In this section, Brandon Leshchinskiy describes the audience he and Prof. Newman are hoping to reach through the Climate 101 presentation.
Brandon Leshchinskiy giving the Climate 101 presentation to students at MIT.
By creating an interdisciplinary and interactive presentation, we can really reach people who haven't typically been part of climate activism.
—Brandon Leshchinskiy
The audience of EarthDNA’s Climate 101 is anybody who's interested in learning more about climate change from an interdisciplinary perspective. Most climate change educational materials focus almost exclusively on the science, while Climate 101 covers the science, the economics, and the civics of climate change, all within 45 minutes. What that allows us to do is to engage with people who wouldn't typically consider climate change to be one of their first priorities. The idea of Climate 101 is that by creating an interdisciplinary and interactive presentation, we can really reach people who haven't typically been part of climate activism.
Our previous efforts at recruiting people to share the Climate 101 presentation focused more on mobilizing: trying to build a giant list of people and then giving them materials, so that based on their level of time commitment or desire to participate, they could go and use them in their community. But we've discovered that mobilizing is not enough; we also need to organize.
So we're now we’re focusing on leadership training. Our materials are still available to anybody who wants them, but especially for people who want to develop their own leadership skills and enhance their personal and professional growth, and at the same time are passionate about climate change. We envision a community of leaders, called Earth Ambassadors, who engage their own communities at their schools on climate change.