Take the #StopAdani Challenge

GATHER SOME MATES

Get your local action group together or start a new group with friends, family and neighbours locally. Invite people over for a coffee, dinner or a movie night. Get them fired up about Adani and ask them to help you complete the #StopAdani Challenge.

If you're looking for like-minded people to complete the #StopAdani Challenge, consider hosting a screening of the 30-minute documentary 'Guarding the Galilee' to get members in your local community informed and fired up about Adani.

GATHER INTEL

Follow these steps to find the information you’ll need about your MP for all future advocacy activities. Do it as a group and distribute the tasks.

• Find your MP, their official website, and their office contact info.

• Find out where your MP stands on Adani, climate change, coal, clean energy and our environment. Remember your MP will have to vote the party line, and the policy positions on their website will have to align with federal party policy. However you can also learn a lot about what your MP really thinks from their comments in the media, which new releases they put on their website and historical commentary on issues from before they became the subject of party politics.

Aim to survey at least 100 people in your electorate. It’s fantastic if you can survey a larger sample in that time - but the main thing is to have a reasonable result to take to your MP in during their winter break from parliamentary sittings in July.
Your community survey should include these five questions:

1. Do you support or oppose a $1 billion loan of public money for Adani’s proposed coal mine project?
2. Do you support or oppose the proposed Adani coal mine in Queensland? (support/oppose)
3. Do you want your local politician to take a stand to stop Adani’s proposed coal mine? (yes/no)
4. If you had one message to send your MP about the proposed Adani coal project, what would it be? (Record a sentence or two)
5. Do you want to hear from us again, including overall results of the community survey?

First, choose when and where you’ll survey. You could survey your neighbours directly outside your MP’s office; outside your local shopping centre; in your workplace; on the sidelines of the weekend footy; at your next church gathering - or whatever else you can come up with!

Print off plenty of copies of this datasheet to record results of your survey. There are 4 to a page so 15 double sided copies will give you space for 120 survey results.

If you’ve taken the challenge as an individual, invite a friend or family member to come along and help with the survey. If you’re a community action group, post a message to your Facebook group or email list and invite people to survey the community with you.

Bring a #StopAdani sign or placard (or wear a t-shirt if you have one) so people can clearly see what you’re about. You can pick up an action pack or t-shirt in the online shop.

Make sure you ask to record people’s contact details - their responses will be confidential, but in providing contact details, you can get back to them with the overall results of the survey, any response from your MP, and opportunities for local action.

You’ve surveyed your community. Now it’s time for some basic arithmetic!

You’ll need to tally up the answers to the first three questions, checking that for each answer, you get the same overall total. For example:

Then, calculate percentages. If your maths is a bit rusty, for the example above, this means:

• 125 ➗ 142 x 100 = 88.03% of people surveyed in my electorate oppose Adani getting a $1 billion in public funding.
• 17 ➗ 142 x 100 = 11.97% of people surveyed in my electorate do support Adani getting $1 billion in public funding.

Next up, select the most powerful statements given for Question 4. These are people’s messages for their MP. Present the best messages alongside your survey results to your MP.

Drop your survey results into this template - this will form part of the briefing pack you will deliver to your MP in person, and you can organise an online action too for local supporters to send this through to your MP with a personalised message.

When you have your results, share them with us at [email protected] - that way we can tell the big story of the overall results of all the surveys in all the electorates.

You’ve done the survey and tallied your results. Next up is planning how and when to deliver your survey results to your MP - and making your voice heard!

For individuals planning to drop off your survey results:

• Ask a friend or family member to accompany you
• Make sure to make a placard with your results (example below)
• Take a pic with your placard, and the MP office sign in shot - post to social media with #StopAdani and #StopAdaniChallenge hashtags. Send your pic through to [email protected] 

For groups planning a loud and noisy community event to deliver your results:

• Set up a Facebook event page with your MP’s office as the venue. Invite friends, family and the members of your group
• List your delivery event on ACF's Events page. This way more people will hear about your event, and can come along
• Get creative - paint a banner, make a placard, costumes, props etc.
• Prepare a briefing pack for your MP, containing:
  • Your survey results and messages
  • A letter explaining why the campaign to #StopAdani matters to you or your local action group, including any questions you’d like your MP to answer and a return address they can reply to, and a request to meet your MP

The day before

• Post a reminder message for your Facebook event
• Send a final reminder to any e-list you have (text them if you can), and to friends, family and local group members who have yet to RSVP
• Make sure any banners, costumes, props and placards etc are all ready to go
• Send a media alert to your local paper and radio station - see here for a template and here for a guide to securing local media.

On the day

• First thing, call your local paper and radio station - ask if they’ve seen the alert and whether they are coming along (they may ask you to re-send the alert)
• A couple of you should aim to get there at least 15 minutes early.
• Before there is a crowd gathered a couple of you may like to go into the office - introduce yourself, explain that the event outside will be peaceful, and let them know the finish time, and if the MP is in the office, invite the MP to come out and talk with your group. Explain that a couple of people will come in and hand over the briefing pack at the conclusion of the action.
• Introduce yourself to people as they arrive at the action, and once you have critical mass, huddle up and give a quick run-through for how the action will run, songs to sing, banners to hold, and let people know when it will finish.
• Aim to have one or two people speak to the gathered crowd (and any media who turn up). A short speech is a good speech!
• Hand over your briefing pack to your MP.

Do you need some background into the campaign? Want to know how to run an online survey? Need some extra support in running a community event?

Download our #StopAdaniChallenge toolkit for all this and more.