Expert Sessions | Movement Building with Bill McKibben

Earlier this year, we hosted a series of expert learning sessions to help shape a long-term strategy for Work on Climate—one that’s grounded in the realities of an ever-evolving political, social, and economic landscape. These sessions brought together practitioners who have driven real impact by building climate-focused ecosystems, communities, and workforces across a range of sectors and scales.

We’re excited to kick off this Expert Sessions series with our first interviewee, Bill McKibben! As a co-founder of 350.org, Bill built the first global grassroots climate movement of ordinary people working to build a world powered by clean, accessible, and affordable renewable energy. 

The interview with Bill will focus on his leadership of 350.org as a global movement, especially during the early-middle days. 

Can you tell us what was key to 350’s approach to getting people from so many walks of life to understand and get excited about the same goal?

350.org when it formed had the great advantage of being there being a kind of unfilled ecological niche. It was the first attempt at a kind of global climate grassroots movement. So when we had our first big day of action in 2009, we were able to coordinate 5200 simultaneous demonstrations in 181 countries. There were just people everywhere eager for the chance to do some work. 

The secret was that we were doing what we call ‘open-source organizing.’ A potluck supper, almost. We set the date and theme, and everybody brought their best stuff. Our attempts to control it were small to non-existent. We just handed out the logo and idea to anybody who was doing anything, and it worked out just fine.

And our effort at first was just to let people know that there were other people around the world who felt the way they did. So the key to our work was a photo sharing app called Flickr. Any place anybody was doing a demonstration, we would have them upload video immediately. Then we would share it with everybody else to sort of let them feel like a part of a big movement. And in a kind of literal sense, we took over Times Square on that first day. We took the billboards that normally show whiskey ads, and we just started pumping these photos onto them one after another. Then we would take photos of those photos, send them back to Kenya or Peru, and say, “Look, here you are, 40 feet tall in Times Square. You’re a big part of a big movement.” 

So at the beginning, it was a lot about just allowing people to feel like there was momentum.

You said everyone acted in whatever made sense for them. Can you say a more about balancing the autonomy of movement organizers versus staying aligned with key goals and parameters of 350?

Well, our odd name “350” was chosen for two reasons. Arabic numerals work better than English words in translation around the world. So 350 meant the same thing everywhere. And two, it became the kind of defining notion of what we were saying, which was what the scientists were saying: 350 parts per million CO₂ was the most you could have in the atmosphere, and we were above that already. 

People around the world could spell 350 with their bodies on beaches, on mountain tops, so on and so forth. Everybody who wrote a story about it took a picture of it. They had to explain this basic piece of physics and help people understand that we were past where we were supposed to be. It’s not very complicated. 

Everybody understands the concept of too much, you know? And so that was enough of a cohesive message, at least in the beginning, to keep everybody on the same page.

How did you approach attracting, cultivating, training, and retaining movement leaders that were initiating and carrying out the action?

At first when we were recruiting, there were seven college students from the US who each took a continent and fanned out around the world. They found people who weren’t necessarily climate activists, but everywhere there was someone who was worried about development, about women’s rights, about peace, about all the things we’re not going to have on an overheated planet. Those people became natural allies, place after place. 

Once we’d been doing this for a while, people made very systematic efforts at leadership development. We did a thing called Global Power Shift. The first one was in Turkey where we had 400 young leaders from around the world there for four to five days, learning from each other on how to do this work. That kind of thing has gone on ever since. 

Just so you know, organizing movement building is a relatively new thing. It was only in the 20th century, under the leadership of people like Gandhi and Dr. King and a million other women and men whose names we don’t know, that we kind of developed this technology for how the small and the many can stand up to the mighty and the few. 

There’s no West Point for nonviolent movement building, so we kind of make it up as we went along. But now there’s enough known about best practices and how to get stuff done, that it’s really important and fun to do a lot of that kind of training work.

