Building healthier communities
Recorded at Climate Con 2021 on November 10, 2021
Building healthier communities
Local things are the best things. The same strategy applies to climate action. Let's see what it looks like to build resilient and healthy places to live.
A conversation with:
Brent Bucknum (Hyphae Design Laboratory)
Sarah Shanley Hope (The Solutions Project)
Jason Carney (Energy Electives)
Lex Kiefhaber (Who’s Saving the Planet)
Transcript
Lex Kiefhaber: We're going to be talking about climate change as it pertains to the community. So how we can affect change within our community is, and how that change can help spur the systematic type change that we need in order to address this problem that we all have. It's about surviving on this planet. So we're going to break this up into a couple of sections.
The first is going to be an introduction to the guests that we have on board. Really excited for you to meet the three of them. They're each doing tremendous work. Second, we're going to talk about an opportunity for them to demonstrate how they've been successful. So how they've been able to leverage their place in the community to affect real change for everyday people.
And then we're going to talk a little bit about stakeholders. So how do we make sure that the people who are the ones that are most effected by this work have a seat at the table? Lastly, we'll get into some questions and then a big picture idea of how we can see this scaling up from the community level to a more systemic approach to saving our planet and each other.
Let's start off first with a brief introduction for each of our guests. Sarah, can we start with you?
Sarah Shanley Hope: Thanks Lex. It's a little loud behind me, so I apologize. Let me do a quick audio check. Sarah Shanley, hope VP of brand and partnerships with The Solutions Project.
Really excited to be here and share the zoom room with Jason and friends. So The Solutions Project is a national US-based non-profit organization, and we are focused really on funding and amplifying the climate justice solutions that are created by black, indigenous immigrant and other people of color all across the country, rooted at the community level.
And that theory of change that focus and our mission is really about understanding that the people closest to the problems are also the first to the solutions and hence the name, the solutions project. And and my role on brand and narrative is really partnering with our grants team to work on building the communications capacity and help amplify the stories that give us so much hope about the future that we are here to create out of this crisis.
Lex Kiefhaber: I think that second part is really important. So not only are you leveraging the financial support, but also you're giving a platform for these people to increase the reach of how this work is affecting their communities and potentially to inspire other people to follow in their footsteps.
Sarah Shanley Hope: That's exactly right. It's the origin story of our organization is really around this vision of a hundred percent renewable energy for 100% of people. And what we found starting that eight years ago now is exactly what you said, Lex, is that big, bold idea is rooted at the community level. That's where it change happens. And that's where we're seeing what's really possible.
Lex Kiefhaber: Thank you for the good work that you're doing and keep it up. Brent, let's move over to you.
Brent Bucknum: Great. My name's Brent Bucknam I'm with HiFi design laboratory we're based in Oakland, California. And I'm an ecologist that works mostly on dominant megafauna and the cities, which is humans. And we focus on human health. Our work actually stems from a mission driven approach based in our own environmental justice, justice community of west Oakland. And we focused on working with environmental justice communities to come up with solutions to their own problems. So we don't have to wait for politicians and agencies. So tell you more about that later.
Lex Kiefhaber: So what's super interesting about what there's many things that are interesting, but you focus largely on making sure that correct me. If I'm wrong, that money from government entities, big pools of money ends up finding its way to communities in a way that can really benefit those to end users.
So like focusing on how those outcomes are going to affect the lives of the people for whom they're designing. Even if the source of that money is really far removed from the communities themselves.
Brent Bucknum: Exactly. We're trying to restructure the framework. What we had was communities to give an overall this power to enact change to agencies, and then through agencies, corporations that work with them and our whole approach was can we recenter the technical experts working directly for, and with community groups and then empower and employ those committees.
Lex Kiefhaber: So Sarah, you're largely thinking about a philanthropic landscape saying we have lots of pools of money in terms of pools of money from rich people and billionaires and organizations and all that. And then Brent you're focused on more or less largely government contracts saying, how do we make sure those go to the right communities to the same end, but just from different sort of angles going down that center. That's not me telling you that. That's me making sure that I understand that.
