SOLUTIONS: GREEN NEW DEAL

Campaign Victory!

After several months of organizing with so many awesome folks here showing up consistently to fight for the vision of the Healthy Through Heat and Smoke Campaign, we just won funding to upgrade half of Seattle’s 26 community centers to be climate resilience hubs through the metropolitan parks levy which passed last night (September 28, 2022)! The measure passed 8-1 with Alex Pedersen casting the only no vote.
 
Van Asselt, High Point, South Park, Garfield, Rainier, Lake City, Queen Anne, Greenlake, Loyal Heights and four more to-be-determined community centers are now slated to get heat pumps, HVAC upgrades, and microgrid solar installations.
 
These schools and community centers will now be able to run without gas power so they can provide cooling during heat waves, and thanks to the HVAC upgrades they’ll provide clean air during smoke events. Lastly, the microgrid solar installations will enable them to run during power outages and consistently add clean energy to our grid!
350 Seattle Campaign Victory, Healthy Through Heat and Smoke
Seattle for a Green New Deal Poster: Healthcare, Education, Housing, and Jobs for All

 

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 

On September 28, 2002, the Healthy Through Heat and Smoke Campaign won funding to upgrade half of Seattle’s 26 community centers to be climate resilience hubs through the metropolitan parks levy. This means that Van Asselt, High Point, South Park, Garfield, Rainier, Lake City, Queen Anne, Greenlake, Loyal Heights and four more to-be-determined community centers are now slated to get heat pumps, HVAC upgrades, and microgrid solar installations.
 
2021 was a big year for 350 Seattle’s Green New Deal organizing: building new partnerships with local labor unions, organizing an anti-racist, cross-movement coalition and investing in our volunteer organizers.
 
Together we won $20M in new Green New Deal investments that reduce climate pollution, build community resilience and create living-wage union jobs.
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

Photo of 350 Seattle activists at city hall with 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.

Green New Deal graphic showing a union worker