Following in the tradition of Mountain Justice Spring Break, the week long camp will bring you face to face with the impacts of mountaintop removal and coal industry abuse — and give you the skills and knowledge you need to fight back!

Please come and share your spring break with us in the breathtaking Southwest Virginia coalfields, March 3-11, cultivating the skills and visions needed to abolish Mountaintop Removal and replace it with vibrant, healthy, self-reliant communities. Come and bring your friends. We are gonna learn a lot, get involved with putting an end to mountaintop removal, and have a whole bunch of fun!

What? Virginia Mountain Spring Break
Who? You and a carload of your best friends
When? March 3-11
Where? Southwest Virginia
Why? Because it’s time to tell King Coal that his reign is coming to an end!

We are currently looking for campus coordinators who can organize a crew of people from your school or community. You are strongly encouraged to contact us for more information and resources to help you bring your school’s spirit to our community!

Questions? Ready to register? Wondering what you can do to help?
Contact us by sending an email to:

Marley: Green.marley@gmail.com
Susanna: sronaldshann@gmail.com

Or by calling us at:
703-409-6993

Look for updates at: http://rrenewcollective.wordpress.com/news/

Thanks, and we’ll see you in the Mountains!

Now growing into its second year, RReNEW is ready to travel to your community and bring the stories of Southern Appalachia to you. We offer interactive presentations on Mountaintop Removal and Environmental Justice. We offer workshops on community and campus organizing to help you and your group build the skills you need to make change in your community. This Fall we bring the fight for Justice being waged in Appalachia to your town, build your skills, and connect you to the broader movement for a better tomorrow, today!

Are you interested in bringing RReNEW to do a presentation near you? From October 24th to November 4th we will be traveling up the East Coast, and we would love to visit your school, church, community or neighborhood! Contact us today by email at rrenew.collective@gmail.com, or by phone at 276 565 2073.

Presenation – Interactive, popular education based presentations on Mountaintop Removal and Surface Coal Mining, Environmental Justice in the Coalfields, Watershed Health or Social and Environmental History of Appalachia

Campus and Community Organizing Skills – We can offer a Community Organizing Day Long Retreat, or a number of 1-3 hour long workshops on basic organizing skills like:
Working with the Media, Campaign and Strategic Planning, Event Planning, Coalition Building, Non-Violent Civil Disobedience/Direct Action, Running an Effective Meeting, Meeting with Decision Makers, Anti-Oppression and Collective Liberations, others of your choosing, or a combination of the above. We are also able and willing to help you troubleshoot or plan your own campaigns in strategy sessions your group.

Community organizing is all about building strong relationships, so the RReNEW Collective is most excited about taking on interns who can make long term commitments (6 months and longer) but we can put people to work on specific projects over summer or winter break as well. We realize its difficult for most people to pick up their lives and move, so we’re excited to work with folks in the region to set up regular days to come out and lend a hand. We aren’t experts, and we aren’t holding out for any either. We’re glad to teach you what you need to know to be an effective part of the collective, we’re all participating in a learning process and expect to leave RReNEW as more effective organizers ready to fight for justice in other communities.

In looking for interns, we want to prioritize people from coal counties, Appalachia, and Appalachian states. People who grew up in the region have a more intimate understanding of the culture and history which is always important when doing community organizing. We also know that Appalachians frequently get the short end of the stick, so we’re hoping to not replicate that in our search for new interns. Similarly, we know that certain groups of people in our world tend to get preferential treatment across the board, and so we will take that into account in our selection process and prioritize people who frequently don’t have exciting opportunities like this made available to them.

Intern positions are, for now, unpaid. We provide free housing and food, and can reimburse interns for many expenses such as travel and supplies. We are always in the process of finding intern stipends because we know many RReNEW interns have had difficulty in paying bills and debts while they dedicated their time to the movement. We, like so many other small groups, are funded almost entirely through grassroots fundraising so if you can’t intern you should consider throwing us a fundraiser in your community so that we can better support our interns.

