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Step 9: Inspire Community Action

Engage community members and inspire them to take action toward achieving community sustainability goals. Foster conversations and create engaging outreach materials.

Why This is Important

You’ve spent extensive time on outreach and research to benefit the community. However, the impacts of your climate efforts will be magnified if you get buy-in from the community and encourage them to take actions on their own. For instance, the bike lanes you’ve invested in will be underutilized if you can’t convince people to switch from driving to biking for their daily commutes and errands.

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Community engagement is crucial because it ensures that the implemented measures are effective and embraced by the public. When the community understands and supports the goals, they are more likely to participate actively and sustainably. This collective action can significantly amplify the impact of your climate initiatives, making them more successful and far-reaching.

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How to Inspire People to Act

  • Motivate by Telling Stories

    • Narrative Power: Use stories to illustrate the impact of climate change on individuals and the community. Personal stories make the issues more relatable and compelling.

    • Example: Share the story of a local resident who switched to biking and how it improved their health and reduced their transportation costs.

  • Keep the Connection Local

    • Relevance Matters: Discuss specific climate impacts that your community is experiencing or may experience. Use local images and news headlines to show these impacts.

    • Local Examples: Highlight how local floods, heatwaves, or pollution have affected the community. Emphasize that taking action can mitigate these issues and improve local quality of life.

  • Focus on Solutions

    • Positive Outlook: Focus on solutions and the positive benefits of climate action. Show how individual actions contribute to broader community goals.

    • Success Stories: Mention specific initiatives in your community and highlight their successes. This not only provides a roadmap for others but also demonstrates that progress is possible.

  • Engage, Engage, Engage

    • Interactive Elements: Include audience engagement in your outreach efforts. Simple actions like asking for a show of hands, using interactive tools like Zoom polls, PollEv, and Mentimeter, or incorporating quizzes and polls can keep the audience involved.

    • Peer Influence: Use peer pressure positively by showing how many community members are already taking action. This can encourage others who are hesitant to join in.

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Ways to Facilitate Engagement

  • Presentations

    • Storytelling: Follow the path of a journey. Use interesting stories or specific examples from your community to illustrate your points. Ensure anecdotes are relevant, short, and tied back to your main topic.

  • Flyers and Social Media Posts

    • Leverage Plan Elements: Utilize pull-out pages from your climate action plan as flyers. Distribute them in cafes or post them on social media to reach a wider audience.

  • Quizzes and Polls

    • Engage and Educate: Use quizzes and polls to engage the community. Refer back to the poll you created in step 1 and ask deeper questions this time, including solutions and steps taken by individuals to improve local sustainability issues.

    • Interactive Learning: Quizzes and polls can be a fun way to educate and involve the community. They can also provide valuable feedback on public opinion and awareness.

  • Community Events

    • In-Person Engagement: Host community events like workshops, town hall meetings, and sustainability fairs. These events provide opportunities for direct interaction and engagement.

    • Showcase Initiatives: Use these events to highlight local sustainability initiatives and successes, fostering a sense of community and shared purpose.

  • Empower the Audience

    • Actionable Steps: End your presentation with a call to action. Provide specific actions they can take, a survey to fill out, a fun quiz, or ask them to follow you on social media or sign up for your newsletter. Include a QR code to direct them to a webpage of your choice for easy access.

    • Continuous Engagement: Keep the momentum going by regularly updating the community on progress and upcoming initiatives. Encourage them to stay involved and informed.

By employing these strategies and tools, you can create engaging outreach materials that not only inform but also inspire your community to take meaningful action toward sustainability goals. This approach ensures that your efforts have a lasting impact and drive community-wide participation.

Next Steps

In the download below, we’ve put together a presentation that illustrate some of the key best practices (and some slides that call out what NOT to do) – make sure you look at the “Notes” section of each slide for important context. Customize this presentation at your next event to inspire your community towards action on your sustainability plan.

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Need Help Implementing This Step?

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