Who are we looking for?

The applications for the summit in Istanbul are now closed, but we encourage all individuals to still get involved in your home country: click here to sign the pledge.

Sign the Pledge

First and foremost: people attending the GPS kick-off event in Istanbul will be expected to organize as part of the climate movement at a national level back home through 2013 and hopefully beyond. So, this requires people who are personally committed to the cause and have capacity to dedicate time and energy on national level organizing — either thanks to personal circumstances, resources/capacity within an existing group, or through new capacity-building/resourcing we pursue in the context of organizing powershifts nationally.

  • SUMMARY: people with commitment and capacity to be national movement organizers
  • Also, GPS will be primarily in English — we can consider special cases where possibly some sort of buddy-system can be developed for key people who don’t speak English, but hopefully most people will be highly comfortable in English


Assuming that basic criteria is met, we’re looking for as much diversity as possible…

  • Groups/networks: people from different groups/networks — using GPS as a vehicle for initiating or strengthening relationships and partnership collaboration between groups/networks from the same country.
    • For this reason, we encourage partners who already run powershift events/campaigns to consider recruiting new partners to apply and go to Istanbul together to cultivate the new relationship/partnership potential.
  • Movement experience: we want some participants to be long-time leaders who will bring their wealth of experience/knowledge to the Istanbul event and to national organizing, but we also want new rising leaders with fresh ideas and energy.
  • Skills: ideally, each team from each country would have some people in the group who excel in different elements of the following areas — though each individual doesn’t need to possess all these skills/experiences:
    • Event organizing/logistics
    • Campaign planning/strategy
    • Grassroots organizing
    • Action organizing
    • Network facilitation
    • Workshop facilitation
    • Policy advocacy
    • Online/web/social media
    • Artivism
    • Communications
  • Background/Perspective: on the one hand, we expect and want the event in Istanbul to largely be a gathering of like-minded people from all over the world. That said, we know we’ll be coming from a huge diversity of international backgrounds, and we even want to encourage a diversity of backgrounds from within each country — some rural, front-line activists teamed up with urban, tech-savvy activists, for example. This will look different in each country context and what sort of people/issues/networks already exist in places, but this in-country diversity will strengthen our collective power moving forward.
  • Geography: people from different parts of the same country (depending on the size of the country).