Craigslist Goes Green

By Erica Gies, Grist.org. Posted June 6, 2005.

Since its founding in 1995, Craigslist has gained a devoted following in cities around the world. As filmmaker Michael Ferris Gibson showed in his recent documentary 24 Hours on Craigslist, the online community board brings strangers together for all sorts of transactions and revelations. Now the website's namesake foundation -- whose raison d'etre is strengthening community by supporting local nonprofits -- is developing a new environmental network.

Craigslist Foundation's Environmental Non-Profit Network is still taking shape, but it will likely include both social and technological components. Its debut in Craigslist's home base, the San Francisco Bay area, has already attracted the interest of hundreds of local organizations. The foundation's executive director, Darian Heyman, says the network could eventually expand to play a national role.

Starting things off the old-school way, ENPN sponsored a face-to-face event in San Francisco on June 1 as part of celebrations marking U.N. World Environment Day, which the city is hosting. Uber-activist Julia Butterfly Hill, an adviser to the nascent network, will be ENPN's keynote speaker.

Steering committee members hope this event will be the beginning of big things to come. They envision giant-scale activism in the form of a 2006 Earth Day mass march; edutainment/theater that will stir the public to demand changes in public policy; and cell-phone technology that will put green-purchasing information at consumers' fingertips.

Craigslist Foundation isn't reinventing the wheel. But it is joining those who are helping a struggling movement get back on its feet. And it offers something that many other organizations just don't have: international cachet -- even hipness. As the new network unfolds, observers repeat a cautious mantra: Craigslist has the power to make this work.

A Vision in Green

The foundation is taking its cue from recent online developments in social, political, and technical networking, ripples of which have emerged through sites like Friendster and LinkedIn, and campaigns like MoveOn and Dean for America. But it is leaving the specifics up to the community.

"This network does not belong to Craigslist Foundation," said Heyman. "It belongs to the Bay Area environmental nonprofit community. We are merely a facilitator. We are trying to empower people to collectively and individually run this thing and tell us how we can help. We're trying not to express an agenda beyond encouraging collaboration and decreasing duplication of effort."

While most coalitions try to find common ground, that narrowing of focus can become a source of conflict. To avoid that fate, "we want to be extremely flexible," said lead ENPN steering committee member Sudeep Motupalli Rao. "We know we have a progressive environmental vision. That's it. That's the only driver. It's a sustainable environmental vision."

"Everybody we talk to is really excited about this," said William Ryan, president of the foundation's board. "So we think we're going down the right path."

Hill, who founded the Oakland-based nonprofit Circle of Life, counts herself among the ranks of the excited. "We know so little about what all these groups are doing in the Bay Area, so spending the time to get together to know what each other's skills and resources are, and then finding some strategic ways to work together, would actually leverage the power of who we are," she said. "I'm passionate about ... building the movement beyond what environmental activism has been -- the coming together of social justice, environmental justice, and the larger sustainability movement."

All Hands on Tech

So ENPN will work toward a sustainable future, and physical social gatherings will be part of that. But what will the technology look like?

Erica Gies is a freelance environmental writer in San Francisco.

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