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With all of the activity going on around advocating for EE programs in the US federal budget, I am curious what other affiliates are doing to encourage and support advocacy efforts in your state or province? Do you have your own advocacy listservs or committees or do you just direct your members to the NAAEE group? Do you provide any advocacy trainings for your members?
In New Jersey we have a very active volunteer who keeps up with the advocacy issues. She is charged with representing ANJEE on NAAEE advocacy phone calls and can advocate using our name on EE issues. She is excellent at sending out emails asking us to call our representatives. She is basically a one woman committee at this point, but we are working on getting her more help.
In Colorado, we have a google group/list serve for our members who are interested in supporting advocacy efforts where we post any calls for action that come from NAAEE's Advocacy Group. We try to tailor any national calls for action to the state by including the contact information for representatives and writing sample scripts/emails. At least once a year we call all our representatives and senator's offices to get updated contact information for both environment and education staffers so that we can quickly send out the info. In addition to sending out a wide call for action, I generally identify at least one person who lives in the district of each representative and personally ask them to contact their representative, so that each representative gets at least one ask from a constituent. We also send calls to action out regarding commenting on state initiatives such as state standards revisions, state agency strategic plans, etc.
In Rhode Island, one of our board members joins the NAAEE advocacy calls and reports back to the full board at our monthly meetings. She also posts pertinent information to either the board or our listserv. Between that board member and another, they contact our US Senators and Congressmen and ask on behalf of RIEEA to sign letters, etc. (As an aside, we always invite our 4 US reps to our Annual Meeting and other major events and they have been known to either attend, send a staff member, or provide us with a video address to play during the event on numerous occasions.) In addition, as part of our new initiatives, we are identifying the state representatives who we want to establish a relationship with and forming a strategy to do that.
