We win a lot of victories together, but any one of us can get the ball rolling all by ourselves. Remember that huge win we just had on bees? Well a big part of it was due to a campaign *started* by Avaaz members!
The German vote was crucial to Europe deciding to ban dangerous pesticides. When a group of German beekeepers heard that Germany was likely to vote no, they used our new community tool to start their own petition. Soon over 150,000 people had signed from across the country, their petition had caught the eye of the media and, together with Avaaz staff, they delivered their call to the government!
A day later, Germany switched its vote — helping to pass the Europe-wide ban and save our bees. All it took was a few minutes to start a petition on an issue these amazing beekeepers cared about. And you don’t have to be a beekeeper or an expert or a campaigner to do the same — just click below to get started:
http://avaaz.org/en/petition/start_a_petition/

The Daniel Pennock Democracy Schools are a key piece of our community organizing.  Named for a boy in Pennsylvania who died after exposure to sewage sludge, the Democracy Schools are one to three-day intensive seminars that examine how communities across the U.S. are beginning to assert local control to protect the rights of their residents, their communities, and nature.

The OCA deals with crucial issues of food safety, industrial agriculture, genetic engineering, children’s health, corporate accountability, Fair Trade, environmental sustainability and other key topics.

We believe that we are in the midst of an escalating ecological crisis, and that the crisis is the result of decisions made by a relatively few people who run corporations and government. We believe that sustainability will never be achieved by leaving those decisions in the hands of a few – both because of their belief in limitless economic production and because their decisions are made at a distance from the communities experiencing the impact of those decisions. Therefore, we believe that to attain sustainability, a right to local self-government must be asserted that places decisions affecting communities in the hands of those closest to the impacts…