Elders for Climate Action, Massachusetts Chapter

Mission and Strategy

Our Mission

Elders Climate Action Massachusetts mobilizes elders and society to address the climate crisis while there is still time to protect the well-being of our grandchildren and future generations.

What We Do

  • We interact with an expanding network of groups and legislators, providing crucial information on climate change and exerting pressure to change policy. We do this in part by mobilizing elders to influence policy makers, telling powerful personal stories from our life experience.
  • We reach out to many Massachusetts communities and activists, forming close partnerships. Our actions allow us to be recognized as leaders within the climate movement.
  • We serve as a resource on the reality of climate change and urgency of combating it to spur people to take effective action.

Core values

  • Seeing human beings as a part of the web of nature
  • Working with hope to build a powerful sense of urgency
  • Putting fidelity to science ahead of political expediency
  • Respecting the urgent needs of environmental justice communities
  • Working to promote the healthiest environment for all, without exception
  • Striving for inclusive, collaborative decision-making

Core strategy

Organizing elders and the broader public to exert pressure on lawmakers and government agencies to develop policies that respond forcefully to climate change, while promoting climate-friendly and socially just behaviors among individuals, communities, businesses, and educational institutions.

Supporting strategies

  • We foster clusters of elder activism, facilitating elder engagement by alerting them to personal actions they can take.
  • We support environmental justice communities in their efforts to protect themselves and take climate action.
  • We cultivate a strong network of connections with allied organizations.
  • We develop relationships with key legislators.
  • We cultivate expertise on the reality of climate change and ways of slowing its impact.
  • We communicate about the reality and impact of climate change, drawing on our unique perspective, to influence other elders, citizens, and decision-makers.
  • We actively develop our leadership capacity as individuals and as an organization.

ECA Mass Policy on Climate Solutions

The mission of Elders Climate Action Massachusetts is to mobilize elders to actively engage in the broad movement addressing the climate crisis while there is still time to protect the well-being of our grandchildren and future generations. We seek equitable, science-based solutions to global warming that promote the urgent action needed to address this existential threat and get us to the goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 (see our full Policy on Climate Solutions here).