ECI Council Launches New Strategy for Decentralized Empowerment

Earth Charter International has launched a new strategy designed to empower individuals, communities, and organizations to take action and promote the Earth Charter worldwide.

 

The strategy builds on the concept of Decentralized Empowerment, and is intended to help the Earth Charter Initiative grow dramatically.

 

As the signals from our world become increasingly urgent regarding climate change, biodiversity loss, armed conflict, water scarcity, poverty and human rights, the Earth Charter’s unifying vision and ethical principles for action are needed more than ever.

 

The new strategy is the outgrowth of ECI Council (the international board of directors) discussions regarding strategies for scaling up. The new policies enacted by the Council encourage people, communities, and organizations everywhere to self-organize and to take action — without relying on direction from any central coordinating administration — to promote the Earth Charter and to put it to work in practice.

 

 

To help promote and guide this expected upsurge in activity, the Council has produced a set of Action Guidelines for Decentralized Empowerment. The Guidelines are intended to function as a “virtual coordinating mechanism” and reference document, to provide a sense of consistency and direction to self-empowered participants in the Earth Charter Initiative. Please click here to read the Action Guidelines.

 

Operating with a small staff and a network of affiliated organizations and volunteer individual representatives worldwide, Earth Charter International — the small secretariat that coordinates communications and programs — can not coordinate an initiative involving many thousands or even millions of people. So the Council has designed the Action Guidelines to encourage self-empowered and self-organized activity, accompanied by a more specific Action Guide. Please click here read the Action Guide to see how you can help promote the Earth Charter.

 

The Council also initiated a program of stimulating more specific volunteer activity of all kinds to support the work of ECI itself. While ECI cannot, and should not, attempt to steer the extraordinary diversity of voluntary global activity we call the Earth Charter Initiative, it does need help to grow and to spread the Earth Charter message. ECI is actively seeking financial and in-kind donors, project sponsors, volunteer presenters and workshop leaders, letter writers, and many other kinds of assistance. Please click here to read more on how you can help support ECI.

 

ECI, as a small coordinating body, will continue to build its network of affiliates and partners; run its specially designed programs in areas like youth empowerment, religion, business and education; and facilitate global communication and connection via continuous development of its highly successful website. Please use all our tools and program offerings … but you do not need to seek our approval to take action to promote the Earth Charter. You can just do it — using the Action Guidelines as your “coordinator,” and our web system as your way to keep in touch with us and with the global network of Earth Charter Endorsers and Initiative participants. Use our website to let the world know what you are doing!

 

The new strategy for “Decentralized Empowerment for Scaling Up” is an experiment — one that ECI hopes will ultimately lead to many thousands if not millions of new and renewed commitments to take action and to fulfill, in the words of the Charter’s Preamble, “our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life, and to future generations.”

 

ECI welcomes your comments and suggestions on this new strategy to scale up the Earth Charter Initiative. You can post a comment here, or at the bottom of any related page. Or write to us by returning to our home page.