Campaign Victory!
Seattle’s Green New Deal calls for eliminating our City’s climate pollution by 2030, while creating thousands of good jobs and healthy, climate-resilient neighborhoods for all.
To get there, we need transformative investments at the scale of the crisis in climate justice solutions:
- affordable housing
- clean energy
- free, electrified transit
- community resilience
Join our 2022 Green New Deal campaign: Healthy Through Heat & Smoke!
With heat waves and wildfire smoke becoming Seattle’s new normal, it’s time for City leaders to act.
We need climate resilience; we need clean energy; we need good green jobs!
Read & share our full Community Endorsement Letter, and sign on your organization to join our growing list of endorsers here.
This year’s Seattle Parks Levy is a huge opportunity to upgrade Seattle’s community centers to be climate resilience hubs — to be powered by clean energy and to provide clean air, cooling and shelter for all Seattle residents. These investments will create union jobs that directly benefit local communities and move Seattle’s public buildings off fossil fuels.
Get involved!
Join us for canvassing or phone-banking! Or come learn more about the campaign and get connected to taking action by joining our weekly HTHS Volunteer Welcome call on Tuesdays @ 6:30pm all summer long. Can’t make it on Tuesdays? Sign up for a 1 to 1 orientation with our Welcome Team and we’ll get you plugged in.
Excellent Additional Resources
To learn more about the Green New Deal in general a great book is A Planet to Win — a short read about the plan and implementation.
Another great read is Movement Generation’s “From Banks and Tanks to Cooperation and Caring: A Strategic Framework for a Just Transition”
Recent work & wins
Solar Schools
Our Solar Schools campaign mobilized over 500 Seattle Public Schools students and community members to demand Seattle Public Schools fund their climate promises. Working with the local educators (SEA) and electricians (IBEW 46) unions, we won $18M for clean energy projects like rooftop solar in the 2022 school levy. We then teamed up with SEA, the Seattle Building Trades and MLK Labor Council to get out the vote & pass the levy at the ballot in Feb 2022.
Solidarity Budget
As part of the Solidarity Budget coalition, we helped organize thousands of Seattle residents and over 200 community groups to support an anti-racist city budget. While Seattle still spends $26 on cops for every $1 on climate, we’re making progress: in 2021, Seattle was the only major US city to divest from police & reinvest in community for the second year in a row. These community investments included some big wins for climate justice:
- $19.2M for affordable housing
- $17.5M for community-led alternatives to policing
- $4.2M in safe streets for walking, biking, and rolling
- $2M for community resilience and Indigenous-led sustainability projects
JumpStart Seattle
In 2022, we also celebrated the activation of Green New Deal policies delayed by the pandemic: the first round of JumpStart Seattle investments ($14M for Green New Deal programs) and the launch of the Green New Deal Community Oversight Board.
How Seattle’s Green New Deal got started
In June 2019 and following the wave of Sunrise Movement youth-led action for a national Green New Deal, 350 Seattle and Got Green (an environmental justice organization based in Seattle’s South End) teamed up to launch a campaign for a local Green New Deal.
Together, we mobilized over 10,000 people in the first 3 months of the campaign: we held community events; canvassed dozens of Seattle neighborhoods and organized a game-changing candidate forum (7 of 9 City Council seats were up that year!). And as all that organizing was underway, 350 Seattle and Got Green worked with a broad coalition of environmental justice groups and City Council champions to create Seattle’s Green New Deal resolution.This coalition included Got Green, Puget Sound Sage, Mazaska Talks, Chinese Information Services, Duwamish River Community Coalition, Transit Riders Union, Sierra Club and Emerald Cities Collaborative. Together, we passed this legislation committing the City to enacting Seattle’s Green New Deal and establishing the Green New Deal Community Oversight Board in fall 2019.
