How to join the global climate strikes (even if you’re supposed to be working)

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We’re Working On It by Ace & Tate

4 min readSep 5, 2019

Eco-anxiety is here to stay, but helping your company get its staff moving during the global climate actions in September is a good way to deal with it.

Ace & Tate is only six years old, which is great because it makes it easy to reach out to your manager or CEO and pitch them sometimes good — most of the time silly — ideas. That’s what I did a few weeks ago when I got together with Sean (Marketing Director) and Mark (CEO) and told them about an idea I had: for Ace & Tate to encourage its staff in stores and HQ to take action during the climate strike week at the end of September. I thought it was a silly one (asking your own employees to go on strike?!), but they were both behind it. No questions asked.

How we did it

So we got to work. We created two different Typeforms, to figure out how many people were interested in taking action at HQ and in our 48 stores. This respects the confidentiality of the people willing to strike but also informs them of actions happening in their cities. We asked if they wanted to use their stores as a place to help people in the neighbourhood get involved, too.

I was worried that no one would be interested in doing anything, but the replies from all over Europe were amazing. At our HQ, almost 40% of our staff have signed up to go to The Hague on the 27th, to support the Netherlands’ national climate strike. In some of our stores like Dublin or Vienna, the entire staff decided to take action and transform their store into a banner workshop, with the help of some peeps from the local creative community. That’s cool, but it also means some of the stores opening hours and eye tests bookings will be messy. So please bear with us, we’re new at this.

Things are changing

A lot of companies, old and new, are changing their position towards activism, and citizens’ actions. It’s not ideal, but we need to be pragmatic, as we are facing a unique situation. So reach out to your staff, to your managers, to your CEOs or even CFOs. They might already be considering taking action, but they’re just not sure how to. If they decide to support their teams both financially and morally, it could help the movement grow very quickly throughout Europe.

Some banners we created for the Amsterdam Climate Strike, back in March.

The global climate strikes are a decentralised form of action, which means they’re happening at different moments and will take different shapes. Most of the information is registered on this website alongside some graphic design guidance and press kits to organise your own strikes. If it’s all still blurry for you, below is a list of cities where we’ve got a store and some information about what’s going on there.

If you’ve got any additional tips, please drop them in the comments below. If you’re interested in what Ace & Tate does to become a better, more responsible company, you should start by reading this piece, that Mark wrote last year and follow us on Medium. That’s where we chat about the challenges we face and the small victories we got along the way.

Thanks for reading,
Martin

Netherlands

There is one national strike, happening in The Hague, on Friday, September 27th. The Ace & Tate store will be open, with some free coffee and a banner workshop.

The Hague — 27 September:
https://www.facebook.com/events/494662804697554/