Building bridges, expanding power: Strategies from the environmental movement

It has been a tough year for the environmental and climate movement, with the systematic dismantling of decades of environmental policy and the rollback of groundbreaking federal investments. These setbacks are a stark reminder that no matter what the issue, policy wins are fragile without a strong, organized base of public support and the resources to back it.

Building that base of support requires a fundamentally different way of working and the courage to bridge divides. The U.S. environmental movement has long enabled people to come together and exercise influence in the public sphere. Today, it is leaning into that history: In Mosaic Environmental Fund’s analysis of nearly 1,000 funding applications, we found environmental groups exploring new ways to connect across geographic, cultural, partisan, and ideological divides; breaking out of silos within the environmental space to collaborate across issues and subsectors; and broadening coalitions to include allies among labor, health, immigration, and other groups whose aims intersect.

Here are some of the strategies environmental groups are using to expand and strengthen the base of the movement—strategies for building power that are applicable across movements.

1. Investing in strong leaders for the environmental movement

Nearly 75% of the applications we received identified the need to support leaders and build strong and diverse leadership pipelines. The work of connecting with diverse audiences and building and maintaining coalitions takes skill and practice that even seasoned leaders don’t always have. Groups are developing leadership development programs and fellowships that provide training and support in relationship and coalition building, organizing, and advocacy. For example, Climate Advocacy Lab has developed a cohort-based training program specifically for coalition leaders and will use insights from this project to create tools for organizers and climate justice leaders across the movement.

Other groups are focused on bringing in new leaders, cultivating champions for climate and environmental issues from outside the environmental movement, like nurses and faith leaders who see the interconnection with their spheres.

2. Building narrative power

Another priority for environmental groups is depoliticizing issues by grounding them in shared values around healthy, thriving communities. Over 60% of proposals focused on narrative identified the need for messaging focused on communities, equity, and justice, and nearly a quarter highlighted the opportunity to make stronger connections between environment and health. Their solutions are not just about developing better messages or bigger distribution platforms but about creating a web of interconnected systems and structures that enable a broad range of actors—from community organizing groups to issue-based advocacy organizations to large environmental nonprofits—to collaboratively develop, test, and deploy narratives that resonate across audiences.

Strategies we’re seeing include:

• Formal collaboratives that allow groups to work together and share insights, resources, and strategies—like a new multistate collaborative of rural community organizing groups, anchored by Firelands Workers Building Community Power in Washington, that came together to ground their issues in rural values
• Skill building for authentic, culturally relevant storytelling that amplifies lived experiences and depolarizes climate issues
• Youth-led and intergenerational storytelling
• Tools and training for disseminating narratives on- and offline

3. Building cross-sector state-level coalitions

Nearly a quarter of submissions represented state-based collaboratives, networks, and coalitions—efforts to bring state and local advocacy groups together across demographics, environmental issues, and other issue areas like labor, immigration, health, and democracy. For example, the Wyoming Outdoor Council is coordinating with other conservation groups across the state and the Wyoming Civic Engagement Network to build community-focused power to advocate for access to clean water, air, and lands; Tribal sovereignty; and wildlife. This emerging trend toward state-level collaboration reflects both a shift in environmental policy opportunities from federal to state, as well as a recognition of the critical role state-level networks and coalitions can play in scaling up local work and connecting state to regional and national efforts.

What organizing and advocacy groups need now

The work of building connective tissue—whether between organizers and their target audiences or among a set of diverse advocacy groups aligning around a shared purpose—takes time, resources, and skill, and is often under-resourced. But these relationships and structures for working collectively are also the critical ingredient for durable power and progress, and groups are increasingly leaning into them.

Just as this kind of bridge-building work requires new approaches from organizations, scaling it will take funders willing to invest for the long term and in ways that cross traditional portfolios, including investments from funders across issue areas in big and small “d” democracy—protecting leaders, organizations, and the public’s right to engage in public advocacy—without which none of this is possible.

The payoff will be big: These kinds of collaborative strategies not only help notch short-term wins that build confidence and momentum—something the environmental movement urgently needs more of—but also lay the groundwork for the deeper, structural wins that take durable, large-scale power to achieve.

Photo credit: Eli Turner, courtesy of Center for Earth, Energy & Democracy