Our Strategy

If you want to make an impact on issues that matter as much as global warming, clean water or the influence of big money over our democracy, you have to answer four questions:

• Who has the power to make the concrete change we want?
• Who or what can persuade the person or people in power to want to make that change?
• What leverage do we have with those who have influence?
• How can we exercise that leverage?

There are plenty of obstacles to success: the power of corporate and other special interests, the polarized state of our politics, a culture that values consumption and entertainment over civic life, the power of inertia, and on and on. Change is hard. You have to be ready to work hard for it — but you also need to be smart and work strategically.

A case study: Our global warming campaign

Our campaigns are designed to be focused, timely and targeted to maximize our impact. For example, we’re running a campaign to limit global warming pollution from America’s #1 carbon polluters: Dirty power plants.

After Impact organizers helped collect 8 million comments to urge President Obama to act on climate, we celebrated a big victory when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced the Clean Power Plan, which is being called the strongest action ever taken by a president to combat global warming. With a target of lowering emissions 32 percent by 2030, this is a huge step in the right direction.

However, climate deniers in Congress, along with their fossil-fuel industry backers, are doing all they can to block action—in part by threatening to withhold funding for the EPA, even if it risks another government shutdown.

The question is how to persuade our elected leaders to persevere—and how to motivate the fence-sitters in Congress to stand on the right side of the issue (and on the right side of history)!

Therefore, Impact organizers across the country are working to raise the voices of climate defenders to drown out the voices of climate denial:

- First, in Congress, we’re urging representatives and senators to stand with President Obama’s plan over Sen. James Inhofe and his allies’ attempts to block it. If necessary, we must win enough votes to sustain a presidential veto.

- Second, outside of Washington, we’re persuading both Republican and Democratic governors who support clean energy to stand behind the Clean Power Plan—and thereby signal to Congress and the courts that blocking this plan will be politically unpopular.

- Third, we must keep showing all of these officials that local leaders and the public are with us and willing to speak out on this issue—because we know when the public leads, our leaders will, eventually, follow.

We’re reaching out to the media, enlisting the help of local officials and clean energy entrepreneurs (including more than 500 solar industry leaders), and mobilizing thousands of ordinary Americans to show their support for climate action.

The final chapter in this story isn’t written yet. But when it is, the work of our campaign organizers will have shaped the ending. That’s how we make an impact.