Some specific internships that are open are:
Student Organizing Intern – working with local highschool students and regional college students to bring Appalachian youth into the movement against MTR.  Interns in this program should be able to stay for a minimum of an entire semester, but interns who can spend an entire school year are strongly encouraged to apply.
Dust Campaign Intern – working closely with SAMS members in their fight to control the coal dust blanketing their communities.  This work involves supporting communities to develop community based water and dust monitoring systems, pressuring regulatory agencies, and much more.
Sustainable Economic Development Intern – working with local working people and small business owners to promote a sustainable economy that is good for workers and communities in Appalachia.
Ison Rock Ridge Intern – working on the, thus far successful, campaign to protect Ison Rock Ridge from being destroyed.  This campaign is in a crucial stage right now.
Fundraising Intern – Grassroots organizing takes money, help fund the work of SAMS and RReNEW and learn important skills for sustaining environmental justice organizing.
House Sustainability Intern - we want to model the world we want to see in our actions today, so this work would be making the house as sustainable as possible.

We’re always open to finding ways to put your skills to use in our campaigns, so apply even if you don’t see how you could immediately fit in.

If you are interested in an internship, or have any questions, please contact us at rrenew.collective@gmail.com. You can also fill out an application.

WE SEDD, Green Jobs Now!
For years, communities in Central Appalachia, in parts of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee, have been standing up to defend their quality of life, the quality of their environment and the prospects for a brighter and better tomorrow for their children and grandchildren. For over a century, the coal industry has maintained a mono-economic stranglehold on many places in Appalachia, a stranglehold that has held the coalfields captive to the destructive whims of King Coal.

Today, coalfield communities are fighting harder than ever to stop the destruction of their mountains. They are also opening a new front in the struggle against King Coal’s social violence.  From West Virginia to Tennessee, grassroots groups are coming together to promote a new kind of sustainable, and diverse economic development that keeps wealth at home, rebuilds our environment and supports our communities for the long haul. WE SEDD is one of these efforts, and it sure could use your votes

You can read more about some of these coalfield visions of sustainable development, among many other places, at Appalachian Transition Initiative, Appalachian Community Economics, Central Appalachian Prosperity Project. Below is a little bit more about the effort in Wise County. Haven’t voted yet? What are you waiting for?

The Wise Energy and Sustainable Economic Diversification and Development Project (WE SEDD) is a citizen led effort to diversify the coal dependent mono-economy of Wise County, Va by promoting economic and environmental sustainability, local and worker ownership, community-owned renewable energy systems and local economic skills. Together, in community, we seek to rebuild sustainable Appalachian communities.

Wise County, in Southwest Virginia, is one of a handful of coal-producing counties in Virginia. Already, over 25% of the County’s landmass has been destroyed by strip mining and mountaintop removal, and the coal industry’s hunger for ever higher profits promises the destruction of more of our community’s mountain heritage.

In the face of this destruction, Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards (SAMS) and other groups, have dedicated themselves “to stopping the destruction of our communities by surface coal mining, to improving the quality of life in our area, and to helping rebuild sustainable communities.” The Wise Energy and Sustainable Economic Development and Diversification project is an effort to achieve the final part of SAMS’ mission statement: to rebuild sustainable Communities in Wise County and Southwest Virginia.

Inspired by our friends and allies across Appalachia, like Coal River Mountain Watch, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Appalachian Community Economics and others, we are undertaking a collaborative effort to identify the skills and potentials inherent in the Appalachian spirit of self-sufficiency and self-determination.

WE SEDD will promote these natural Appalachian talents in order to foster a new model of economic development in Southwest Virginia that can break the mono-economic stranglehold of outlaw mining and fossil fuel dependency that today whittles away at the hope we hold for a brighter future.

Already we have held three “Wise Energy Forums” to discuss the challenges facing our regional economy, and to identify the possibilities for sustainable development. From these forums, we have taken the step of creating a directory of locally owned businesses, and identified an initial group of Wise County citizens dedicated to continuing the work of diversifying our local economy. From here we hope to identify skills already existing in our communities, connect the individuals with those skills to others across our communities, and connect them to trainings, funding and support to develop their own entrepreneurial passions.

By creating and promoting economic alternatives in the coalfields of Wise County, we will rise to the challenge so often heard in our community organizing efforts here: “I work on the strip mines because there isn’t anything else here. Show me something that can provide for my family, and I will stand with you for our mountains.” By encouraging the growth of sustainable, economic systems, we will ensure the long-term viability of our communities, and play our rightful part in the global struggle for Climate Justice and a brighter planet for our children. We are asking for $5000 to jump start the Wise Energy and Sustainable Economic Development and Diversification Project, Will you Help us Get there?

