Title: Raising the Barn: Building Resilience and Connection through Community Activation

Learning objectives: Effective strategies to engage and activate your community. 

I will share learnings from the many community organizing strategies I have deployed in my environmental work as well as some inspirational examples that help restore faith in our humanity and ability to rise to the occasion. 

Themes explored:

• Find Meaning in Crisis: Discover how to define a meaningful, active relationship with the climate crisis and use it as a catalyst for personal and societal change: An opportunity to live more deeply and authentically.

• Move beyond the myth of individual action:  How to work as a collective and end the isolation that often comes with climate depression.

• Move from awareness to action: Find ways to operationalize the emergency.  Working with your own talents and desires to move from isolation towards community.

Charlotte E. Binns has been organizing communities around environmental action for a decade. Starting in her neighborhood in Brooklyn, she  created GoGreenbk.org as a hub for everything environmental in Greenpoint and Williamsburg and joined the board of North Brooklyn Neighbors, helping the community to win back Bushwick Inlet Park. She led a Participatory Budgeting campaign to win $400,000 for a public school eco playground. And has worked with municipalities across the state to enable local clean energy legislation, converting tens of thousands of homes to renewable energy. Before moving out of NYC, Charlotte successfully lobbied the City Council to commit to a feasibility study to buy clean energy with savings for entire neighborhoods. Charlotte is now the Sustainability Director in her Village of Irvington in Westchester.