Brent Bucknum: I think that's part of it. I think we're really not just focused on the government, but the ecosystem that makes change. So that's the citizens specialists, government nonprofits who fund it, but how do we re you know, recenter that around communities and then communities having the technical support, they need to make decisions for how to improve their built by.
Sarah Shanley Hope: And I appreciate we always say follow the money, move the money. So I do appreciate that focus on philanthropic capital, public capital. And then you'll hear from Jason, like where private capital needs to go to in terms of funding for entrepreneurs. So they're yes, ecosystem is right. And it helps to look at the streams.
Lex Kiefhaber: You've certainly done my job in terms of a segue. So with the hat, Jason, welcome aboard.
Jason Carney: Thanks for having me. I really am glad to be on the panel with Brynn, Sarah. And of course we had a really good interview that I enjoyed. I do quite a bit of this and the one I did with you sticks in my mind.
And thanks to your team and all the people that are working behind getting everything together for hosting me. I'm Jason Carney. Nashville, Tennessee, native of Nashville. I'm president and founder and CEO, Fuji electors and we do solar and energy efficiency work. I'm the only, African-American that certified to design solar in the state of Tennessee.
Maybe possibly more about that later. I'm also president of the Tennessee solar energy association, which is 5 0 1 C3 that six to just educate and celebrate solar an affinity group for solar. We just need to get more information out there and, try to battle the big utility giant with good news stories. I like to basically just say, I'm the man in the arena. I'm the one that wants all that philanthropic and government money. So if Sarah and Brian can help I'm here.
Lex Kiefhaber: Yeah. It was amazing. When everyone got introduced, how many ties that you guys already have to each other working through the community.
And there's so many, so much overlap with the different things that you're doing and it's. Borne out by the fact that the world gets smaller and smaller when you start focusing on how to make changes at this local level. Let's focus on that for a minute to what's in reverse order, just quickly give an example of how one aspect of what you do and has proven to be successful within your communities to give people a sense of what the shape of this looks like on the ground.
So Jason, let's start with you. And it was a pleasure talking with you before. You're very modest about that. In addition to all the other things that you do, you also are a man of faith and a preacher. And so one of the most interesting conversations we had was combining the idea of being a faith based leader with somebody who's grounded in like the science of actually climate change so much and more to dig in on that.
Jason Carney: Yeah, that exact capacity while I was one of my favorites, because it combined my two big passions in that conversation. Because you went there somewhat lost the initial question.
Lex Kiefhaber: What's the most recent success that you guys had thought the organization?
Jason Carney: Most recent? That would be a really cool project in the community, an extension of our initial project, which we taught students at local high school a largely African-American high school in the city to design and install solar on their school campus. This recent one was an extension of that in as much as that one was in the community and the way we wanted it This one was actually in it on a physical home.
So this was a rooftop solar that we pulled in a lot of stakeholders to donate the equipment, to provide supplemental funding and found a great house. In a predominantly black community and African-American lady that was already doing a community garden. That's why she was chosen. I felt like she was already trying to help others.
Why not choose her? And she's been a great host and it's a saving, a good amount of publicity now. And it's just another good feel-good story that there is research out there that African-American African Americans, when you correct for income and home ownership still don't adopt solar at the same level as others.
And so we literally proved that out by getting data that showed within a one mile radius of our home, no one else had solar. We put it there. Hopefully that'll be an example, and we've already seen neighbors and others being interested. So that's the most recent,
Lex Kiefhaber: I think that's one of the coolest things about the work that you do is that while it is effective in terms of actually creating renewable energy for a single home, it's more illustrative of the potential for how that can spread within communities.
And when people seeing it happen in their neighborhood, it becomes real for them. And it breaks down those barriers of like of misconception, which is tremendous. Brent let's go over to you.
