The amazing team at StepItUp is at it again – showing us all how grassroots organizing is done … one town, one neighborhood, one campus at a time. Step It Up began with a small group of folks with a good idea up in Vermont. There’s no big budget or mega mailing list – just folks, spreading the word to their friends and neighbors. In April, this led to more than 1400 events nationwide where citizens gathered to call for real action on global warming. Now they are asking us all to help step it up in our hometowns.

The plan is simple and wonderful – here’s how Bill McKibben describes it:

Here’s the idea. On November 3, a year before the next election, we’re asking people to organize rallies large and small in their communities. Each one should take place in some spot that commemorates great leaders of the past. People have already committed to climbing New Hampshire’s Mt. Washington and gathering in Nashville’s Wilson Mall. Others will gather at the Rhode Island church where John F. Kennedy was married, or in front of a site honoring Navajo elder and activist Roberta Blackgoat. But we need hundreds more, gatherings in places that bear the names of national leaders or of locally celebrated men and women who did the right thing in a moment of great need. You’ll know the person that makes sense in your city or town—they don’t need to be saints, just true leaders, the kind who, faced with the great issues of their day, didn’t punt or compromise.

A movement needs to keep moving, and calling for real leadership is the next logical step.

Once you’ve got your rally registered on our website, we’ll help you gather a crowd, and invite the politicians from your neck of the woods. We want to ask every Senator and Representative, and every candidate for those offices, to come to these rallies, along with state and local officials. Once they’re there, we’ll present politicians with the three “1 Sky” priorities prepared in the last few months by climate campaigners across the country. They are: an 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050, a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants, and a Green Jobs Now mobilizing our society to help fix homes and businesses so those targets can be met. Basically, we want to find out who is simply a politician, and who’s ready to be a leader.

So firepups … are you ready to Step It Up? This is one very good thing we can each do in our own neighborhood … who’s in?

h/t Ahila

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