Food and Water Watch

ecs55@duke.edu — Thu, 03 May 2018 03:09:18 +0000

Description:

Food & Water Watch is a nongovernmental organization that advocates for healthy food and clean water for all. With the intention to stand up against corporations that care more about profit than other people, Food & Water Watch advocates for a democracy that protects the environment and improves quality of human lives across the world. The organization acknowledges the inequalities present in our food, water, and energy systems and aims to build a movement with the political power to create a healthy future for future generations through democratic processes to allow all to access the resources they need.

Goals:

Food & Water Watch have goals to rooted in independence, democracy, human rights, and sustainability. They wish to remain a public interest organization, independent of corporate and government influence. Engaging and mobilizing citizens through various manners is a strong goal as they believe political involvement is critical to hold people accountable to ensure a sustainable world with safe food and clean water. The organization has the political will to secure and strive for adequate nutrition and drinking water for all. Additionally, they hope to protect the quality of the environment while trying to achieve access to resources because a sustainability is important to future generations.

Structure:

Wenonah Hauter is the founder and executive director of Food & Water Watch. She has three decades of experience with campaigning and writing on environmental issues relating to food, water, and energy. She trains and mentors organizers and activists around the country and has experience working at both state and local levels to develop policy and legislative strategies to secure accomplishments for communities and the environment across the country. The staff that comprise the team span across the country, in Latin America, and the European Union in offices to work closely with grassroots groups. They are wildly experienced. Membership is a core value of Food & Water Watch as well as individual donors and foundations that hold similar agendas. The organization takes no money from corporations or governments.

Genealogy:

In the Fall of 2005, 12 members of the Energy and Environment Program at Public Citizen created Food & Water Watch. The group first had the intention to create a grassroots movement with the power to protect our resources, and with the support of donors, foundations, and members, the organization has grown to more than 100 staff members. Food & Water Watch has offices across the country and, with the help of supporters and activists, in the last 10 years has achieved accomplishments spanning from helping allies in Europe to convince others to vote in favor of a moratorium on fracking to organizing communities across the country to stop the corporate takeover of public water systems.

Campaigns:

https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/campaigns

Oppositional Forces:

Corporations abusing power to privatize public resources, pollution, governments that enforce policies which do not hold corporations accountable, and a lack of penalties for prosecuted corporations. They are also fighting against factory farming, global trade, GMOs, and fracking.

Type of Organization:

NGO

Tatics Used:

grassroots organizing

events

advocate fair policies

organize for change

take legal action

research and policy analysis

forming coalitions

Information campaigns

Website

Twitter

Facebook

Web Exhibit Created By:

Emma Stein

Public:

true

Caption:

350.org

ddp19@duke.edu — Thu, 12 Apr 2018 00:18:07 +0000

Description:

350.org organizes mass amounts of people to act against new coal, oil, and gas projects. With a network that extends to 188 countries, 350.org has no shortage of citizens committed to looking for clean energy solutions that will halt the heating of the planet. The organization derives it's name from what is typically regarded as the upper limit of what the earth can handle: 350 parts per million (ppm) of carbon in the atmosphere. Thus, it's three primary goals revolve around carbon: keep it in the ground, build an equitable zero-carbon economy, and pressure the government into limiting emissions. To accomplish these goals, it pushes mass collaboration in the name of climate justice, participating in dozens of marches and movements annually.

Goals:

As detailed in this section of its website, the organization's goals are three-fold:

1. Keep carbon in the ground.

2. Help build a new, more equitable zero-carbon economy.

3. Pressure governments into limiting emissions.

They aim to accomplish these three noble pursuits with grassroots organizing, social media campaigns, and mass public actions that target the fossil fuel industry.

Structure:

350.org consists of hundreds of staff members and thousands of volunteers from around the world, as detailed by their team page. They prepend words like "Chief" and "Lead" to certain titles suggesting some sort of hierarchical structure to decision making. The top-most level is an extremely diverse 9-person board which reflects the diversity of their entire team. Most of their impact, though, comes from the thousands of volunteers that demonstrate on a global scale.

Genealogy:

In 2008, environmentalist and writer Bill McKibben and a small group of students from Middlebury College set out with one goal: to reduce the parts per million (ppm) of carbon in the atmosphere. The group derived its name from a paper by NASA climate scientist James Hansen that found 350 ppm of carbon to be the upper limit, or tipping point, in the atmosphere. Just one year previously in 2007, McKibben led his "Step It Up" campaign that involved demonstrations in 1,400 cities across the US. After this, McKibben and the students set out to shift that mission from national to global.

The group gained a significant amount of traction in 2009 after McKibben appeared on the Colbert Report. In 2012, the group received the Katerva Award for behavioural change.

Campaigns:

International Day of Climate Action 10/10/10 Global Work Party Connect the Dots People's Climate March Many more can be found at https://campaigns.350.org/categories

Communication Strategy:

The organization's prioritizes communication through their press releases over all other channels. They also do a lot of communication through social media outlets, as they encourage people to like and share relevant pages. Additionally, their campaigns page spreads the word about relevant movements through petitions.

Oppositional Forces:

Fossil fuel companies, national governments

Type of Organization:

NGO

Tatics Used:

marches

social media campaigns

grassroots organizing