Brent Bucknum: I'll just show you guys a couple as a designer. I'm more of a visual learner than an audio learner. I just wanted to give you guys a little context where hypey design lab. We started out doing a lot of like innovative, iconic green infrastructure. Some of what you've seen, if you're from the bay area.
Asking you have really complex tools to model and manage things like indoor temperature and thermal and energy, but how do we really look at things like human health? What we're doing is designing greener buildings, but not greener people necessarily. So this has been the real mission behind our work. So we started at the built environment and started branching out to. How do we, for example, redesign hospitals, where we bring nature indoors, and we provide spaces for practitioners and patients to be exposed to nature and improve their health and have spaces outside. And a lot of this actually drove us to this sort of connection where our human health is intrinsically linked to environmental health.
I think most people have had this focus on genetics, but now we're finding that our environment is about. 70% of our health impact. And then that's intrinsically linked to our built environment. And this has really framed our work both on a theoretical level, but on a very personal level, we started our business in west Oakland.
And as I was drawing these connections between our built environment, I was also seeing my environment around me. And what we find is walking to the store. You're seeing your neighbors take out screens and clean them because the particular matter and through this, I met a really good now we're really good friend of mine on this 10 or 15 years later, woman named Ms. Margaret Gordon has an environmental justice organizer in West Oakland started the environmental indicators project. We hit it off with this vision of kind of creating a joint partnership where we as technical specialists could work for an environmental justice group as our client and lead. And so we've launched that as the urban biofilter project and it's grown into a number of really cool wins.
One was we were tackling the cleaning of a Superfund site in our neighborhood. Red dot was our office. And what we found was the pollution in our yards and our neighbor's yard was over those 10 times worse than the Superfund site. And so we worked with the EPA to create an emergency project called The Fishbone Project.
Where in what we actually did was we brought in 90% local community members and trained them to do the labor, to actually go and use more ecological bioremediation means to mitigate lead poisoning. And sadly, this problem persists in our community and predominantly black and poverty ridden communities.
And so this is what our mind was a model that we could grow, where we would essentially. The cyclical process, where we do a lot of the analysis and design. Raise funds to then create green jobs and empower the community. And this basically grew into now a much larger project and we've gotten funding from National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, other large organizations to actually build a platform for other communities to do this.
And so in west Oakland, we're linking things like policeman exposure. And right now tons of people are just focused on tonnage of greenhouse gases. And we're trying to refocus people's attention on things. Cancer exposure as opposed to greenhouse gases. Cause we're really worried a lot of this climate response will not first tackle the environmental injustices that we've created, but we'll be hyper-focused on this global issue of greenhouse gases.
And I think that's what we're really trying to do is get people to step down from this macro level, which we need to look at, but really look at the micro level. So for example, in our community, We have far higher cancer risk than any of the counties surrounding us. And it actually drops off dramatically as you move away from freeways.
So a lot of our work has basically been on looking at how do we design and model urban conditions to actually mitigate these exposures and impacts and develop hyperlocalized in many ways, unfortunate data models, where we can calculate very precision air pollution, and then match that with information, for example, from Kaiser and find out that two senior centers, three blocks away from each other can essentially have 30% higher pollution and cardiovascular and health impacts when you're right next to the pollution source.
So we're working with communities and government and developing the technical tools to actually analyze these spaces where we can say, okay, you're going to build a new housing complex next to the. We actually need to do simulation modeling, to look at how that will impact the community. So we can plug in emissions models who look at how that impacts community and then develop different alternatives.
So we can look at baseline conditions. And then we can say, what happens if we add a sound well, or if we add a Greenbelt and we can actually calculate the pollution differences in specific areas. Through modeling. So that's an overview. These tools are now being used in seven or eight cities.
We have the first clinical trial happening in Louisville around urban green and cardiovascular health. For us, we're really just linking the built environment and transport with your health.
Lex Kiefhaber: I appreciate not only that presentation, but how quickly you went through it. And I know that must have been painful for you
Brent Bucknum: I did it in less than five minutes.
