Greetings from Spain! A volunteer's first experience at an official Greenpeace Skillshare!
Hey everybody! My name is Josh Chamberland and I'm a campus coordinator at Bowling Green State University (Northwest OH) with the Environmental Action Group, an incredibly amazing club at BGSU. We work with the Greenpeace Student Network and Ohio Student Environmental Coalition (OSEC).
A couple of weeks ago I was invited to take part in Greenpeace International's "Digital Mobilization Skillshare" that is taking place in Catalonia, Spain and this is where I'm writing from today! So what the heck is a Digital Mobilization skillshare?! Basically, it's a conference where people working for Greenpeace all over the world are coming together to share skills and ideas on how Greenpeace can improve its effectiveness in the "online world" and link it with the "offline world" to make a super effective, planet saving machine!
What's really exciting is that I am one of three volunteers that were invited from all across the world to add to the conversations what volunteers in America are experiencing, what may work, and what might not work in regards to building the environmental movement around the world. I am six hours ahead from my normal timezone, experiencing true jet-lag for the first time, and just got finished with the first offical day's activities.What I've seen thus far is truly amazing. It's basically a bunch of sessions designed for the participants, by the participants... something I've never really experienced before (the agenda is literally finalized the day of).
Today, I went to a workshop discussing how to effectively recruit volunteers for Greenpeace campaigns and another one that was all about sharing stories about campaigns fighting against climate change (this was really inspiring to hear all the different efforts/ approaches going on, big and small, across the globe). What I took away from the story sharing workshop was: "We are brought together through suffering together or having fun together" (both are effective means of movement building). I'm already lined up to co-facilitate at least 2 workshops thus far and get to represent how U.S. volunteers do it (woot woot!). But yeah, I'll be co-facilitating a workshop on "giving an effective story of self and why it's important" and then another day I'll be co-facilitating an "actions brainstorming session". I actually have to go prepare for those now and then head off to bed for the night, but more updates will be coming soon!
If you'd like to find out more what Environmental Action Group at BGSU has been up to, check out these links:
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