What did it look like operationally to train movement leaders?

When we were doing those Global Power Shifts, of course we had to raise a lot of money to hundreds of people from hundreds of places, mostly across the global south to one central location. So people nominated themselves or nominated other people to attend these events. But in much more informal and frequent ways, we’re just setting up opportunities all the time for people to learn how to organize. There’s something intimidating for people about the idea that they have to go be an organizer, but it turns out that this is a skill set that all human beings are suited for. I’m a deep introvert and if I can learn to do some of this, then most people can. So we find it really fun to introduce people to this new part of themselves. 

Did you do anything in particular to help people see their agency as a potential organizer? How did you help them see that they could do this?

I actually think that you mostly learn by doing things. If 350 had one kind of organizing innovation, it was this idea that the Internet had advanced to the point where we could do these massively distributed actions. We could do 5,000 things at the same time. And we were, I think, the first people to try that sort of thing. 

And that means most of those things are going to be pretty small. It’s not like the March on Washington or something. And that allows lots of people to earn some good organizing chops.

Did you have to keep people accountable in doing the work they said they’d do as organizers, or was it all organic and the collective efforts added up?

My experience has been: you can put a great deal of trust in people. The test for that, with 350, we had a logo and it was a good one, a beautiful one. And we just said, “Take it, use it,” which would have been impossibly scary for the World Wildlife Fund, for instance, who doesn’t like it if you take a panda and stick it on their logo. They’re rightly worried that someone might do something bad with it or, you know, damage their brand. 

We just decided not to worry about that, and to let people do what they wanted. 350 has organized, by now, 20,000 demonstrations in every country on earth except North Korea. And there’s never been a problem. It might be weird in this era of trolling, and I probably should knock on wood, but I think there’s a good deal to be said for trusting the people around you.

Can you say a little about how you resourced this work? How much was funded versus how much was done by volunteers, and how did you appeal to funders?

You need a central staff in order to make volunteers as productive as possible. I’ve always been a volunteer in this work, but we’ve always needed a small core of people who were gonna make sure that the website was up, stay in contact with people, develop materials, and more. 

But the key for organizations like this is to see themselves in the role of, above all, empowering their volunteers. The danger becomes if things become too staff-centric. Those of us in the center of things begin to think of ourselves as the organization instead of as a kind of apparatus to help make the organization work as well as it can. 

That becomes less of a problem when you’re actively engaged in campaigns, when you’re in the middle of a fight. It’s when you’re in-between fights, people decide that it’s time to sit around and think about theories of change and strategies. Sometimes, I begin to worry because it’s harder to distribute that work and stuff widely. 

The stuff we do is, you know, difficult for funders to get their head around because they usually like more centralized control. Also, I think that the metrics that funders care the most about generally aren’t the right metrics. Regarding huge scale questions like climate change, yes, you’re fighting to stop particular pipelines or to pass a piece of particular legislation or whatever the fight is, but the larger, more important fight that all of that feeds into is the fight to change the zeitgeist – to change society’s sense of what’s normal, natural, and obvious. 

If you can get that done, it makes all those other fights easier. As that zeitgeist shifts, the next set of battles get much simpler. That’s generally where I’m aiming, but that’s hard to explain why that’s crucial to funders.

You do a lot of cool stuff. You get a lot of people to change what they’ve previously done or join one of the causes. What are some of the obstacles that you always see and how do you help people overcome them?

The biggest obstacle, and perhaps relates more to Americans, is that we default to individualism in a way that other places aren’t. The biggest obstacle is people feel they need to tackle these causes by themselves. If they’re thinking about climate change, their first question is, “What do I put on my roof or in my garage?” 

It takes a while to explain to people that the most important thing an individual can do right now is be less of an individual and join others in movements, coalitions large enough to have some chance of affecting the basic ground rules here. I think people are starting to understand that more. And as they do, it gets easier to build the scale of movements that we need. 

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