Lex Kiefhaber: Great job. That was awesome. And I think it's really interesting, the sense of like where that information, what that information flow is. So if you're going from this macro level of saying, we need to reduce. The instances of cancer and community, and then building into the micro model saying if we plant trees on this street that could help how we then bring in the conversation of the people that live in those facilities who have to deal with either the construction of a sound wall or their environment changing on.
And you said something else, what really struck me, which is you're working on building green environments, not necessarily green people. So whereas Jason's thinking about. What is the mindset of the community here that I can help tap into to influence this conceptual change? Not that you're not doing that, but you're also saying how can we just adjust the environment itself to provide positive downstream effects without necessarily anyone knowing that's good.
And I referenced that because I was sad the other day. And so my wife brought me these flowers on my desk. And so this can happen at the super micro level. In addition to the. Mezzo and macro level. Sarah please, the floor is yours,
Sarah Shanley Hope: An open floor. I appreciate that. I have total engineer, brain and V right now I am more on the communications side. I just really appreciate and learned a lot from Jason, your remarks, and also Brent loved the slides. Also really appreciated the vege buff. I think that's something I'm going to start using that, the vegetation buffer and what I also really appreciate is, if I if my brain works a little differently than yours, there's no question.
Like we have some. Spirit connection here, because what I also hear is the through line to the solutions project work is understanding that success comes through that systems lens, where humans are actually like a key piece of the puzzle. And so hearing from both of you and that theme that I think is true for the solutions project that our success and the success that we see is really like, how are we supporting our frontline grantee partners, those organizations reflected in both of your stories of success.
I'm sure those neighbor to neighbor. We use the terminology of like base-building community organizing organizations that have been working in communities at the front lines of pollution, of the climate crisis of historic disinvestment red lining, the history is of course, hundreds of years old, when you think about colonialism and capitalism.
Those communities really having inherent expertise and strengths and wisdom and innovation born out of the toughest conditions. We can imagine that really present the path for all of us to follow the influencers for solar on one house, rippling out, across everyone's home and really that key advocate in our work. So one small example in my hometown of Buffalo, New York where we've been supporting a number of base building organizations, push Buffalo being our anchor partner there, again, door to door, Buffalo, New York, not known as a hotbed of innovation. And anything that you wings and and really you can go to Buffalo today, 15 years after started and meet someone working in every green job imaginable.
They've got solar, of course, and energy efficiency, geothermal heating, there's offshore, wind right on lake Erie there and through a base building power building analysis a power analysis. The community members have come together to really envision what are the assets that we have old housing stock, at the time, 15 years ago, they were able to buy up abandoned properties and form a land trust, a community land trust, and start to build that model of this is what a green economy can look like that keeps people in place that understands and tracks and prevents gentrification from pushing people out as the quality of life improves. Then starts to connect those very place-based neighbor to neighbor, examples of success in a green economy to statewide policy. So organizing with other frontline organizations across New York state, as part of the New York renews coalition energy democracy Alliance, passing the strongest climate bill in the country a couple of years ago, the climate and community leadership and protection act, which passed not only a hundred percent clean energy in New York state, but also a 35 to 40% commitment mandate for investments in environmental justice communities that then inspired the Biden Harris administration's 40% commitment for federal climate and energy funding to benefit. We're hoping that are working to make sure that those benefits are also investments directly in frontline communities, environmental justice communities as part of the justice 40 initiative and that through line again from neighbor to neighbor.
All the way to changing federal policy is something that we see time and time again, with our frontline grantee partners and doing our part to resource them, share their stories, connect them to, celebrities and media outlets and other funders to scale. What we know is working, but is often, ignored because these are solutions and strategies created largely by black, indigenous immigrant and women, especially. That's where we see success.
Lex Kiefhaber: And your model is also supportive of not only just projects or predominantly non projects, but actual people change-makers within the community that can lead movements or projects themselves. Is that correct?
