“The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.” ― James Madison

Loosely based on the Niagara Sierra Club’s successful Writing Group, the RPCC is starting a Writer’s Group of its own. This group will help all RPCC member organizations amplify and accelerate its mission by assisting them in working out the best possible language and strategies for reaching the mainstream media. We’ll also leverage all the possible social media aspects of the Internet to get our member’s message to the public.

When: Thursday, October 13th, at 7PM
Where: St. Thomas’ Church of Rochester, 2000 Highland Avenue, Rochester, NY 14618

This group will meet monthly to discuss how RPCC member organization are addressing Climate Change and talk about how to reach local media most effectively. While we wouldn’t be actually writing articles and press releases for our member groups, we will be assisting in all other aspects of shaping the message and getting it to the media—both print and digital media. Neither will the Writing Group be speaking for the RPCC, we are a service of the RPCC for our members. (BTW: If your group isn’t a member of the RPCC, sign up here.) 

With almost 100 member organizations, the RPCC is already reaching many folks though their membership and has become an effective vehicle to bring the crisis on Climate Change to the media’s attention.

“The Rochester People’s Climate Coalition unites local organizations to address the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, transition to a clean energy economy, and prepare for the impacts of global warming.  Through our coordinated, collaborative efforts, we will create a more environmentally just and sustainable community.”   

The Writing Group hopes to noodle through all the opportunities such a vast and diverse coalition can exploit to focus local media’s attention on RPCC’s actions, events, and positions on Climate Change.
Climate Change has metastasized past the point where only a few people can make a difference on this worldwide crisis; now it’s all hands on deck. Check out this recent article by Bill McKibben:

Recalculating the Climate Math The numbers on global warming are even scarier than we thought. The future of humanity depends on math. And the numbers in a new studyreleased Thursday are the most ominous yet. Those numbers spell out, in simple arithmetic, how much of the fossil fuel in the world’s existing coal mines and oil wells we can burn if we want to prevent global warming from cooking the planet. In other words, if our goal is to keep the Earth’s temperature from rising more than two degrees Celsius—the upper limit identified by the nations of the world—how much more new digging and drilling can we do? Here’s the answer: zero. (September 22, 2016) Bill McKibben New Republic [more on Climate Change in our area]

The Writing Group will host ongoing presentations on the nuts and bolts of writing articles, discussions by experts on how to get articles published, meetings with member groups on what they’d already learned about reaching the public via the local media, and discuss new ideas on how engage the public on the crisis of our age. If you have experience or interest in editing, writing, teaching, communication, social media, or web editor skills, come on over.

I’ll be hosting these monthly meetings and try to keep them lively and informative. I was communications chair of the Rochester Regional Group of the Sierra Club for many years, and for almost twenty years my website, RochesterEnvironment.com, has offered me an opportunity to focus my message around the urgency of environmental issues and Climate Change. Your thoughts and experiences are pivotal to the success of this group.


The Writing Group will be fun and useful.