The EcoRes Forum Call for Action

To NGOs, Grassroots Activists & Professional Advocates

In our efforts to change attitudes, policies, and institutions as we educate, advocate and operate, we call upon our global civil society at all levels:

• To recognize the significant expansion of CSOs’ status during the last decades and the responsibilities that accompany this expanded role;
• To look beyond organizational and political obstacles to our forging better and more synergistic interconnections, and to actively cultivate and exploit these synergies, building coalitions and taking joint action for the good of all concerned;
• To actively incorporate a diversity of views in our work, tapping into our experience and wisdom as we overcome falsely propagated geographical and social divisions;
• To help raise the voices and concerns of the underrepresented and marginalized peoples most negatively effected by governmental and industrial decision-making in order to concretely incorporate these concerns in future decision-making;
• To focus our creative energies and convictions in order to identify key areas and effectively achieve and implement shared objectives by forming and/or joining local, national and international coalitions and alliances;
• To use the materials developed by the educational/training sector, as well as those developed within our own sector, to educate policy-makers, citizens, and students at all levels, and to use our networks and contacts to promote and share these materials;
• To empower our constituencies, through education and training, to explore alternative livelihood possibilities, particularly in areas in which traditional livelihoods are based on unsustainable practices and resources that may soon no longer be available;
• To actively reach out to those in positions of influence, whether religious, political, or communal, to make the voices of environmental responsibility heard, to be willing to take risks and criticism while doing so, and to promote participatory, grassroots democracy as key to progress in all areas;
• To decrease duplication of effort, and, where overlap is identified, to seek joint cooperation with religious, community, and development groups in order to most effectively use resources, whether human, material, or financial; to use communicative technology like the Internet more effectively in these united efforts;
• To develop our leadership, managerial, organizational, communication, operational and relationship-building skills in order to put our resources to the most effective use;
• To increase our sectoral and organizational professionalism, accountability and transparency to earn the trust of those a) we hope to reach and b) from whom we
  seek support;
• To leverage the catalyzing potential of new media in order to widen our reach and potential impact in addition to the tools already at our disposal;
• To develop a sectoral support system to maintain our “production capacity”: methods and approaches to training, evaluation, and empowerment, including an emotional/social component, in order to prevent burnout and issue exhaustion and to maintain enthusiasm and motivation;
• To identify and incorporate, where possible, logical, rational bases for our efforts, in order to widen our reach and overcome the stereotype that only extremists and nonconformists take part in environmentally motivated endeavors;
• To strengthen partnerships with the UN and national governments while actively monitoring compliance with international environmental protocols and conventions; and
• To establish and empower witnessing systems to raise our voices if/when deviation from or abuse of these conventions occurs.