Keeling Curve

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Project Summary / Description:

Ecochallenge.org is a pioneering digital environmental-education nonprofit whose mission is to inspire, engage, and drive people to take action for a more sustainable world. With three decades of experience and efforts planted firmly in social-science research and the latest digital technologies, Ecochallenge.org combines education with action to empower individuals to act responsibly to protect the climate.

Founded in 1993 as the Northwest Earth Institute, in 2008 we offered our first Ecochallenge, an innovative social competition that combines education and action to create habits that reduce GHG emissions, helping participants to overcome feelings of powerlessness and move from intention to action.

What makes Ecochallenges unique is the way we utilize a custom-built digital platform that provides a ready-made framework to guide these transformations. Impact updates, delivered in real time, help dramatize the impact of actions and demonstrate the power of collective action.

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Replaces/avoids GHGs (e.g., projects that replace sources of GHGs, such as the burning of fossil fuels for electricity, heat, transport, or other energy uses)

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Both internally and externally, Ecochallenge.org is committed to supporting and empowering those traditionally underrepresented in the leadership of the climate movement. To begin with, our approach to protecting the environment, rooted in an understanding of the world as a vast and complex series of relationships and interconnections, leads inexorably to a focus on issues of justice and equity. Our justice and equity vision (https://ecochallenge.org/about/justice-equity-vision) recognizes that people of color, women, and youth‚ who constitute the majority of the world‚ population and are disproportionately impacted by environmental degradation‚ have been excluded from positions of leadership in the climate movement and access to tools, resources, and opportunities to help them make their communities more sustainable. We are committed, through our programming and internal practices, to rectifying this disparity in the name of both justice and of effective action to protect the planet.

Internally, we are committed to applying an anti-racist, anti-bias equity framework in the areas of hiring, culture, and operations. In terms of our programming, we are committed to ensuring inclusion and accessibility through a number of initiatives: educating our audiences on environmental injustice as well as solutions we know can eradicate it; finding new audiences by increasing the number and variety of partners we work with; centering the perspectives and lived experiences of people marginalized by our societies, articulated in their own voices; working to decolonize the language we use in speaking about and addressing sustainability; and tailoring our materials to make them more accessible to the hearing- and vision-impaired.

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Mission Statement:

Ecochallenge.org is a primarily digital organization; as such, we welcome users from across the United States and across the world. While we are rooted in the Pacific Northwest, Ecochallenge users increasingly hail from various parts of the US or one of the 139 countries (and counting!) where the platform has seen use. So far, the bulk of our international users have come from the United Kingdom, Germany, and Mexico. One key technological goal for us in the coming years is to integrate localization services that will significantly extend our global reach.

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