To understand the Coalition, first watch Our Climate Change Stories
We collectivized.
The Harvard Climate Coalition was born less out of necessity but instead out of hope.
Many discussions. Many hours. Many blackboards and chalk stubs. Many late-night texts and emails. Many disagreements. Many solutions. Many unanswerable questions. All of these components led to the creation of the Harvard Climate Coalition in Fall Semester, 2022.
That semester, student climate leaders met over 12 times to ideate, dream, negotiate, and debate with one another how to build a centralized space for climate action.
We built values, goals, missions, dreams, and actions together. Thus, we built the Coalition.
The Coalition was born from storytelling. The words of our speakers from Our Climate Change Stories (Fall, 2022) both united the existing climate community and challenged it to grapple with its role in exacerbating racial disparities. Acknowledging the history of environmentalism as an inaccessible movement was pivotal to the foundation of the Climate Coalition.
Moreover, democracy was the foundation of the Climate Coalition: our structure is so weird because we listened to everyone’s concerns regarding a centralized space. Will it overreach? Will it exclude? Will it gatekeep? (And, thus, gaslight and girlboss?)
To meet the demands of these questions, we devised the three caucuses to prioritize function, democracy, and radical inclusivity. The DEI Caucus represents our belief that frontline voices must be institutionalized as decision-makers in any climate action. Likewise, we know that to make our space welcoming to historically marginalized voices (who tend to sit on the front lines of climate change) we have to curate space for those perspectives to be heard, highlighted, and encouraged.