Sarah Shanley Hope: It is true. All of our grantees are membership-based organizations, that means that neighbors are actually in governance roles. They're volunteers they're a part of the programming, but we do have an analysis, a power analysis that it's not individuals that are gonna affect change it's individuals coming together and organizing as a collective.
And so that organization that people power, is central to our model and the success that we've seen. But it is absolutely that ecosystem of individual.
Lex Kiefhaber: Let's focus in on not then, because each of you work with a diverse collection of stakeholders, everything from the national government down to the grandmother on the corner of the street. How do you think about structuring the projects and the overall goals of what you're achieving in a way that safeguards the participation of the people that are usually the ones that have the least power to be heard the least influence in this to be able to build the architecture around these projects so that it benefits the community.
What tactics do you have to make sure that those people are well heard? Never ask a question to multiple people without specifying to whom you are asking. The question is the first thing they teach you in moderator school. So Jason, let's start with you because you definitely you're working in this world from the ground up. What do you think when you're starting a new project? Who do you go to first to talk to?
Jason Carney: That is the great engineering answer to all questions. It depends. What kind of project are we talking about? But specifically I'm thinking about like the one that we just did. I talked about having some success was a collaboration, right? So in both of them, the school project and the neighborhood project, you've got to have the the influencer that kind of breaks down the wall. So for the community project, it was a neighborhood non-profit that went in and helped. With kind of a structural items where people couldn't afford like a new roof or some plumbing.
So they have been doing this work for years. So they're the trusted voice. And so we worked with them and they gave me entrance to the community and said, Hey, we have a trusted partner that wants to do this project in your community, can he, and it was, a red carpet and I think that when as great as solar is, and I think it's the end all be all. Everyone's not there, and so you can't just go in with all your bells and whistles on and say, Hey, I'm here, but there is some strategy to how do you enter into communities and make sure that they don't feel taken advantage of, especially African-American communities.
That's one of the first things. And this is one of the reasons that I do what I do, because I know that it's a CNB type model. If you don't see the person that looks like you and comes from the same neighborhood, speaks the same vernacular. And as we just saw, me and Sarah and Brent earlier, how small the world is immediate connection.
When you make that. Oh yeah, I know your uncle. I know your cousin, the lady that I just did this project for her nephew is my next door. Neighbor has been my next door neighbor for 15 years. So I didn't know that's just how it works. Definitely I hate to, I don't know if I'm going to say it as well as Sarah would say, being in marketing, but being an African-American helps me in have entrance in the community, but even with that, it's great to have trusted people to make the introduction.
And then you can work with them without them feeling you're coming in and trying to extract something cause in Nashville and I'll somewhat close with this. Hopefully answering your question. But in Nashville, gentrification is on a 1000000%. So every move into a neighborhood, people are very apprehensive of it.
Doesn't matter who you are and what you look like. They're like, why are you here? Why are you offering me something? You have to be cognizant of that and use trusted partners to, to make our patients.
Lex Kiefhaber: Brent, you're thinking about going into a community like Nashville and saying, Hey, we've got this project. That's really going to help some quantifiable aspect of your health and wellbeing, but you need to find someone that Jason was talking about to make sure that community voices heard, how do you go about drawing that bridge between a separate entity? It's like a government or an institution to draw it into like the community aspects. Jason's neighbors and nephew of the woman in charge of that element of it.
Brent Bucknum: Yeah, I think I'm on one level for us. We have learned through our own community. So like I started working with Ms. Margaret, cause I ended up at a barbecue with her and she lives two blocks away from me and then started telling her what I do.
And then she's oh, you need to help. And she like puts me on a committee. And then that spirals into more and more. So I think for me, it's just bringing that knowledge of like how I have done the work through my own community, to others. Then provides its own street cramp to some extent.
And then it's just others that you've started to work with and other communities. So we take this approach where instead of working for the agencies, for example, and being like, oh, we're this technical expert. And we'll help bridge this dialogue with the community we go the other way around. So it's like in Stockton, we're working with little Manila rising, an environmental justice community that Sarah's group funded. And so they brought us in to actually act as their technical advisor when they're dealing with Caltrans or other agencies so that they know the science they're getting is grounded in their goals and mission.
