ACE reaches thousands of students through Causes

This guest post was written by Alisha Fowler, Fundraising Manager for the Alliance for Climate Education.

Alliance for Climate Education (ACE) is a national nonprofit that was founded in 2008 to teach high school students the science behind climate change and inspire them to take action to lessen the consequences of global warming. Since 2009, we’ve educated more than 830,000 youth through our free in-person climate science assembly at more than 1,400 high schools and emerged as the nation’s leading high school climate science education organization. ACE was also just honored to be named the Climate Change Communicator of the Year by George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication.

ACE has a lot of work to do. Poll after poll reports that Americans aren’t worried about climate change – and don’t understand climate science. Just check out this recent survey from Yale about Amercian teens’ understanding of climate change (spoiler: they do even worse than adults). What’s more, our nation lacks uniform climate science education standards. It’s hard to care about something you can’t understand. ACE is committed to making climate science clear, interesting and hey – while we’re at it – even fun.

ACE reaches thousands of students through Causes

Over the past two years, we have built a large network on Causes with thousands of high school students joining Action Teams, or green clubs, and creating online Causes to stay organized and connected. We decided to do a fundraiser on Causes, Support an ACE Educator, this spring to engage our Cause network around a single campaign and create a more unified voice for supporting climate science education.

We were drawn to Causes because we can easily communicate with thousands of students at a time, and we also love that we can have fun challenges like our water bottle prize for the top Cause recruiter. We’ve also found that students, and adults for that matter, love to be able to donate money and/or their time!

“I’ve been trying to show ACE to other people, and now facebook has made it so much easier. I sent the invitation to everybody on my facebook friends list, which took no time at all. After I invited everybody, I waited a few days and then sent a few reminders to friends that I saw as potential recruits. The reminders really got people to join, because once I sent them with personal messages, they could see that it was a real cause. I’m elated that so many of them joined, and I’m glad that it helped the cause :)” – Talia

Climate change is a massive, global issue and oftentimes it can feel far away and intangible.

When starting our campaign, we wanted to craft a more personal message and so we focused the campaign around Supporting an ACE Educator, allowing us to spotlight individual ACE Educators across the country.

A day in the life of an ACE Educator isn’t easy. Remote educators book all assemblies, travel hours each day, deliver six or eights presentations in a row, meet with green clubs after school, write blog posts like this one, enter data in to Salesforce, pen emails, and much more – all from their home, or cafes, without an office or seeing colleagues frequently, if ever.

We want to showcase Educators’ dedication, thank our Cause members for their dedication, and also give thanks to Causes for providing this powerful online platform for engagement and communication.

Please check out our fundraising project, and thanks so much for your support!