Postcard Blitz

Hope4Climate has three main ways to make change happen and they are all super important to our success.

One is our Friday buying strike every week which we started in support of the #SchoolStrike4Climate. You can read more about it here https://hope4climate.com/what-is-the-adult-strike-4-climate/, where we tell the story of how it got started and how much this will shake up industry and governments once enough of us are in it. The best part is anyone can participate, because it takes no extra money or energy!

Second is getting media attention, which is powerful when it works, but unwise to count on due to the way rich people/fossil fuel investors own so much of the media. I will be starting to work very hard on publicity now.

Our third initiative is to spread the word using person-to-person postcards through the regular mail. Hope4Climate is run by volunteers who have no interest in accepting donations and who also believe that it is easier to squash a rebellion that is centralized – and this is a rebellion. We are rebelling against the powerful and full of inertia systems, governments, and businesses that are quickly killing our planet and us. They work very hard at keeping us all distracted and busy and overwhelmed so that we can’t organize, because YOU HAVE MORE POWER THAN YOU THINK. They are already getting freaked out by the youth climate activists (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/05/biggest-compliment-yet-greta-thunberg-welcomes-oil-chiefs-greatest-threat-label), and it only takes 3.5% of a population participating in a peaceful protest (http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190513-it-only-takes-35-of-people-to-change-the-world) to make change happen. We need YOUR help to get that 3.5% of people participating. Let’s aim for 50% or more, though!

How to send postcards:

This is a step by step guide to conducting your own share of the postcard blitz. If anything is unclear, please feel free to email me and ask for clarification, as I want everyone to be successful in sending postcards.

First, you can download the postcard file here at Google Drive (https://drive.google.com/open?id=1lfYm0A_6Dxe496mF3RT1qMPblANuQGYL). It is in Word .doc format, which should work on almost any computer. Save it to your desktop or somewhere easily accessible. Print it on card stock paper, preferably in color ink, and print as many copies as you like. Even if you don’t have a printer, any print/copy place will be able to do it in a jiffy.

The next step is finding addresses to send it to! You can easily send postcards to friends and families whose addresses you know well, of course. You can also walk around the block and take note of addresses on the houses/apartments.

But what about if you are an overachiever and want to send out more and more postcards? Well, if you are in a country like Canada or the US, you can go to Zillow and do a search under houses for sale, or for rent. Then, zoom in on the map and keep zooming. You will come to a close up that looks like this:

Try clicking one of the estimated values, like this:

This will expand into a window that shows the exact address. You can then copy and paste that into whatever form of document or email you prefer to collect addresses in!

In many other parts of the world you can use Google Street View to explore a neighborhood and see addresses on mailboxes.

Or, find a random spot on Google Earth, use the satellite view to find the homes (as opposed to business district), and right click on a house to get a general idea of the address, then refine using Street View to cross-reference.

It is also very easy to buy lists of addresses, but I wanted to offer free ways to find addresses. I recommend sticking to addresses in your home country and starting with a list of 20, perhaps 20 neighbors.

Actually addressing them: You do not need to include your own information on the card. I plan to simply write the card to “Neighbor” at Blank Address.

You can write the addresses all at once or one a day, whatever works for you. You could even have a postcard party and compete to see who can do the most in a set amount of a time. I’d love to see photos of that!

Let’s say your first batch of postcards was a batch of 20 – you can, if you want, help the effort even more by tagging us on social media/emailing us to let us know how many you mailed. How does this help? It lets us have an idea of how successful each postcard is and tweak future designs. You don’t have to do that, though if you do we will high five you (virtually). You can use the tag #postcardblitz followed by a space and then the number of how many cards you sent and we will find you 🙂

Thank you for participating in this effort to REVERSE climate change and restore a healthy environment. You are incredibly important to this movement.