The most important events we are organizing right now are happening in households and coffee shops across the country.
We are calling on Oceana supporters to host a small gathering of friends and family to discuss recent events in the Gulf and beyond and to form an “action plan” to help pressure your U.S. Senators to put a permanent end to offshore oil drilling.
These events are easy to put together. It takes around 1-2 total hours to prepare:
1. Pick a date and a location (your living room or a nearby coffee shop usually work well).
2. Invite a handful of friends and/or family that already agree with the goal of banning offshore oil drilling – 5-10 people is a good size for a first meeting.
3. Email act@oceana.org to let us know you’ll be organizing an event and we will email you (or “snail” mail you, if you don’t have a printer) a small handful of one-page fact sheets and articles for distribution at the event.
Sample event itinerary:
- 7:00pm: Welcome and introductions. Everyone goes around and introduces themselves and says why they came.
- 7:30: Reading and discussion. Different people read from selected Oceana material, including the fact sheets and news articles. After reading 2-4 articles, discussion begins. What do people think about what they’ve heard/read?
- 8:00: Steer the discussion in the direction of action. Work to get the group united behind a specific action plan to get more people involved and to communicate with your U.S. Senators.
- Actions supported by Oceana include:
- Petition gathering (download the petition here)
- Writing letters to the editors (LTEs) of newspapers
- Generating letters to U.S. Senators
- Generating phone calls to U.S. Senators
- 9:00: Adjourn the meeting with a solid idea of what people have committed to. Not everyone needs to agree to do everything, but everyone should agree to participate. It is a good idea to schedule the next meeting while the group is still together, and for each person to agree to find 1-2 more people to bring to the following meeting.