NYU Heyman center for philanthropy and fundraising partners with World Bank’s Connect4Climate initiative to raise awareness about climate change issues around the world.
New York University’s George H. Heyman Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising (NYUHC) is the latest educational institution to partner with the World Bank and a broad range of partners in Connect4Climate (C4C): a campaign, a competition, and a community dedicated to raising awareness about climate change issues in Africa and around the world. The C4C global partnership initiative uses social media and the web to give voice to local stakeholders who have stories to tell about climate change.
C4C’s goal is to create a participatory open knowledge platform that engages the global community in climate change conversation to drive local action. In just nine months, C4C has created a Facebook community of nearly 300,000 followers. Across multiple social media platforms and the www.connect4climate.org site, C4C’s weekly online reach is between 4 to 6 million.
According to NYU Heyman Center’ Executive Director Naomi Levine: “Our faculty is in a unique position to contribute its expertise in cause marketing, digital advocacy and fundraising, to help advance solutions to this key issue, affecting our planet and future survival. The C4C partnership will also enable us to provide access to our distance learning courses designed to help nonprofits and activists better engage their supporters.” Upcoming Heyman Center online courses are Always On/Always There: Leveraging Mobile Applications and Engaging Supporters, taught online by faculty member, Elizabeth Ngonzi (C4C partnership liaison) on Wednesdays from 10:00am-12:30pm ET, June 6 – June 27; and Fundraising Concepts and Practices, available May 21 – August 10 (10 sessions individually arranged), accessible to anyone around the world via Internet.
Lucia Grenna, C4C Program Manager, sees the partnership with NYUHC as a vehicle to provide educators, students and activists around the world with access to critical strategies and tactics that will help them activate policy makers and increase stakeholder engagement in a meaningful manner, so as to lead help address climate change issues more effectively. Other U.S. educational institutions participating in C4C include: Columbia University Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence-Climate Co-Lab, and Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.