You got a feeling? It’s Electric!

Our Vice President of Communications and Creative Strategy, Sarah Lazarovic , imparts the importance of parties:

Here’s a great story from the wonderful behavioral scientist Nicholas Epley that I heard on Hidden Brain last week: 

So I've got a little orchard behind our house. We've got one tree in particular, it's an Asian pear tree. It just pours fruit. We get wheelbarrows full of Asian pears in the fall, and they're great, but they're also a pain in the neck, because there are like 500 of these things. And so most years, we'd pick all these pears, and then we would have wheelbarrows and buckets full of Asian pears that we would try to eat for months as best we could. And then there were hundreds that we would try to give away to people. This last fall, though, we invited, essentially, the whole neighborhood over for a pear-picking party. And I have a tractor that's got a bucket on it, we brought that to the house, and I was lifting the kids up into the tree in the bucket, and we had a ladder up into the tree that kids were climbing up, and everybody had buckets. We spent hours, kids playing with each other on our trampoline, we just turned it into a party. And it turned that experience that otherwise would have been kind of arduous and isolating into one that was really, really fun. 

My first thought was, “kids on ladders makes me nervous.” My second thought was, “this is amazing.” When you want to get something done and you need help, make it…fun. While I’ve been accused of rebranding the most tedious of chores as parties (let’s have a tidy time dance party, kids!), convening to pick and share fruit on a gorgeous day is a perfect example of how communities have always come together to harvest, to barn raise, and to turn hard work into soft collaboration. 

Beyond parties for prodigious pear trees, we need to come together for people and planet. In recent weeks strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio’s dictum to throw a better party is finally being heard in the world of politics, too. 

While the climate movement is a little late to this party principle, with eventful exceptions of course (apparently, the first Earth Day was a real banger), it’s never too late to tell a better story, or make a better cocktail. So how can we create that climate party? And by party I don’t mean a singular happening in time, but an ongoing party, an Olympic flame of a party, a vibe you want to be a part of, and not apart from. Well, we have to give people something of value: access, delight, and community. Information is merely the helpful byproduct of all that.

And we have to do so with an openness that transcends any definition of how to be a climate person. More often than not, the best climate party doesn’t even call itself a climate party: It’s a block party where you can pick up free soil for your garden. It’s a community event where you can hear an inspiring speaker. It’s a beautiful playground installation made of things that would otherwise clog your local landfill. And it’s a bunch of people playing music on your street, inviting you to meet everyone around you, preferably with good snacks.

For too long, the climate party was a dirge: Come be sad and fatalistic with us. Rewiring America founder Saul Griffith was one of the first people to point out that this was both terrible messaging, and terribly untrue. We’ve got solutions, we’ve got stuff to do. Let’s go! Climate activist and author Ayana Elizabeth Johnson gets this completely, and launches her climate party book tour this week! It’s been gratifying to see this actionable optimism spread in recent years, but we’ve still got so much to do to make it magical. Here are a few things we’re thinking about when it comes to throwing a better shindig!

Connect the watts

Parties are about connection. In the case of electrification, quite literally! Community resilience and thriving require nothing short of deep connection. How does your climate party connect? And does it create space for fishing net connections, as opposed to firework connections? The goal is not connectivity to the facilitator, but connection with each other. Success is a web of redundancy, (the good kind: it means multiple, overlapping connections) according to Damon Centola, author of Change. It’s also deeply place-based. We need “to stop looking for the special people in the network and instead start looking for the special places,” he writes. In other words, create spaces for connection, and let people forge their own bonds.

Make it electric

Electric things have an edge. When an event feels exciting people call it electric! You got a feeling? It’s electric. Party language already gives electrification an advantage — our hangs just need to live up to the adjective. It’s harder than ever to get people out of the house for all kinds of very good reasons. Attention and attendance are the most valuable commodities. So we have to provide electrifying experiences that warrant the sharing of those commodities. Electric doesn’t mean expensive, it means connective! Make things pleasant for people and they'll patronize your party.

Reframe it to refun it

My husband has a catchphrase: what if this were fun? It’s the light touch version of G.K. Chesterton: An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered. And it’s basically what the brilliant psychologist Jiaying Zhao preaches in her work and TED talkery: Make it fun. It can seem simplistic, but why is doom the default when there are so many emissions-reducing things that actually make us happy? Let’s fix that. “Don’t drive more…drive more people,” Zhao says. Because company turns a commute into a community.

Reinvigorate, don’t replicate!

Big gatherings like Climate Week give me pause. Alllll the emissions. I used up my carbon budget by the time I was seven. And yet, if we’re going to get together, LET US GET TOGETHER. Let's gather where the people are, for maximum efficiency and minimum emissions. Find the spaces people like to be and support them, add your gatherings to them, and make it easy for people to join your thing. If a fave community block party is already happening, table there and bring that pedal-powered snow cone machine. If Climate Week is already bringing everyone you need to meet to town, add some of your own electricity and make sparks fly. This is about accessibility, too — don’t add another rarefied destination event to the cal that people cannot afford to travel to. And think about ways to make companion virtual experiences as delightful as possible, too, for those that cannot IRL it for all sorts of reasons.

If we do all this right, we spoonful-of-sugar climate action. Not to sugarcoat the very real and time-bound challenges, but to make joining in easier for the people who want to help. Increasingly, we know that’s just about everyone! We’ve got a better story and better benefits. Now we just need to throw the best parties. In the coming months, Rewiring America will roll out some tools for adding that spark to your parties, and programs to help you do this!

Our Climate Week panel of a party, featuring some incredible people and some incredibly creative programming, is sold out, but you can join the waitlist here. Are you headed to NYC? Let us know in the comments!