climate action in the Boulder community. This meeting is a result of the enthusiasm expressed at the BIFF Global Town Hall and the closing night showing of “Racing Extinction” in which the yearning to be engaged in meaningful action to address climate change was so palpably evident.

We believe coming together now is extremely timely as a number of local initiatives and efforts that will be unfolding over the next few months that could take community engagement and ownership of this issue to a new level.

The purpose of the meeting is to explore making a “place” where collaboration is front and center in climate action mobilization. How can we join existing efforts into collective narrative-rich creation to ignite a community-wide brave, joyful, impactful movement? This IS NOT an effort to replace what is currently going and IT IS an explorative journey to identify how to engage and motivate broader and more focused community participation.

The 1st step in this process is to hear from some of the most committed connectors, communicators and integrators in our community, YOU.

Here is the agenda that we humbly put forth for the meeting. In the spirit of collaboration, please feel free to share your feedback prior to the meeting.

1. Brief intro
2. Current community climate action “asset” mapping (Orgs and relations, strategies, info resources)
3. Discussion of assumptions and map.
4. To group or not to group: who, what, how and where, when and how long?
5. Next steps

Assumptions:

A. Collaborating and co-creating with others will better serve the climate future I am working for in the Boulder community.
B. The Boulder community is rich with groups and institutes working to address climate change.
C. The time is now to build a collaborative movement across sectors.

We look forward to dreaming and scheming with you on Thursday.

In grateful collaboration,
Joellen Raderstorf and Brett KenCairn
—

That meeting was the first of many which brought together people from all across the city and county: videographers and activists, CU professors, climate scientists, engineers, city and county government folks, visionaries, faith leaders, on and on. To name a few: David Adamson, Margo Josephs and Sierra Voss, Morey Bean and Bob Morehouse, Beth Osness, Greg Guibert, Katy Human and Katya Hafich, Micah Parkin and Michelle Gabrieloff-Parish, Waleed Abdalati and Wynn Martens, Jonathan Koehn, Tatiana Maxwell, Lea Yancy, and many, many others—some of who have gone on to form our Stewardship Council!

Eventually, the group came to be known as the Climate Culture Collaborative (C3 Boulder for short), and with the generous funding and committed leadership of Joellen Raderstorf, I was hired on as our first staff person. We were doin’ the damn thing!

C3 Boulder Meeting – look at all those smiling faces!

We were using Theory U and permaculture design principles to help guide our work, which could be summed up into four parts:

1. Start small,
2. Obtain a yield,
3. Celebrate!
4. Get back to work.

Thanks to Katya Hafich, we poured over community capacity building resources like SSIR’s collective impact articles and Peter Block’s Civic Engagement and Restoration of the Community booklet. With the addition of Leila Bruno to the stewardship council, asking, “What would nature do?” became a constant check-in. We were learning as we went along, which meant balancing the two major paradigms we faced: 1) it takes time to build community trust, 2) climate change requires us to act urgently. We embraced the entrepreneurship motto: fail fast, fail often! We explored holocracy and developed working groups.

Swarm event! photo: Ning Mosberger-Tang

We were making it up as we went along—who could have known that C3 Boulder would evolve into an organization who could not only reach 10s of thousands of Boulderites through the years with efforts like the COP21 Event Series, Boulder Earth Week (which evolved into Boulder Earth Month!), the Climate CoLab Contest, the BoCo Youth Climate Challenge, #TogetherWeWill Micro Grants and the countless potluck and community nights that pulled together people from all sectors of our community.

We have had SO much to celebrate over the years! To name a few things:

1. Proving that magic happens when different sectors come together. At one of our meetings Michelle Gabrieloff-Parish & Brett KenCairn realized that the city’s climate plan was fatally flawed: it didn’t have anything about social justice and equity. Now, the City of Boulder is the first ever to have created a Climate Commitment document that included justice and equity components throughout.
2. We had more submissions than Nike (who had not one but two launch parties in NYC & London!) to our Climate CoLab contest!
3. An all-girl highschool group that participated in the BoCo Youth Climate Challenge had their vision of a bike lane at Monarch High School brought to life when they were paired up with a mentor in the department of transportation.

It was becoming clear that if we wanted folks to stop recreating the wheel—to actually collaborate—we needed to provide the right conditions.

When asked, the community shared that they wanted guidance in three areas: 1) What actions can I take? 2) What events are going on? 3) What organizations exist? And so, Boulder.Earth as you know it was born. Enter Damjan Bogdanovic and Mark Steele as web developers extraordinaire! Our long-term vision of creating a landing page to foster connectivity was coming to fruition.

We entered the city’s Boulder Energy Challenge, and not only were we granted our startup funding, but we even won the community pitch night for a bonus $1k! We had our launch party in November, and now, a year later here we are. Stay tuned for our next blog post about what comes next!