Last day of our awesome 1Sky internship

By 1Sky interns Florencia Foxley and Emma Fernandez, soon-to-be graduates of Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. Thanks for your hard work! -- Luis

Today is our last day as interns at 1Sky [2]. Over the past four weeks, we’ve had a lot of fun and learned a lot about running a grassroots environmental campaign. Among other things, we prepared spreadsheets, sat in on staff meetings, and called people across the country.

Our main project was to create a high school organizing guide [3] and to distribute it to schools in swing states. Though we used 1Sky’s Field Organizing Guide as a basic template for our project, we also drew on our own experiences as high school environmental organizers to restructure and refine the guide. We hoped to create a resource that would interest students in environmental activism by leading them through six fun projects. The guide begins with the most basic project, organizing a club, and moves to the most complex: meeting with an elected official. It was a lot of work but it all paid off when we were able to connect with schools in far-away districts like Tennessee and Missouri and send them our guide.

The timing of our internship was perfect, since we got to witness 1Sky’s push to strengthen the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 [4] in the House Energy and Commerce Committee. We hope that the guide we wrote will contribute to this effort by helping high school students influence their representatives to strengthen ACES as it moves through Congress.

We also got to help out with a variety of other projects that were underway in the office. Our favorite activity was phone petitioning in Dupont Circle [5]. We spent three hours asking random pedestrians to call the offices of four key swing Congressmen and ask them to support and strengthen the bill. It was fun to get involved at the grassroots level and heartening to see how many people cared about the issue. We generated over 50 calls in three hours and definitely made an impression in those offices!

This internship has been both fun and informative. We’ve been inspired by the 1Sky team’s hard work and dedication to such an important issue. Through our various projects we got to work with many people in the office. The staff at 1Sky has been friendly and encouraging and we have really enjoyed getting to know them. Thanks a lot everyone, it’s been great!