Since its launch in September 2016, more than 13,000 organizations and individual supporters from across the world have joined the Break Free From Plastic (BFFP) movement to demand massive reductions in single-use plastics and to ramp down fossil fuel production and plastic production, leading to lasting solutions to the plastic pollution crisis. With decades of experience co-convening and facilitating strategy development for social justice and environmental movements, OAEC’s Executive Director Dave Henson has served as a lead facilitator and strategy consultant for BFFP. He facilitated the global strategy meeting in Thailand in Summer 2019 and BFFP US national strategy meeting in Philadelphia in Fall 2019. In March 2020, he facilitated the global BFFP staff, as well as the BFFP global communications staff, for strategy planning meetings at OAEC.
In August 2019, here at OAEC, #BreakFreeFromPlastic organized an Environmental Justice Culture Hack storytelling workshop geared at highlighting the stories of frontline communities who are feeling the toxic impacts of plastic pollution at every level of the supply chain. The workshop brought together environmental justice organizers with communications strategists to creatively shift the narrative of plastics as a “litter” problem focused on individual responsibility to a story focused on corporate accountability for the gross injustices of oil extraction and manufacturing of single-use fossil fuel-based products. Various organizations within the #BreakFreeFromPlastic movement meet regularly at OAEC to reflect and plan new strategy.
