Our Approach

Vision

We strive for a world free from the influence of the fossil fuel industry and its enablers, where universities can become true climate leaders.

Mission

The Campus Climate Network is revitalizing the student climate movement. We are building a coalition of student-led climate justice groups fighting to cut ties with the fossil fuel industry and its enablers. We provide students with the training, resources, and connections they need to run winning campaigns on campus and become the next generation of climate justice leaders. 

Partner Organizations

What We’re Up Against

  • Climate change is an existential threat to humanity and a driver of injustice at every level. Its impacts are already being felt around the world. Tackling climate change requires an immediate and just energy transition away from fossil fuels that centers on the interests of those communities most heavily impacted by the climate crisis.

  • The fossil fuel industry’s business model is unjust at its core. The industry systematically sows doubt to delay a just energy transition. Its continued reliance on corporate violence and extraction of fossil fuels systematically harms marginalized communities.

  • A narrow set of decision makers bound by corporate interests dictate the priorities of our universities. Meanwhile, the rise in private funding of research has given corporations undue influence over research priorities. We must push to dramatically increase public funding for university research and establish transparent and democratic decision making processes that give real power to all university members.

How We Unite

  • We are building an international coalition of student climate justice groups. We provide student organizers with the skills, resources, and connections they need to run winning campaigns and continue the fight for climate justice after graduation.

  • University organizers know their own campuses best and will define the priorities and demands of their local campaigns. The role of our central organization is to support and coordinate these efforts, not to impose agendas.

  • We forge close relationships with allied causes and organizations in the climate justice movement. We call on our base in moments of movement-wide mobilization.

What We Do

  • We share skills, work together, mentor each other, and coordinate our efforts to create a stronger and more united campus climate movement.

  • We take nonviolent direct action to force decision makers to confront the violence of the fossil fuel industry and pick a side. Our tactics are accessible, highly visible, and inspiring. They compel others to join our movement.

  • We use our collective voice – on a local, national, and global scale – to set the conversation about the fossil fuel industry’s influence on higher education.

  • We highlight the violence enacted on marginalized groups, both in our communities and around the world, by the corporations that our universities wrongly continue to see as reputable partners. We center these frontline struggles in our campus campaigns. As a coalition, we build relationships and stand in solidarity with frontline organizations.

Theory of Change

If we build a large, coordinated coalition of skilled student climate organizers and campus community members running effective campaigns, we will hold the power to successfully influence decision-making at universities and publicly pressure them to cut ties with the fossil fuel industry. 

We will win because when we unite, we pose a credible threat to universities’ prestige, credibility, and influence, without which they can’t survive.

Universities have always been on the forefront of social change. When universities cut ties with the fossil fuel industry, other social institutions will follow. 

Along the way, we will equip a new generation of leaders to continue the fight for climate justice long after they have left campus. 

Revoking the fossil fuel industry’s social license to operate and developing new climate justice leaders will bring us closer to achieving a just energy transition to stop the climate crisis.