The Claremont Off Fossil Fuels (OFF) campaign began in the wake of the successful anti-fossil fuels student movements before us. These movements folded into the intersectional fight for Palestinian liberation amidst the active investments by U.S colleges in weapons manufacturing and genocide, and were ultimately suppressed and silenced by normalized crackdowns on free speech in higher education across the country. By February 2025, when students founded the Claremont OFF campaign, American colleges had reached paralysis: Administrators had doubled down on restrictive free speech policies and reaffirmed commitments to maintaining business-as-usual, instilling a sense of fear and powerlessness among student organizers. Administrative crackdowns, both federal and collegiate, had changed the calculus of student movements, increasing risk, reducing capacity, and shrinking the imaginative bounds of student-driven change. Meanwhile, college administrations increasingly sidelined climate action as the Trump Administration dissolved climate protections nationwide and “flooded the zone” with a barrage of crises and crackdowns that shifted public attention elsewhere.
As the founders of our campaign observed the absence of full-time environmental coordinators at Pitzer and Harvey Mudd, Pomona’s increasing reliance on unreliable carbon offsets, and all five Claremont Colleges’ uncontested fossil fuel complacency, we felt an imperative to hold the Colleges accountable at a moment when accountability was absent. The OFF campaign centered a clear goal: push the Claremont Colleges to recognize and mitigate the consequences of their continued reliance on fossil fuel electricity. And we won.
“On April 16, the finance leaders of all five Claremont Colleges, plus Claremont Graduate University and The Claremont Colleges Services, unanimously voted to switch the Colleges from sourcing fossil fuels from the investor-owned electricity monopoly Southern California Edison to the Clean Power Alliance’s 100 percent renewable electricity.”
As the co-leaders of the campaign, we want to clarify what this win means, why it matters, and how we got here. Our win is a testament to the power of grassroots student organizing. But despite our excitement that the Claremont Colleges have moved away from fossil fuel-driven electricity, we must recognize that this decision should have been a no-brainer for the Colleges. We must recognize that the Colleges have ignored previous opportunities to purchase renewable electricity. Most importantly, we must recognize that this is just one step in an ongoing journey toward divestment from extractive industries at the Claremont Colleges and beyond. We will not allow administrators to claim this win as final.
Our Win
On April 16, the finance leaders of all five Claremont Colleges, plus Claremont Graduate University and The Claremont Colleges Services, unanimously voted to switch the Colleges from sourcing fossil fuels from the investor-owned electricity monopoly Southern California Edison to the Clean Power Alliance’s 100 percent renewable electricity. In the following hours, each college president approved the transition. This unanimous decision marked the biggest moment of collaboration between the Claremont Colleges in years. It marked the elimination of 29 percent of Pomona’s greenhouse gas emissions, and similar figures at the other Colleges. Although simple, this decision was monumental: the switch to CPA was the largest single action the Colleges could have taken to negate their carbon emissions. It is also the closest the Colleges have come in recent history to acknowledging that they are not absolved from responsibility for environmental catastrophe.
When we began this effort, we wanted more than just a decommitment from harmful electricity sourcing; we wanted a viable alternative. CPA is a publicly founded nonprofit electricity provider, guided by a board of directors composed of elected officials from more than dozen municipalities across Southern California. It also provides a number of community benefits, ranging from workforce development programs in underserved communities to a Community Benefits Grant that it provides to local clean energy, energy equity, and environmental education nonprofits.
The Purpose of Climate Action
You don’t have to look far to see the problems that CPA seeks to address. Last year, Claremont students watched from afar as smoke engulfed entire LA neighborhoods, destroying homes, communities, and livelihoods. Further, in recent years, warehouse growth in the Inland Empire has intensified rapidly in response to the whims of American consumerism and the wealth of the country’s largest corporations. The impact on the IE has been an influx of low-wage jobs and environmental injustice, with CalMatters reporting that “the negative effects of that pollution and related traffic congestion are overwhelmingly concentrated in neighborhoods inhabited mostly by Latinos and low-income residents.” To be clear, warehouse proliferation and fossil fuel extraction are deeply intertwined: When one industry succeeds, so does the other, and when they both succeed, the IE’s historically marginalized communities suffer the consequences of their relentless pollution and profiteering. As extractive industries exploit neighborhoods mere miles from the Claremont Colleges, we must reflect on the enormous wealth and influence of these colleges. We must reconcile with our reliance on industries that cause displacement, pollution, and health crises in communities across the IE.
Often, in discussions of climate change at privileged institutions like the Claremont Colleges, we become detached from the tangible impact our actions have. Institutional climate action — beyond the low-hanging fruit of sustainability initiatives and energy efficiency measures — is easily ignored because these institutions don’t often feel the consequences of their complacency. Sweeping language on carbon neutrality goals and values-based progress at institutions like these promise urgent climate action. Yet they often betray that sense of urgency by choosing complicity in corporate greenwashing and quick-fix partial solutions. If future on-campus clean energy projects are just another component in a calculus of annual budgets, student yield, and alumni donations, administrators will be less likely to pursue critical electrification projects with real ambition. When climate action becomes disconnected from the people it benefits, it becomes hollow, misguided, and uninspired. We began every campaign pitch to administrators by grounding them in a sense of personal responsibility, with a request that they see the financial burden of the CPA switch as a small sacrifice in the pursuit of tangible environmental justice.
