Identify Your Group’s Focus: What problem or solution are you organizing around?

When Green Ellsworth formed in 2017, their focus was writing a 10-year Green Plan to guide sustainability efforts in the town. However, as the planning process progressed, some members became eager to move into action while others felt the need to stay focused on the planning. This created a challenge in maintaining momentum. The solution? Adding actionable short term projects alongside the planning process. This helped keep volunteers engaged and motivated as they saw results and progress in the near term.

CEBE had a different journey. They started with a focus on raising climate awareness through visible community projects and events. But as partnerships expanded and political dynamics shifted, their focus evolved. At times, advocacy took center stage, particularly when faced with a climate-hostile administration. As public support for climate action grew, their focus shifted again, this time toward implementation projects like EV charger installations and resilience assessments.

Defining your group’s initial focus is a crucial first step in the organizing process. It provides clarity and direction, ensuring that your efforts are purposeful and aligned with the values and interests of the group. Without a clear focus, groups can become overwhelmed by the breadth of climate issues, risking fragmentation of energy and resources. Having a defined focus helps prioritize actions and makes it easier to communicate your goals to others. It also allows you to both measure impact with greater ease and make more strategic decisions as the work unfolds, ensuring that you’re not spreading yourselves too thin or veering off course. While you may advocate for multiple solutions, your group should choose a couple of near-term priority areas to retain focus.

Both of the groups profiled here demonstrate that focus can evolve. It is important to start with a clear sense of what excites and motivates people, while staying flexible enough to adjust as the work unfolds. Some questions to consider when exploring the focus for your group follow.  While this can be a challenging process, as climate change touches nearly every aspect of community life, it is also an exciting opportunity to align near-term focus with priorities and specific interests within your group.

What climate solution(s) are you most passionate about?

This question speaks to the interests in your group and how climate solutions intersect with what people care about. 

By answering these questions, your group will not only clarify your immediate focus but also set the groundwork for strategic decision-making. Knowing your focus will help you prioritize actions, allocate resources, and engage stakeholders in a more focused, impactful way

Use the linked worksheet to answer and organize your responses to these questions. This will help your group build a clear and actionable focus as you move forward.

Section 1: Getting Started

Planning: Defining Scale