Tag: Al Gore

  • Intensive and fun days at Nya Malmö Latin with ‘Young Ideas for Europe’

    Students are working hard on a political manifesto for sustainable future
    Students are working hard on a political manifesto for sustainable future © IFOK GmbH

    It’s half-way into the project week with ‘Young Ideas for Europe’ and so far we have had tonnes of new information that the participants absorbed from expert presentations, videos, and watching the live stream of 24 Hours of Reality“, organised by Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project. At this very moment the students of Nya Malmö Latin are creating their political manifestos for the role-play, as well as working on their own positive vision for the energy and climate policies in Europe in the next 15 years that will be delivered to EU’s top politicians in Brussels in a month from now.

    We all learn new things every day. Not only the students, but the facilitators as well. Together we are doing the math and asking critical questions, trying to make peace with the fact that there are no definite answers, but only a definite direction we need to go, and an overwhelming sense of urgency to follow a sustainable path.

    On the project’s first day on Monday we had one of the lead authors of the IPCC’s latest assessment report, professor Markku Rummukainen, joining us at the school and delivering a brilliant and well-balanced presentation. Tuesday was filled with politics, inspiringly presented by Lorenz Tovatt, a spokesperson of the Swedish Young Greens, and Anna Bengtsson from the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation. Positive visions for Swedish and European climate and energy policies were brainstormed in the afternoon of the second day. Wednesday marked the start of the two-days long role-play.

    It’s half-way through the project week of ‘Young Ideas for Europe’ at Nya Malmö Latin, but only a starting point for these young people’s engagement with climate politics. And we are there with them to support them on every step along this way towards a climate-safe, prosperous, and just world for all.

  • Heading to Istanbul!

    Leading a workshop on international climate politics in Vienna
    Leading a workshop on international climate politics in Vienna

    June is a pretty hot month for us at Wake-Up Call. Well, to be honest, we were actually freezing in the rains-battered and flooded Central Europe, as we travelled to Vienna to facilitate sessions on climate and energy politics and to train 30 young activists from all corners of Europe in campaign strategy planning at the EnCaTra training, organised by Federation of Young European Greens in the beautiful capital of Austria. But the energy and enthusiasm of the EnCaTra’s participants raised the emotional temperature considerably higher than what would be considered sustainable for our planet. 🙂 This warm event gave us enough energy to continue the trip to our next destination – Istanbul, where a number of our friends and comrades have already converged to join the protests in Gezi Park and to help prepare for the Global Power Shift that is coming to that city in less than two weeks from now. A slogan that we saw at one of the demonstrations that we recently took part in: “A tree fell down, a nation woke up”. We hope that similar wake-up call for democracy is coming to many corners of the world, as it already did in Tunisia and Egypt, and is currently happening all across Turkey.

    On the 7th anniversary of Al Gore’s famous documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ we are packing our bags to go to Istanbul to participate in Al Gore’s Climate Reality Leadership Training, where we and few other of our friends from Sweden will be trained as effective climate communicators and organisers. Few days after that first training we are going to attend another one – ‘Training for Trainers’ – with the awesome facilitators from Training for Change. And then it’ll be our turn to flex our “facilitator’s muscle” and to spend a week with seventy young climate leaders from over 135 countries of the world, coaching them in story-telling techniques and the story-based campaign strategy. Among those participants will be our own colleagues from Wake-Up Call and our close friends and allies from PUSH Sverige. How exciting is that?! Very! We are so psyched up that we can barely contain ourselves! Come back to this blog and tune into Wake-Up Call’s Facebook page and Twitter account for more updates from Istanbul, from Al Gore’s Climate Reality Leadership Training and from the Global Power Shift!