The Trajectory of Claremont OFF
In telling the story of the campaign, we hope to make visible the roughly thirty students who made this transition possible. These are the students who met every Sunday in the Scripps Student Union for more than a year, applying backgrounds in graphic design, scientific research, event planning, photography, food justice, and climate organizing to an evolving set of responsibilities. They are history, politics, chemistry, philosophy, physics, environmental analysis, economics, and Spanish majors. They include members of all five undergraduate student governments.
What became a far-reaching effort at every Claremont College began with two Pomona students. Milo Slevin PO ’28 and Annika Weber PO ’27 started the campaign working group of the 5C Environmental Justice Collective in February 2025. The club was already doing rigorous work through its three existing working groups: Redistributing excess food from the Colleges to community organizations in Pomona; collaborating with community partners to design environmental justice curriculum for local Title I schools; and providing volunteer capacity to critical Inland Empire organizations like the Huerta Del Valle community farm in Ontario.
While the path forward was difficult to imagine at the campaign’s outset, its founders were driven by a strong commitment to holding our institutions accountable to their proclaimed values. Our decision to push for the switch to CPA followed a series of conversations with students, staff, and faculty centered around where the Colleges were lacking and where we could push for long-term change. Our early working group meetings often provoked more questions than answers. How will we organize when our colleges have systematically shut down student organizing? How will we build strong student power when students are justifiably scared of facing administrative power? On a more personal level, how long is this work going to take, and maybe more importantly, how much is this work going to take out of us? As we struggled to answer those questions last spring, we were lucky to have more than a handful of people attend our weekly meetings. Over the summer, however, we gained more consistent membership as we solidified a campaign strategy and group objective over countless hours on FaceTime. We built our strategy around earning buy-in from every campaign member, with a focus on presenting to administrators before protesting against them.
In the fall, the campaign gained momentum as new members brought unique perspectives and creative ideas to the group. We had enough members to divide into two subgroups: Inroads and Outreach. While Inroads worked to put the CPA transition back on the agenda through direct engagement with administrators, Outreach called attention to the Colleges’ complicity in fossil fuels and their decision to opt out of renewable electricity, garnering community support for the campaign.
As campaign members learned how to connect their interests with the OFF campaign, they were also tasked with helping others do the same. We convinced community members why they should care about decarbonization in classrooms, in front of dining halls, during office hours, and while waiting in line at the Motley Coffehouse. A TSL op-ed establishing the core values of our campaign accompanied the release of a petition, which ultimately amassed 1,300 signatures – nearly all of which were a product of one-on-one conversations.
Our outreach work earned us the legitimacy of student support and allowed us to negotiate for a place on administrators’ agendas. The fall semester of communication with administrators culminated in a presentation to the Claremont Colleges Facilities Management Committee (FMC) on December 5th, where we expressed student sentiments regarding fossil fuels and laid a clear pathway to the switch to renewable electricity. Facilities directors from the five undergraduate colleges, CGU, and TCCS expressed their support of the transition, leaving financial evaluation of the switch to the Business and Financial Affairs Committee (BFAC), where we would present next.
In January, we fought to stay on the agenda even as we were off campus. When we secured an hour to present to financial decision makers on March 5, we began building public anticipation around the presentation. Administrators would have the information they needed to make a decision; students would be watching to see what they did next. In anticipation of the BFAC presentation, we asked for the support of the leftist organization coalition that our campaign helped to found, creating a space to be in community and support each others’ work at a ‘Claremont OFF’ Field Day event on February 28. We shared a megaphone between 15 student organizations, asked attendees to watch closely as administrators deliberated the common-sense switch to CPA, and built community through an array of fun field day activities.
At our March 5 presentation, we balanced a year of energy grid research and financial analysis with the representation of student letters, interviews, and commitments. We compelled each finance lead to understand the transition as an investment in the stated values of our institutions. We fielded logistical questions, clarifying what the transition would and would not require. It took weeks for administrators to follow up on our presentation. We applied pressure. In March and April, the Associated Students of CMC, Scripps, and HMC joined Pitzer in passing student government resolutions endorsing the transition away from fossil fuel electricity.
We declared April as our Power Month, planning teach-ins, an ‘email storm’ of administrators’ inboxes, and a Riding Rally, at which we planned to deliver over 20 faculty letters of support, 1,300 petition signatures, and four student resolutions to each College’s financial office via bikes, scooters, and skateboards. We intended for the Riding Rally to be a moment of direct and public pressure on decision-makers who seemed prepared to delay their decision into the summer. That moment never came.
In the hours before we came knocking on the doors of college finance leaders, we received word that the BFAC had unanimously approved the transition to 100 percent renewable electricity the day prior. That morning, the Presidents of each College had confirmed their endorsement. Our rally became a celebration: dozens of students rode to each finance office in triumph. We were thankful for the administrators who helped to move the needle in BFAC deliberations, but we were also emboldened by a moment that reinforced the power of grassroots student organizing.
The Future of Student Organizing
Now that we have succeeded, it is critical that students control the narrative. Climate action can easily be folded into the narrative of institutional sustainability: in the same way that our colleges may justify a reusable utensils program or drought-resistant landscaping, they are likely to frame the transition to renewable electricity as an investment in the longevity of our institutions as they are. But we refuse to sustain the unjust power structures entangled with our institutions as they are.
We hope the Claremont Colleges follow this win with more commitments to disassociating from extractive industries. We hope future climate action at the Colleges centers environmental justice and accountability to polluted communities in the Inland Empire. Most of all, we hope the OFF campaign provides a framework for how to sustain grassroots student power at a moment when our leaders are actively working to strip that power away.