The RRENEW Collective was created in the Summer of 2009 in the spirit of facilitating the placement of volunteers with organizations working for a sustainable Appalachia in the coal dependent region of Southwest Virginia. The Collective operates a volunteer house in Appalachia, Va, where volunteers can live and work together with local organizations for a more sustainable, healthy and just Appalachia–the town and the region.

The collective house/residence will also serve as a space to demonstrate and learn sustainable living practices that can be employed throughout the coal field regions of Appalachia. The grant will be used to purchase materials to finish the last bedroom in the collective and allow space for 6 long term, full time volunteers.

Thank you to everyone who has helped to sell the benefit CD. Since its release, Still Moving Mountains has been on CNN, CMT, FolkWax, Elmore Magazine and more. Let’s keep sellin’ ‘em so more grants can go out.

People from near and far came together to learn and share about fighting ecological destruction while building a sustainable and just future. Below are some photos from the weekend:

Residents sharing their experiences

Looney Ridge strip site

Appalachia Civic Center...thank you!

Discussing and eating!

Highlight: In spite of the difficulties of top-down change, communities working together will bring about the clean energy revolution. In College Park, creative ideas generated by students are already taking hold.

Cross-posted from: here

There is a very well written column in the Diamondback by a member of UMD for Clean Energy Jesse Yurow, who is also our Outreach Director. Jesse does a good job of explaining how we can’t only rely on the top down approach to make our society more sustainable, but we need to take charge at the community level. The group Jesse alludes to working with the City Council to develop a energy efficiency loan fund policy, is of course..us.

Guest column: Climate, Kyoto and council

Twelve years ago, world leaders signed the Kyoto Protocol, a global treaty that promised to develop strategies to mitigate the perils of global climate change. Epic fail. Without mechanisms of accountability and without the support of Earth’s largest polluter, the United States, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has skyrocketed to about 380 parts per million and is still rising. NASA climatologist James Hansen suggests that, in order to avoid ecological catastrophe, concentrations of carbon dioxide must be reduced and held steady at 350 parts per million (see www.350.org). People sit with their fingers crossed, awaiting climate change solutions to be handed down at the next global summit on climate change this December in Copenhagen.

The United States may be able to redeem itself from the ghosts of Kyoto past and earn bargaining power on the world stage by committing to carbon emissions reductions before December. The House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act last June. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) recently introduced the Senate version: the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act. However, coal and oil lobbyists are sure to grease up this bill just as they have the House version.

In spite of the difficulties of top-down change, communities working together will bring about the clean energy revolution. In College Park, creative ideas generated by students are already taking hold. Two weeks ago, the College Park City Council held a work session to discuss the possibility of implementing an energy-efficiency loan fund to finance efficiency upgrades for College Park residents. This idea was suggested to the city council by a student group along with a list of several other policies which would save the city money while cutting carbon emissions.

The city council is working with a student group to develop policy? This surely is a historic moment. But it shouldn’t be. Students working with the city to make College Park a better place should be standard operating procedure. However, students have never represented a large voting block in a city council election, so the city council has never had a reason to listen to students. With an election on Nov. 3, we have a unique opportunity to change our relationship with the city council by voting en masse and engaging the council. In order to vote in council elections, one must register to vote in College Park. The deadline for registration is today at 5 p.m. You can find voter registration forms in the Student Government Association office in the Student Involvement Suite in Stamp Student Union.

The standard recommendations for “green living,” changing to compact fluorescent light bulbs, driving less and using “eco-friendly” products, illustrate the immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem and the puniness of the changes we are being asked to make. We need to stop trying to be less bad and start trying to be good. Through direct action and engagement with elected officials on a local level, we can empower the communities we live in to implement innovative and far-reaching solutions to climate change.

Come to beautiful Wise County, VA for a weekend summit focusing on a sustainable future for Appalachia! Together we will appreciate the rich culture and ecology of this area, learn how to defend it against the harmful effects of mountaintop removal coal mining, and explore a sustainable future for the region.

Read more and register here!

The weekend will be November 6-8 in Wise County, Southwest Virginia. There will be mountaintop removal site tours, workshops and trainings (on student and community organizing, mountaintop removal, sustainability, and other topics), hiking trips, music (and dancing!), opportunities to meet residents who live with the effects of mountaintop removal coal mining in their communities, and networking with other students from your region so you can bring these skills home and work together!

Register here