Day 4: Add your representatives' #'s

Today's Action: Saving your local and national representatives' phone numbers for easy access

Today, we’re laying the groundwork to become more vocal citizens. Hooray!! (Don’t worry, we won’t ask you to be as loud as us!) Take a few minutes right now to look up the phone numbers of your federal and local representatives, and add them to your phone contacts. If you don’t want to store their contact information in your phone, write the numbers down somewhere easy to find--maybe wherever you wrote down your climate motivation?

Here’s how to find these numbers (for those of us in the US):

• To find your federal and state representatives, click here and type in your address or zip code; clicking on each representative’s name will give you their contact info.

• To find your local representatives, you can use this tool, or do a web search (try “[YOUR CITY/town] city council representative”).

Why this action? We need strong citizen pressure to push our elected officials on climate action! This isn’t a partisan thing – most Americans care about climate change. So regardless of our other ideological differences, Americans across the political spectrum need to start making climate an issue that no politician can ignore.

Calling your representatives is one of the most effective ways to get their attention. In the US, elected officials carefully track which issues people care enough to call about. Having our politicians’ numbers on hand is a good first step to getting our voices heard.

Looking for more? Read on for more info and further actions.

Learn and reflect:

• Beyond calling your elected officials, other effective ways to capture their attention include: creating media attention, demonstrating, and showing up/speaking up at their townhalls.

• If you want to know more about where your national representatives stand on climate and environmental issues, check out the League of Conservation Voters’ scorecard. Click on your state and then the representative to see how pro-environment their voting record is.

Act:

• If you already have your representatives’ information stored, are there a few people in your life whom you could convince to do this as well?

• If you’re feeling the urge to do more today, how about writing a letter to the editor of a local paper asking your representatives to step up and act on climate before it’s too late? (Here are tips on writing letters to the editor, and below is an example that Kaitlin wrote a few months ago.) Let's keep the pressure on!