ROCKVILLE, Md. — One of the organizations participating in last weekend’s People’s Climate March in New York City is advertising training to individuals who want to “make a good living” teaching elementary school children about climate change.
According to a posting on its website last year, the organization — We Are Power Shift — wants “energetic young people who want to make a living as professional presenters to go to elementary schools and show students, parents and teachers how to take significant action to reduce their carbon footprints as much as they can and as quickly as possible.”
We Are Power Shift says younger children are vital to their movement because “the missing 1/3 of the population is elementary children and the teachers and parents who love them.”
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The organization admits that it intends to harness “the most powerful forces in the world, parental love and the nagging power of children.”
Training sessions began last October in Montgomery County, Maryland.
According to the Facebook page link provided, trainees spent three days at Montgomery College learning how to deliver the program ‘Step By Step’, how to get into schools, how to become a sub-foundation of We Are Power Shift’s parent organization, and how to get paid for it.
The training sessions, referred to as Climate Change is Elementary, are led by Dave Fennigan.
According to Fennigan, trainees learn how to teach elementary students “the carbon cycle in a dramatic retelling”, showing them “how slowly all the carbon got into the Earth and how quickly we are putting it into the atmosphere.”
In addition to learning a song, which they say they intend to teach to “all the kids in the world”, Fennigan says the program shows climate change educators how to “bait” families into returning to the school in the evening with their children.
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The bait involves teaching the children the song and a second activity for them to share with their parents at ‘Family Night’.
The second activity is juggling “with slow-moving nylon scarves”. There is no mention as to whether this activity has anything to do with climate change, so perhaps it is just what Fennigan says it is — “bait”.
During ‘Family Night’, parents are asked to fill out a “Family Sustainability Checklist of all the things they promise to do to reduce their carbon footprint.”
We Are Power Shift is a project of Energy Action Coalition, which, according to Discover the Networks, is a member of Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Education. They receive funding from several foundations, including George Soros’ Open Society Institute, The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Surdna Foundation.
Energy Action Coalition says it is comprised of 30 youth-led environmental and social justice organizations. Its partners include Green Peace, The League of Young Voters, and Green For All, the organization started by Van Jones, the former Obama “green jobs czar” who once proclaimed himself to be a communist.
Jones was keynote speaker at Energy Action Coalition’s 2009 and 2011 Power Shift conferences.
According to its website, Energy Action Coalition strives to follow, among other principles, the People of Color Environmental Justice Principles of Working Together.
The Preamble to ‘Principles of Working Together’, a document established at the First People of Color Leadership Summit in 1991, states, in part:
“WE, THE PEOPLE OF COLOR, gathered together at this multinational …People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, to begin to build a national and international movement of all peoples of color to fight the destruction and taking of our lands and communities, do hereby re-establish our spiritual interdependence to the sacredness of our Mother Earth; to respect and celebrate each of our cultures, languages and beliefs about the natural world and our roles in healing ourselves; to ensure environmental justice; to promote economic alternatives… which would contribute to the development of environmentally safe livelihoods; and, to secure our political, economic and cultural liberation that has been denied for over 500 years of colonization and oppression, resulting in the poisoning of our communities and [water, air] land and the genocide of our peoples to affirm and adopt these Principles of Environmental Justice.”
Last Saturday, at the People’s Climate March in New York, trainers from the Climate Change is Elementary program presented a session titled “Mobilizing Families and Children for Climate Action.”
As recently reported, organizations participating in the planning and promotion of the march included the International Socialist Organization, Freedom Socialist Party, and the Communist Party USA.
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