Last Friday, we held a unique all-community call to shape the Climate Collaborative’s path forward from COVID-19. We were blown away by the response, as hundreds of you joined to plan for how our industry can work together to build back to better—better ways of doing business, ensuring supply chain stability, and protecting the planet and the people and communities we work with.

If you weren’t able to join, you can view the meeting in full here, and I really hope you will. We heard from environmental author and activist Bill McKibben, our partner Ceres, and our very own Nancy Hirshberg, a Climate Collaborative co-founder who is helping us build a vital climate response to COVID-19.

Right now we know everyone is suffering, and the focus is rightly on working to keep businesses and families afloat. However, as we move from recovery to economic stimulus in the coming months, trillions of dollars will be invested in infrastructure, and we must tackle the looming threat of climate change in that work, alongside driving economic growth and addressing inequities that the crisis has laid bare.

It is our biggest opportunity to shape the next decade of climate action. As Nancy said on the call, “Every one of us has a powerful voice coming out of this crisis, and we want to help you use it. Individual action isn't enough--we need a collective solution.”

So what is our plan?

Our first step is to partner with Ceres in their LEAD on Climate Days May 12-13. This will be the largest virtual call to action on climate from the business community ever. If you can, we need as many voices as possible to join. Our goal is to get at least 100 companies signed up—nearly 50 committed to do so on our Friday call alone! You can register here.

Registration is free and available to any company. You’ll get a half-day of online training on how to be an effective advocate, as well as talking points, social media kits, and everything else you need to engage. The second day Ceres will schedule group calls with members of Congress and their staff.  We are making it as easy as possible for you to engage from the comfort of your home.

Our plans don’t stop there. In the course of the call, we polled participants, and 97% said they want to be involved in a range of efforts in the coming months. Beyond LEAD, we are exploring ways to organize policy briefings, op-eds, sign-on letters, meetings with congressional representatives, and more. We want your ideas as we build this work, so we hope you’ll be part of the journey.

You may be asking why the voices from our industry are so vital. As Bill McKibben said on the call, small and medium-sized businesses are the ones who really hold political power--policymakers need to hear from all of you on climate!

"Let's take this moment and the massive government assistance that it's going to require to get us through this and use it to help ameliorate the problems coming at us next [on climate change]…we know we won't get many more chances, so let's get to it.”

Fifty years ago last Wednesday, twenty million Americans took part in the first Earth Day (10% of the population at the time). We’re now asking you to join another collective call at a historic moment in time.

Sign up for LEAD here, and contact us at [email protected] or [email protected] with questions or to get involved in this work.