So I think it's like reframing that structure. Obviously we do have other projects where we're like working for National Institute of Health through NSF, but in general, the goals there are to come up with the tools so that then we can like provide the solutions more affordably to the communities we want to work with.
So I think that's the big thing. It's we don't want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars doing fluid dynamics modeling if we can train a computer to do it. And so we go after those with the different models so that we can keep working for the communities, want to and scale essentially.
Lex Kiefhaber: Gotcha. And Sarah, I know that you work with a lot of very important stakeholders, both from the community aspect, but also people that potentially have agendas that are helping to be involved in the philanthropic efforts and your organization has gone above and beyond to make sure that there's church and state not to use a very mixed metaphor on that, but like some degree of safeguards between what channel of where some of the resources are coming from and the people that get to execute on the decision-making.
How did you set those up and how do you ensure that they are robust?
Sarah Shanley Hope: Yeah. Again, the synchronicities here for three people who really just met each other through this event are remarkable. So I like hats off to Climate Con. Two things that, that Jason shared that I think were also reflected in Brent's remarks are this notion.
And it's definitely not my quote at Stephen Covey. Change happens at the speed of trust and that's something that we hear from our grantee partners all the time. And something that we see from our celebrity partners, or even from our donors as well. We fundraise in addition to give giving grants out and this notion of trust being like the actual infrastructure that allows the work to happen is it's again it's an intergenerational, like characteristic of communities that have not been in traditional power for, that, that's how you get things to happen is through those relational networks. And so it's less about separating kind of donors from frontline organizations for our success and our work. It's more about how are we cultivating? Relationships from, Gloria Walton, our CEO really emphasizes you begin with values and where you're putting your values into practice and we're human.
Oftentimes we don't put our values into practice. And so what are those accountability? Measures that we have where the relationships and the trust can actually grow, even when you have conflict or, you cross boundaries. And this question of Who am I with is one that we always ask.
So if I'm feeling pressured to respond to a donor or, push forth a policy, that I care a lot about the solutions project cares about my board cares a lot about, but our grantees are not with us. We stop. And we ask that question, okay, who are we with? And then the questions from there are, what can we do together? How can this relationship be generative? And again, Jason used the word extractive, how do we make sure this relationship is generative and it's not extractive. And those touch points for our team. And then for the relationships that we cultivate in these very different sectors of society with industry, media Base building community organizations, we're still using the same questions and the same values in practice, no matter where we are.
And that in gender is an amount of trust and a long game and a boldness in our role as an intermediary funder and like amplifier that keeps us correct. That keeps us in the right lane ready to, integrate feedback when we've made a mistake and to help those that are new to a frontline community.
Like the actor mark refloat or, he's not, he's been an activist from the jump, but. To make sure that they don't step on any landmines that could be avoided if they took a a more, trust-based relational. Listening, respectful approach.
Lex Kiefhaber: Yeah. I think that's a great point. And also having those value pillars that you can come back to that who are we with? One is an excellent way to understand what framework is something that you're going to use to make decisions. So it's not just anecdotal, but you have a through-line. That helps guide you when unexpected things invariably come up.
So we've got a couple minutes left here and we want to take at least one question from the powers that be before we get to that, I do see that among the audience is my mother. So I want to say, hi mom, I love you. Thank you for being supportive. This is iced coffee. If anyone was wondering, and since she's here, I figured we'd say that explicitly.
Yin Lu which question would be. The steel in order to to wrap this up and we'll do this very briefly because we don't have much time. So without, yeah, let's do one question that each of the panelists can respond to
Yin Lu: One specifically for Sarah. And it was for Sarah to give us an example of a grantee and their work.
