Campus Climate Challenge Survey Results

The Campus Climate Challenge nicely released a copy of their survey results providing an insightful look at who is active in the student climate change movement.

The results show the lack of diversity that is typical of the student environmental movement (and to a lesser extent of other student movements). Particularly worrisome is the degree of race and class stratification.

Geographical Diversity
Students are from liberal states - like the northeast, and less so from southern states. For instance, Texas has about 7% of the combined US/Canada but only 0.6% of respondents. Florida has 5.4% of the US/Canada population, but only 2.4% of respondents.

Gender
65% women - which is typical for the student environmental movement (I did an analysis of the Student Environmental Action Coalition several years ago, which showed it to be 60% women). Perhaps SEAC has more men because it is more social-justice oriented than other student environmental groups like Student Sierra Coalition.

Sexual Orientation
Hard to figure out the results, because 9.5% answered "would rather not say". Maybe this and the large number for bisexual shows that people are figuring out their sexuality, and that sexual orientation is increasingly becoming a continuum where people don't fit into neat categories.

Race
The numbers show just how far black students are from being a part of the campaign. The gap between white and black students in this campaign (and likely in a heck of a lot of other campaigns) is much greater than that between whites and latino/as or whites and asians/asian-americans. Blacks are around 13% of the US population (though probably a lot less of the college population), but only 1.5% of this sample. This disparity is likely smaller if you include the multi-racial students who identify as black as one of their races, however it's still a huge gap.

Class
It's hard to say how good a measurement of class it is for participants to estimate their class. For instance, students from privileged backgrounds tend to seem themselves as less well-off than they are because they compare themselves to their peers. I think asking people their income would have been much better. That said, these results show the class stratification which is typical of student activism.

Most Important Resources
"17. What Campus Climate Challenge resources did you use? "
This question is cool because it lets you know what tools student activists want the most.

The clear five winners were:
Assistance with campaign strategy
Project/campaign ideas
Campaign background materials
Connect you with larger national/regional initiatives
Leadership development and planning tools

Activism Network seeks to help with these goals by doing the following:
1. Assistance with campaign strategy - we provide organizing resources that explain campaign strategy, like our organizing guides. We also have a selection of case studies.

2. Project/campaign ideas - we have a list of campaigns so that activists can find a cause to plug into. We could do a better job of this. Campaigns are tricky to organize (Ex. ending the war in Iraq is actually a combination of sub-campaigns like ending military recruitment, and involves thousands of groups).

3. Campaign background materials - we have a database of campaign materials. Partially this depends on getting the campaign organizing group to upload its main packet and other materials (which doesn't always happen, there are likely hundreds of such packets that aren't on our site).

4. Connect you with larger national/regional initiatives - we do a good job here of showing what groups exist, what networks exist, mapping, and providing information on upcoming state and national events to get plugged into the networks.

5. Leadership development and planning tools - we have leadership development materials. We could use a really good "all-in-one" leadership development manual. Someone should write one!!!

"26. What is your preferred method of contact or information gathering?"
Of course email and listservs win.

What is most interesting here is that facebook crushes myspace. Facebook has momentum (see alexa.com for site traffic figures), whereas MySpace does not, and apparently people are either not yet tired of all its notifications or they might even enjoy them. I suspect Facebook users will get overloaded and tired of all the notifications in the future...