Tuesday, 26 Feb 2002

WASHINGTON, D.C.

This morning, as planned, I called Peter Leary, the clean air campaign coordinator for the Southern Environmental Law Center, a Clear the Air coalition partner. I also called Jeremy Kranowitz of the Izaak Walton League of America, another campaign partner. After talking to Peter and Jeremy, I have a better idea of which groups to try to work with on this campaign. It seems, however, that inter-organizational politics will be a little tricky to navigate.

I wondered if any of the other Green Corps organizers on the Clear the Air team were facing similar issues, so I posted a message on the listserv we recently set up. There are seven other Green Corps organizers working on Clear the Air right now — in Oregon, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, and New Hampshire.

The Clear the Air listserv is part of the support network that exists among Green Corps organizers and our supervisors. In one way, the Green Corp organizers are employees, hired to make a difference on critical campaigns. In another way, however, we’re students learning to be environmental leaders. To accommodate this latter identity, the program has created numerous avenues for discussion of and feedback on our work.

While we’re in the field, each Green Corps organizer stays in contact with an assistant organizing director who monitors our progress and provides help and advice on our work throughout the year. Our AODs are available for consultation almost anytime, and once a week each of us has an hour-long individual call with his or her AOD. Our AODs are experienced organizers, and they can help us learn to organize more effectively, but they also keep us thinking about our plans for the future. On weekly calls with my AOD, Antha, I have plenty of questions about the day-to-day details of my work. But as the year progresses, I also find that I have more and more questions about where I will fit into the environmental movement after Green Corps. Antha has been helping me figure out what type of job I should be looking for.

Our AODs aren’t the only part of the Green Corps support network. Green Corps organizers are a valuable resource to each other as well. Teams of organizers stay in touch with each other through weekly conference calls as well as through individual phone conversations and email. Our conversations aren’t all business, though. There’s an intense feeling of community among my Green Corps classmates, and we’re friends as much as we are colleagues.

A message on the Clear the Air listserv alerted me that tomorrow will be the Clear the Air team’s first weekly conference call, where I’ll get a chance to say hi to the rest of the team and find out how they’re doing, but also to bounce some ideas off them about what to do in Virginia. I wrote the conference call into my schedule for tomorrow, and then replanned the rest of my week around the new information I learned from the Virginia campaign partners. My top priority for the rest of the week is to get in touch with the “big fish” — the environmental, health, or religious groups that I am most interested in working with — so I scheduled in lots of time on the phone.

Tuesday ended happily, because I spoke with someone who has a room to rent, and arranged to see the place and meet the other tenants tomorrow. The location is excellent, the price is reasonable, and unless my potential housemates are three-headed ogres, I’ll probably take it.