Sarah Shanley Hope: So let's see. Why don't I Brett, maybe you and I could do this together. Cause I feel like I've had a chance to speak a lot about our work. Maybe we can talk about little Manila rising because this is an organization in California and in Stockton that has yeah, like it is an incredible story. So this is. I don't know how should we tag team? I'm inviting you in to my room.
Brent Bucknum: But yeah, we're, I'm coming at it from the standpoint too. Like it being a good example where we're collaborating and working for an environmental justice community rather than for an agency or someone. And I had actually known Matt Holmes who runs their sort of EJI section from working in Richmond.
But we similarly are, they're just approach them and we're like, we love what you're doing. We'll start working for you for free. A way that we start to build that bridge too. Cause we're like, we want to do want to help you and do what you're doing. And then that started building that relationship and starting to look at how do we mitigate exposures for that community, from roads and freeways and things. But you probably know them.
Sarah Shanley Hope: Yeah. What I'd add to that is, you talk about authenticity. This is an organization whose founder. And I didn't have the honor of meeting her when she was alive. So I might not be pronouncing her name correctly, but Dr. Don. She Was an innovator. She was a community changemaker who saw a gap saw that her community had extremely high, the highest in the state, the highest really at the top, in the country of air pollution. And there was no, even the agencies locally that were tasked with public health and environmental issues.
They weren't connecting the dots there. They weren't getting the research and the data they weren't addressing the extreme crisis in asthma impacts in the community. And so little Manila for icing was formed very much in neighbor to neighbor volunteer at the beginning organization and started to fill the gaps in the.
Like almost direct services, but building power to then change the laws that created the conditions in the first place. And it's tragic because her innovation was born out of crisis. And she passed because at a very young age my memory is that she was in her forties because of an asthma related events and this is, many years ago and this organization has grown and built and carried on her legacy in a way that is setting new standards. Not only for those same agencies that they I found weren't actually doing their job, but really, for next level, like looking at transit, looking at renewable energy, looking at, a whole host of the built environment and how the economy was not working for the Filipino community in Stockton. So I think that's just one, one small example.
Lex Kiefhaber: Every example counts. And so thank you for sharing that. And with the 60 seconds that we have left, Jason, I'm going to ask you an incredibly complex question that there's no way you're going to be able to answer briefly, but here we go. Most communities are complex.
They have diverse makeups and diverse needs. How do you balance those needs while building communities that are healthier for everyone?
Jason Carney: So I guess the best way to do it, to answer the question is to give an example of something that we've done. And that was to pass a resolution at the city level to find. Low-income energy efficiency, upgrades and it was very difficult to get it through the city to pass that. Initially it failed. We came back and a year later a state was in. On whether it was legal because there was a n opt out instead of an opting in, so everyone is automatically opted in and you have to opt out through the local electric company or utility. So in any event, thank God it was it was eventually passed kind of 11th hour and.
That's a way of doing something on a kind of corporate meaning, large scale that helps everyone equally. And no one feels that someone is being helped more than another especially because this is for low-income folks, it's change out of your pocket. You're rounding up the sense in your bill.
And if you guys have any familiarity with the program, but I think that's one of those chances and opportunities to. Do something for a large group of people with, without they have complex needs. But there are, as I think Sarah mentioned finding these common values, we all have to buy electricity and we don't want, and I'm way past 60 seconds, but we don't want folks who can't otherwise be able to afford it and have to choose between food and medicine and paying their electricity bill.
Thank everyone for the most. Agrees that we can give up $6 a year to help that. And no matter how complex our communities are.
Lex Kiefhaber: Thank you for not only answering that, but forcing that answer into this tiny window that I have allotted you. So I appreciate that. Thank you all for coming in and sharing your stories with us today.
We really appreciate it. There's more information about each one of our speakers at the climate clon website. Please take a look at the great work that you are doing. It is invaluable. So thank you all very much.
Brent Bucknum: Thank you, Lex for herding the cats.
Lex Kiefhaber: All right.
Sarah Shanley Hope: Thank you all so much.
Brent Bucknum: Thanks everyone.
