How to Use this Site to Improve Your Activism



1. You Want to Win Your Local Campaign
You network so that you can do what *you* want -- only better. Find other groups and people that are working on a similar campaign. Email them. Call them. Visit them. They can tell you what worked and failed for them and then you can adjust this advice to stop predatory corporations from targeting your community.

You can use other people's arguments, their resources (leaflets, research papers, and essays), and when the campaign comes down to the wire, you can ask for their support. They can email your newspaper, email/fax/call your politicians, and even show up at your events to express their support. Email us and say you want to join our networking email lists (No New Coal Plants, No Biomass, etc).



2. You Want to Find Similar Issues in your Community
You can use our My Community Map to find other operating and proposed facilities in your community. You can find other people and groups in your community and build alliances.



3. You Want to Analyze the Environmental Justice Impact
You can add our Census data layers for race, income, and poverty to analyze how corporations choose their target communities. These can be found at the bottom of the pages with our community, state, national, and global maps.



4. You Want to Find Facilities: Coal, Biomass, Gas, Oil, Hydro, Nuclear, Landfills, and More!
We have a several methods for finding facilities including My Community, My State (accessible from the homepage), US National Map, and National Maps for several other countres (accessible from the homepage). We also have a Basic Search and an Advanced Search which lets you use more advanced logic. You can even export those results into a spreadsheet!



5. You Want to Print a Map to Educate and Inspire
You can expand our maps by mouse clicking on the lower-right corner and dragging. If you want a very big map you need to use Firefox. Then you must first select the OpenStreet layer (otherwise part of the map background will go blank when it gets too wide or tall). Next expand the map size. Only then should you zoom in or out, pan, and select which layers you want to view.

Finally, you can make a screenshot by hitting the 'Print Screen' button on your keyboard. Then copy it into an image editing program, or a word processor. Crop it as needed. You need to attribute OpenStreetMap as the source for the map data.



6. You Want to Make a Map and Send a Link to your Friends
You can make a map, and click on 'Save the Link' to create a tinyurl that can be sent to your friends. For instance you might want to make a map of coal plants in your state.



7. You want information about your politicians
The My State view gives you a list of Senators and Congressional representatives with links to their biographies, voting records, and fundraising.

There is also a link to the Sunlight Labs pages with more detailed state legislature information.



8. You Want to Win Your Campaign Everywhere (Not In Anyone's Backyard!)
Once you've got your group all charged up and you're winning your local campaign, now is an excellent time to share your goals and strategy with activists in other communities so that they can repeat your success.

You can participate in our existing email lists, or ask us to start a new one to directly suit your needs.

Upload materials that you have collected or written yourself about the campaign. Leaflets, graphics, an essay on the campaign's goals and tactics, a campaign packet - whatever you have. You can also search for groups and search for people who might be interested in working on this campaign based on what issues they listed that they cared about. Email, call, and/or mail them to ask.

We can help you build a network against a corporation that is targeting multiple communities.



9. You Want to Build an Amazing Tool for Environmentalists
Be a grassroots journalist and help us build the best source of information on operating, proposed, and closed power plants and waste facilities. This site is one of very few that puts the control of complex data in the hands of grassroots activists. We want you to tell us what facilities you are tracking. And we want you to edit them and add new facilities.


10. You Want to Attend or Recruit People for an Upcoming Event
You can see our list of upcoming events. You can add an event and it will get sent out to our email list. And you can join our website and subscribe to receive a weekly email with upcoming events in your area.