CIVIC ENGAGEMENT

Through education, engagement and action, our Civic Engagement program area builds youth-led, multi-sector Town Hall Forum campaigns. Every September, we build teams at 4-year and 2-year college campuses in each state. With FTN support and coaching, these teams spend six months mobilizing their campus and immediate communities as they build momentum for their annual Town Hall each February. After teams have been established, FTN fosters collaboration between 4-year and 2-year teams in the same state, as well as inter-state collaboration on best practices for events.

For young people between the ages of 18 and 28, these events serve as a tremendous leadership opportunity in learning hard skills related to topics such as politics, energy infrastructure, community organizing, marketing, media relations, moderating panels, budgeting, writing, and public speaking. Volunteer teams also learn “softer skills” like team building, delegating, working with older people in positions of power, motivating and coaching others, negotiation, compromise, decision-making, problem solving, professionalism, and conflict resolution.

For community members who attend Focus the Nation Town Halls, they function as a educational tool to learn about how clean energy directly connects to exciting innovative technology solutions, national security, job growth, local and national policy and a variety of other issues like energy infrastructure, transportation or regional food systems—whatever is most unique and tangible to that community.

The events also serve as an engagement opportunity for community members to interact directly with business and elected leaders in an action-focused panel discussion that identifies immediate roadblocks and solutions for people to mobilize around. Each event identifies immediate Roadblocks and Solutions in their state (or at the national level) to take action on in the months following the event.

Each summer following the Town Halls, FTN holds an intensive Youth Leadership Retreat on Mt. Hood in Oregon for a select group of young people who are interested in building careers as Innovators, Technicians, Politicians or Storytellers in the clean energy revolution. These retreats are designed to deepen their range of skills, foster early multi-sector collaboration and replenish the passion they have for doing intense social change work.

Since 2008, Focus the Nation has conducted four national campaigns that have engaged more than 300,000 young people in direct dialogue with thousands of business and elected leaders. Here is a list of our past Civic Engagement campaigns that have informed the vision of our model and empowerment approach to building the clean energy future:


•    Jan. 31, 2008: National Teach-in on Climate Change
•    Apr. 18, 2009: Nationwide Town Hall on Clean Energy
•    Fall 2009 Clean Energy Forums: Community and the Road to Copenhagen
•    Spring 2010 Clean Energy Forums: Jobs and the Clean Energy Race