Millennials Changing America

Adaptability, (slow) tech-integration, and Focus the Nation

by Alex Steed

Published November 25, 2008 @ 06:58AM PT

Focus the Nation had a huge impact on me when I met with them a few weeks back. I was wholly awed by their four full-time staff members who are totally bright, well-organized, and devoted to fixing the climate mess by way of creating nation-wide campus mobilization.

I was struck most not just by their intelligence and passion — we talked seamlessly for well-over an hour — but by the way they approached organizing:

• Tech-integration. I now spend so much time in "early adopter" circles, where socially minded tech geeks try to figure out how to integrate the cutting edge into their overall performance, that it is easy to forget that doing requires action. The four young people I met at Focus the Nation had all been organizers elsewhere and they had a tremendous amount of on-the-ground experience. When it came to organizing 1900 teach-ins throughout the United States, they got on the phones, maintained excel sheets, and set up meetings one by one.
• Adaptability. Their ability to adapt their message campus-to-campus also inspired awe. They went into organizing this nation-wide campus movement imagining that every university had a pocket of socially-interested, climate-passionate students and faculty who would be willing to take this issue on. Realizing that this is not actually the case, they pursued scalable events, which ranged from help with setting up recycling clubs (in part so that they could lay out concepts and ideas that will eventually lead to more comprehensive action), to several-thousand-people-strong rallies. Having seen many groups crumble under the unmanageable weight of "our way or bust" models, seeing their approach regarding adaptability was refreshing.

After pulling off a successful mobilization by way of their model, they then organized their online campaign around the architecture of this success. It is easy, of course, to get caught up in the magic the tools of online action and activism, but having seen the successes that Focus the Nation had found in doing things the opposite way, it reminds that while the Internet is a great way to get a lot of people doing things at once, face-to-face organizing has a rich depth to it that can well-implemented when organized then leveraged and better-organized by way of online communication.

Focus the Nation just launched their new site. Be sure to check it out.