Yesterday, at 5 PM, I wandered computer-bleary eyed around the net. Feeling too guilty about my one-hour Chinese restaurant lunch to leave the office early, I stumbled across some resources my lovely Greenpeace colleagues have thoughtfully placed upon the web.
    I know that the web is made up of many rooms with many different doors and corridors leading to these rooms, so yes, you may have come across some of these tools en route to reading this blog. But I’m going to assume that you haven’t. After all, doesn’t one always want to think that one is helpful, introducing friends to new things, rather than annoying, pointing out things friends already know?  
    Here’s what I found.
    If you go to http://kleercut.net/en/campus, you will be able to download a Kleercut student packet. This is a nine-page guide to beginning, middling, and completing the Campaign on your campus. Also available on the site, you will find a sample letter your university can “write” to K-C. This letter, or one extremely similar to it, is your goal. (You will find a link to this blog, but nuff said about that.) Though Lindsey Allen, our very dedicated Campus Kleercut Organizer, will be glad to send you information on the Kleercut Campaign, it’s always good to be able to access the resource on your own, from your dorm room or the library or where ever else you might be.  
    The other resource I came across in my end-of-the-day internet hiking trip was the Greenpeace Student Network. If you go to http://members.greenpeace.org/students, you will find a list of schools that have already joined the network, so you can see if you school’s there, or if there are schools in your area. (High schoolers—there are high schools in the network too!)  If you mosey on to the About Us link, you can learn more about the structure of the network. This is especially helpful if you are in the beginning stages of getting a group of students together.
    Further, also on the page is a brief history of the 21st Century. The 21st Century Greenpeace Student Network, that is. It unarguably inspiring to read about these students’ accomplishments. Last night, I went home at a decent hour, full of Chinese food lunch and excitement for the future.

    Have you heard this before? “So what does your environmental interest have to do with the real world?” What an annoying, ridiculous question. Yet for so many people, environmental work is either far away from, or just not part of, the “real world.” I have found this is especially true for forest and wilderness work, where the areas getting the attention are the areas physically removed from the population that is trying to save them (as well as removed, most likely, from the greater population).
But questions like these are part of the reason I am particularly excited about the Forest Friendly 500, a website of businesses that have pledged not to buy Kimberly-Clark products until the company stops sourcing from ancient forests to make its disposable paper products. This website makes the very necessary connection between the Boreal Forest’s well-being and consumer choices.
So there you have the “Forest Friendly 500” bit to which the title of this blog refers. Here’s where the two other parts of the blog’s title comes in—this summer, the Kimberly-Clark campaign needs you to recruit businesses to join the Forest Friendly 500.
As a Forest Friendly 500 activist this summer, not only will you be connecting with your community, but you’ll be educating people about ancient forests and their role in protecting/destroying these lands. You’ll be the person who’s making the connection between “environmental issues” and  “real world” issues. What could be more exciting? Not much, that’s for sure.
Oh, wait, here’s something that’s practically equally exciting—get ten businesses to join the Forest Friendly 500, and you’ll get a free green Kleercut t-shirt, get twenty sign-ups, and you’ll get a free hoodie. (Check out the website www.forestfriendly500.com for more information.)
Visit www.forestfriendly500.com to download your activist pack, and get busy! All the businesses in the world are eligible to participate—from, say, a family member’s business, to the coffee shop where you get your morning coffee, to the thrift store or law office in your neighborhood. You get the idea. Right now we have 264 businesses (52%) of the 500, but we need more. (Hey! It wouldn’t hurt to have more than 500 businesses listed, either.)
One last thing— if you plan on being a Forest Friendly activist, it would be great if you could email me (renata.silberblatt@sfo.greenpeace.org). This way, I’ll be able to see how many activists we have working on this campaign this summer. I’ll also keep you up-to-date on K-C campaign activities after the summer.

