Introducing Our No Time to Waste Fund!

In the real estate business, they say the priorities are location, location, location. In the making-change business, it’s timing, timing, timing.

We’re at the narrowest point of the bottleneck right now. As of June, we’re seeing temperatures that no human society has ever encountered before, and those temperatures are going to rise steadily now, since a big El Niño is underway. It’s terrifying, and it’s an opening for broadening the movement dramatically.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is polling ahead of Joe Biden a year out from the 2024 elections. That’s terrifying too, but if we fight like heck we can win this contest, and in the process push back authoritarianism for a generation.

Third Act is going to be key. We’ve identified a new, massive, and under-organized demographic: Americans over 60 who care about the future but need a vehicle to get involved. We’ve provided that vehicle, and it’s working powerfully in place after place.

Which is why we’ve launched this No Time to Waste fund. We’re hard at work to raise $500,000 by the end of this year to supercharge our organizing work and bring on a few more staff to help hold it all together. If you can pitch in, this is the time. Donate Today.

At the moment we’ve got more than 65,000 members, and a staff of about ten to tend to them. That’s one staffer per 6,500 volunteers, which is not good enough. We volunteers can accomplish a huge amount, but we need people pointing us in the right direction, coordinating our actions for maximum effect, and linking us up with other progressive groups.

We’ve been consciously putting the brakes on new recruitment because we lack the staffing to deal with the volunteers who come flooding in whenever we put the word out. But if we can raise some money before the year ends, then my guess is we’ll have 100,000 volunteers hard at work by the spring of next year—as the northern hemisphere heats up, and the election too.

Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben is a founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 to work on climate, democracy, and racial justice. He founded the first global grassroots climate campaign, 350.org, and serves as the Schumann Distinguished Professor in Residence at Middlebury College in Vermont. In 2014 he was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the ‘alternative Nobel,’ in the Swedish Parliament. He’s also won the Gandhi Peace Award, and honorary degrees from 19 colleges and universities. He has written over a dozen books about the environment, including his first, The End of Nature, published in 1989. His most recently released book is The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at his Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.