The Alliance for Climate Protection
Who They Are:
Led by former Vice President Al Gore, and a bi-partisan board of directors, the Alliance for Climate Change seeks to “persuade the American people—and people elsewhere in the world—of the importance and urgency of adopting and implementing effective and comprehensive solutions for the climate crisis.” They pursue these goals through three main projects:
- “We Can Solve It,” which focuses on solar energy;
- “This is Reality,” which shines light on myths of coal as an energy source, and encourages a shift towards alternatives.
- “Repower America,” which seeks to transition America’s electricity to 100% clean electricity in 10 years;
Their mission revolves around promoting global climate change awareness, and empowering people to get involved in the green movement.
Their Online Presence:
A remarkably tech-savvy organization, the Alliance for Climate Protection has ambitiously utilized new media in numerous ways. They’ve created a “Facebook Causes” page, which has attracted over 2.7 million members and has raised over $32,000 so far. Their website has attracted about 2.2 million members itself, allows those with similar goals of improving our environment to interact in new collaborative ways.
How they could “Be Extraordinary!”
Global Warming is a 21st century issue – one that transcends governments and borders. The Alliance for Climate Change could take advantage of the crowdsourcing that The Extraordinaries offers by putting up important documents, fact-sheets, and project-proposals for translation. Then, when a volunteer has a few minutes waiting in line at the DMV, they can translate these facts about the Coal Industry into Korean, Estonian, or Arabic. Utilizing the ready and able volunteers’ free time to translate allows people to take advantage of their comparative advantage in language skills (rather than rely upon those awkward Google Translate results), to help spread an environmental education throughout the world through a message that affects the entire global community.
The Alliance also has a great feature called “Voices for Repower America” ( which allows people to tell their story, and why and how they plan to support the shift to clean electricity. But what if they could make these stories more dynamic? The Extraordinaries application would allow people to share their dreams and their anecdotes through recording and quickly uploading an audio recording of what they are doing, or perhaps a photo showing the contribution they, personally, are making to this global goal. Leveraging the Extraordinaries’ platform would allow this great community-building feature to become more robust, more personal, and more vibrant, without placing any additional burden on those volunteers that want to share their experiences.
Want to learn more?
http://www.climateprotect.org/
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Alex Budak is a recent graduate of UCLA and is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Public Policy at Georgetown University, with a focus on Technology and Social Entrepreneurship. He is joining The Extraordinaries this summer as a Research Fellow.
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