One of the demands of Fridays for Future Toronto is that Toronto should declare a climate emergency.

While working on a letter to the mayor from staff, students and alumni at my former high school, I realized it would be useful to make these tools available as google documents to students or alumni from other Toronto schools.

  1. Prepare your letter. Draft your own letter to the Mayor urging him to champion a climate emergency declaration at Toronto City Council.  If you want, you can personalize this template by selecting ‘make a copy’ under File and editing your copy.  You can also send a copy to your councillor.  Look up your councillor by entering your school’s address here.
  2. Get Signatures in person.  Print a copy of your letter for people to read. Then print or copy this sign-up sheet to gather names, graduation year (or staff position) and signatures by hand.
  3. Get Signatures online.  If you want, you can gather signatures online by creating a google form with two short answer questions: 1. “Name” & 2. “Graduating Year or Position.”  Put simple instructions and the text of your letter in the ‘form description’ field.  You can then send your form around or put a link on social media to collect signatures.  It should look something like this:form image

4. Organize your signatories and then print and mail your letter.  If you collected signatures by hand, you can simply include those pages with your letter.  If you used an online form, check the ‘responses’ tab of your form.  From there, you can either create a google spreadsheet and print it or download a .csv file and print that and include those sheets with the letter.

Mayor John Tory
Office of the Mayor
City Hall, 2nd Floor
100 Queen St. W.
Toronto, ON M5H 2N2

You can also print up extra copies of the letter and ask people to sign and mail their own copy.  While a letter with twenty or thirty signatures is impressive — getting a twenty or thirty stamped and sealed envelopes will have an even bigger impact.

If you haven’t done it already, you should also sign this online petition to the Mayor.