As I’ve reported a few blogs ago, American University has gone K-C free. Amazing news, but you might wonder: who are some of the people behind this victory? Well, I’ve been hard at work getting this scoop (ok, “hard at work” is a little misleading: I’ve traded some emails, and got the scoop for you). In the next few paragraphs, I want to talk about Riley Neugebauer, American University’s Environmental Coordinator.
When asked about how she became an environmentalist, Riley responds that she “can’t explain it that well, because it always just made so much sense to me.” She points out that growing up in rural Pennsylvania, her “parents instilled in me the ideals of conservation, hard work, the difference between needs and wants, and the importance of self-sufficiency.” These things, along with the “great appreciation for how beautiful the world is, and how beautiful the different people of the world are,” directed her toward “helping the earth and helping people at the same time.” However, her environmentalism became more focused in college, where she switched from environmental science to environmental studies partially because of the “wonderful professors who really showed hope along with the scary threats to the planet and its species.” Also at college, Riley learned about community organizing, and perhaps more importantly, she learned that not only did she have a knack for organizing, but that she had passion for doing this kind of work as well. Her organizing experience at college lead her to see that she “really wanted to be able to organize, and especially organize young people around environmental issues, because of all our passion and energy and power.”
One of the main challenges that faced the American University K-C campaign was “figuring out what a letter from “the university” meant.” Riley notes that “there was no way that we could go straight to the President and have him sign this letter regarding K-C. Everything that you try to push through at that level of leadership take months, years, to succeed.”   Instead, what worked really well was figuring out a target who had purchasing power over the campus, but who wasn’t the president or a major senior-level administrator. Riley and Lindsey (GP’s Kleercut Student Organizer) “changed the letter [that stated AU wouldn’t purchase K-C products] a bit so that it applied to the Director in Facilities Management.” This director at AU “is the person who manages the contracts with Housekeeping services here, and so he has some level of control over what goes into AU’s contracts and what paper the school uses through the vendor with which the school works.”
I asked Riley to give me some tips to pass on to aspiring (and real-life) student activists and organizers. She gave me three. Firstly, she suggests that activists/organizers shouldn’t get into the mindset that “every administrator and every person in power [on their campuses] is evil.” She believes that “this mindset among the activist communities on many campuses is really detrimental to getting things done.” Along these lines, another tip she has is for students to “identify champions within the administration to help them, and act as a liaison between students and other administrators.” This can be the sustainability coordinator, but it can also be interested staff. Her last tip is that students should “not forget their power.” She points out that “Institutions are there for students [. . .] Rather than feel that your institution owes you the right to park wherever you want, or that it should use plenty of pesticides so the grass is green, you should feel it is your right to make changes which are better for our health, for our planet, and for the future economy in dealing with real issues like climate change, a lack of corporate social responsibility, poor forest management, and the loss of biodiversity.”
Well said, no? With Riley’s help, it seems almost certain that America University will be going far, leading the environmentally-conscious university charge.  

    Obviously, every campus is different, and there is no one way, one set of steps to follow, to run a successful campus campaign. However, consider the points that follow as a sort of checklist that you can add to, or subtract from, as they relate to your campus situation.

1) Identify your goal. The over-arching goal of the K-C University Campaign is to get universities to commit to not using K-C products until the company stops sourcing from ancient forests.
2) Find your target. Who is the Facilities or Operations or Purchasing Manager (i.e. who is responsible for purchasing decisions) at your school?
3) Find yourself a group. You’re going to need student (and maybe even professor) allies in this campaign. Either form a group with your friends and other interested parties, or find an already-existing campus group that deals with environmental issues. Some campuses have groups that tackle campus-purchasing procedures. If your campus has one of these, you may want to work closely with them (i.e. join the group and get them to tackle this campaign with you).
4) Get the word out to the student body. School officials are a lot like politicians—most times, in order to make them move on a campaign, you need to show them that a lot of people care about the issue.
Some ways to get the word out:
- campus newspapers (write an op-ed, write a letter or get an editorial)  
- tabling (posters, fliers, banners, anything to catch people’s eyes and engage them in the issues—this is a good chance to be creative and have fun)
- PSAs on the campus radio (write up a quick rap about K-C and get your college radio station DJs to read it every few hours)
5) Record your support. As you get the word out, get records of support. Have people sign postcards, letters, toilet paper, anything to document that they support your work on the K-C campaign.
6) Meet with the decision-makers (i.e. your target). This is not as easy as it sounds, after all, who knows how willing to meet with you your individual campus decision makers will be, so setting up an initial meeting may take a lot of hard work and persistence. Nevertheless, let’s jump ahead. Good work! You’ve set up a meeting. Make sure that you’re prepared for this meeting.
- Know the issues: why are you against K-C?
- Know what you want from your school.
- Know why you want this; be able to vocalize the importance and impact on K-C of your university/college going K-C free.
- Be able to offer realistic other purchasing suggestions for your school.
- Come prepared to counter your school’s arguments against going K-C free.
- Have literature on hand that the decision-makers can refer to and keep after the meeting. (Pictures of the Boreal are really helpful, as they literally let people see things they may never have known existed before.)
- Bring your show of student support. No- you don’t need to bring your 10,000 students into the office, but do bring the signed petitions or letters.
7) Follow up with the decision-makers. This means a thank you for the meeting, but also a nudge (or more than a nudge, some pushes) to keep them to what they’ve agreed. Maybe they haven’t said that your school will go K-C free, but said that they’ll “look into that possibility.” Well, ok. So give them a call a few days later and ask, “Have you checked out the literature I’ve left with you? Do you have any questions about what we’ve discussed?” Also, ask for follow-up meetings.
8) Lastly, be prepared to fight! Remember, this may be a long-term campaign. You might even graduate before your school’s committed to going K-C free. But laying the groundwork: getting other students interested in what you’re doing, and letting others (people outside of school, the faculty) know about the campaign, are both huge aspects of any campaign. Even if you can’t get the golden egg, a letter of support from your school, by educating the public around you, I’d say you’ve definitely gotten lots of gold dust, and think about how much easier you made the trail for the following year!