On October 9th through 11th, more than 100 students from Indiana and 400 students in Michigan united to network, learn, and train to take action on climate change at Michigan Power Shift and Indiana Power Shift.
“Some people are environment activists, some people are poverty reduction activists, some are social activists — we’re all (coming) together finding ways we can work together,” said University of Chicago graduate student Kyle Gracey this weekend in Michigan.
Organizers in Michigan used artists and musical performances to energize participants, featuring posters from the well-known Beehive Collective and musicians p.h.i.l.t.h.y. and the Flobots. The event in Indiana hosted keynote speakers Jessy Tolkan, Executive Director of Energy Action Coalition, and Carmel Mayor James Brainard who encouraged students to push for a clean energy economy.
Students at both events took up a range of projects throughout the weekend. Students in Indiana called Senators Evan Bayh and Richard Lugar to urge them to support strong climate legislation, brainstormed ideas for climate action, and wrote letters to politicians. Students in Michigan collected recyclable electronics from neighborhoods, built an urban garden, fixed up homes in the Lansing area, and launched a bike-building cooperative.
The two events were part of a dozen state summits taking place this fall throughout the United States and Canada to demonstrate the need for strong, bold climate legislation leading up to the United Nations Climate Change summit in Copenhagen this December.
“We’ve made mistakes in the past when it comes to the type of energy we have been producing … we know better now, and owe it to ours and future generations to fix it,” said Fred Hillenbrand in Indiana, a Vincennes University student who attended the national Power Shift ’09 summit in Washington D.C.
In the words of Hillenbrand, this generation “is the Power Shift the world’s been waiting for.”
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