Benefits for Climate Action

We must master the art of replication and coordinated collective action.

The climate and ecological crisis is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced and if we are to address the climate emergency without widening the economic divides that already plague our society, then we must give people a say in how this is done.

For the past decade respected speakers such as Vandana Shiva, Satish Kumar, George Monbiot, Jonathon Porritt and many others, have advocated for grassroots democracy and community empowerment as a key solution to local and global issues. A platform to underpin this transformation has yet to scale, however.

We believe VocalEyes can be that platform.

To date, the full range and beneficial impact of climate solutions have not been explained in a way that bridges the divide between urgency and agency. The aspirations of people who want to enact meaningful solutions remain largely untapped.

Dr. Leon Clark, one of the lead authors of the IPCC 5th Assessment, wrote, “We have the technologies, but we really have no sense of what it would take to deploy them at scale.”

Together, let’s figure this out.

https://www.drawdown.org/about

The recent civil disobedience by the Extinction Rebellion initiative (12 years to act decisively!) shows just how bad it’s got and how ready people are to make a radical change for the better. Listen to the speech given by George Monbiot.

Summary

The VocalEyes Solutions Repository enables people to better understand solutions for reversing climate breakdown, connecting through meaningful endeavour in their adaptation and implementation.

Our digital and dialogic approach empowers people to discover, adapt, replicate and scale proven drawdown initiatives providing a powerful means for rapid sequestration to a more sustainable world.

The Challenge

Operation Drawdown has come up with the top 100 solutions for reversing global warming that can be completed by 2050. The challenge is to communicate these solutions so bottom-up, grassroots responses can be implemented quickly and scaled rapidly.

The stakes couldn’t possibly be higher. A global movement is required that needs an operating model for social & ecological projects acceleration enabling drawdown at scale.

Solution

Build a participation culture by blending digital and real world experience. Digital makes the transaction easy, while the real world experience through participation in practical projects will make drawdown a reality.

Redesign how participation works at the local level by inculcating children into growing ideas and gaining the skills and resources to make it happen.

Create a new type of collaborative neighbourhood culture and support the democratisation of communication between children and adults.

Use a digital platform – VocalEyes for Pupil, Parent and Community Voice – combined with face-to-face dialogic tools to build meaningful relationships and support deep collaboration.

VocalEyes will work with Drawdown partners to seed inspiring, triple bottom line projects, with the highest social, environmental and financial impact into VocalEyes for discovery, prioritisation and adaptation by children and adults.

Prioritised ideas will be crowdsourced into local ownership by children and local people in communities throughout the world. Where innovation, largely only seen in silo pockets, is replicated into any interest or geographic community in any area of the globe.

We will provide decision-making, governance and social organising frameworks to galvanise effective action to tackle global risks through a process of high impact, scaleable localisation.

Who Will Benefit

VocalEyes is the catalyst to reconnect local communities. Beginning in schools with Pupil Voice, two great healing forces – togetherness and belonging – will be unleashed as children draw in their parents and communities to implement solutions to climate breakdown and thus grow civic life.

We will help pupils, parents and residents discover and understand Drawdown solutions and implement projects with high social and ecological impact with potential for rejuvenating local economies and build participatory democracy.

We will help connect those with solutions to people in local communities building common endeavour towards climate stability and restoring biosphere balance.

About VocalEyes

The VocalEyes platform has been co-developed over 4 years and has a suite of tools that help to facilitate different aspects of the community organising process from idea suggestion through to project realisation.

The following slides depict some of the fundamental deficit of participation within our communities and how an interconnected pupil-parent-community voice is absolutely integral to filling this void. https://tinyurl.com/democratic-deficit

Our core aspiration is to enable proven high impact projects (HIPs) to be discovered, adapted and replicated throughout large networks. This will be done by compiling repositories of HIPs, categorised specifically by stakeholder type and complexity.

Our strategy is to integrate Social AI (artificial intelligence) that will ensure only the most relevant solutions are seeded into each group maximising the chances of successful adaptation and replication.

Although we have strong case studies demonstrating improved democratic engagement leading to meaningful actions and tangible outcomes, especially in schools and communities, there is still much to do to fully integrate Drawdown solutions and provide a holistic solution for reversing climate breakdown.