This Changes Everything: Impact
In addition to the book and documentary film, This Changes Everything included a robust impact campaign that ran from 2011-2016, to help bring the ideas behind the project to life in partnership with activists and educators around the world.
From the beginning, we were guided by a strong belief that books and films don’t change the world: movements do. We’ve undertaken all of our engagement work in the spirit of connecting, strengthening and celebrating those movements on the front lines of economic and environmental justice struggles.
The impact projects that came out of This Changes Everything include:
Beautiful Solutions: An interactive space for sharing the stories, solutions and big ideas needed to build new institutional power and point the way toward a just, resilient, and democratic future.
Climate And…: An interactive and educational gallery where you can explore the links between climate change and issues like debt, migration, Indigenous rights, and more, illustrated with images and quotes from the This Changes Everything book and film.
The Leap: The Leap was a climate justice organization that ran from 2015 until closing its doors in 2021. The Leap’s mission was to advance intersectional solutions to the overlapping crises of climate change, racism and inequality. We developed projects that built solidarity and relationships between climate and other movements. And we boosted them with cultural and media work that built popular support for our allies’ struggles, advancing a vision of the world we are fighting for.
The Leap Manifesto: A fifteen-point roadmap for how Canada can transition beyond fossil fuels while upholding Indigenous rights and creating a more just and caring country. The writing of the manifesto was initiated in the spring of 2015 at a two-day meeting in Toronto (see below) attended by representatives from Canada’s Indigenous rights, social and food justice, environmental, faith-based and labour movements. It made national headlines when it launched and shaped the debate around Canada’s energy transition for years to come.
This Changes Everything Study Guide: A free guide for the book and film targeted at grades 9-12, to help users look critically at the idea of how our economic system’s push for continual growth impacts both the environment and quality of life for all people.
Toronto Conference: We convened this two-day meeting in Toronto in 2015 to move beyond saying “no” to the worst attacks on our rights and environment, and to dream together about the world we actually want and how to get there. Representatives from Canada’s Indigenous rights, social and food justice, environmental, faith-based and labour movements came together to draft the text of what became The Leap Manifesto. This document describes the rollout of both days in Toronto and the exercises and prompts we used through the gathering.
UK Conference: On the 28th of March 2015, one thousand people gathered in Central London to discuss some of the most urgent questions facing our generation: what crises do we face? What would a fair and sustainable alternative to those crises look like? What kind of movement will it take to put that alternative in place? The resulting event, named This Changes Everything UK, was coordinated by an independent group of around twenty activists. This page provides the breakdown of the day, the workshops and the materials used.