What's next?

In addition to putting the pressure on Kimberly-Clark on the Web, the campaign has been building a grassroots network of local activists across Canada and, more recently, the United States. Building on the experience of campaigns like the Billionaires for Bush in the U.S. — which leveraged a large network of local chapters to deliver innovative street theatre (capturing national media attention) — tools were launched to support local autonomous organization, specifically the Kleercut Groups (powered by the open source Sympa mailing list and hosted at NPOgroups.org) and the Kleercut Action Pack.

We realized early on that the success of our online activism is very closely tied to the success of our grassroots “in person” activism. They are very interrelated and support each other. We firmly believe that a campaign is successful when it bridges the technology gap and is based on coalition building and empowering the average person to take action.

Action Pack in hand, motivated and environmentally concerned citizens are taking a stand in their community and saying no to ancient forest destruction by Kimberly-Clark and Kleenex. Already there have been store adoptions from coast-to-coast across Canada and the U.S., and there are more local groups forming every day. The objective: a one-on-one, neighbor-to-neighbor, citizen-to-citizen movement that delivers the message along with the trust that exists in those local networks. The result: a magnitude of increased consumer pressure on Kimberly-Clark to end its environmentally irresponsible practices.

And there is much more being planned...new tools, new actions and new partners on the campaign. To stay tuned and to get updates, please take one minute right now to join the Forest Defenders list, to take action and send a message to Kimberly-Clark and to spread the word about this campaign.

If you’d like to help even more, please post a link to this article on your site (or reproduce it entirely). And, if you’re a Web developer, Flash designer, blogger, online campaigner, writer, editor, illustrator or just plain talented and pissed-off at Kleenex, please get in touch with us.

The Kleercut campaign team,

Christy, Earl, Eric, Phillip and Richard.