Living Change: A Quest For Climate Leadership

John Bauters / Emeryville, CA (Part 1)

John Bauters (00:00):

The best public servants are empathetic people. We joke about studying bus seats, right? There’s the same thing for the human condition. I don’t need to study whether or not it is right to help an undocumented person. And I think there’s too much overthinking and there’s a lot of people with power who want to analyze and study everything, including the human condition. And you study the human condition by working with humans.

Andrea Learned (00:28):

I’m Andrea Learned, and welcome to Living Change, a podcast exploring unconventional climate leadership. I talk to people who’ve converted their personal values into business and policy decisions in a load of different sectors. I believe that the more we’re visible about these changes, the more we chart the way for other leaders wanting to create new social norms. Today I’m speaking with Emeryville, California Mayor John Bauters. Hey John.

John Bauters (00:53):

Hi. How are you? Good.

Andrea Learned (00:54):

How are you? We had such a great conversation that we’re releasing it in two parts. You may notice a pattern with many of my guests. I first connected with John on Twitter as a fellow biker. I enjoyed watching him document rides throughout the city. I loved his photos with his pup, and I enthusiastically followed as he tweeted about his Emeryville City Council work. And then he went on to be elected Mayor John sees climate impact at the intersection of most of his policy priorities. He’s a vocal advocate for the intersection of housing, affordability and climate. Most people don’t realize how linked homelessness and climate change are, but in fact, the homeless population are the first to experience the climate crisis acutely. Think about it, they’re most vulnerable when a natural disaster strikes from hurricanes to heat waves, and they have nowhere to turn for respite. They’re also disproportionately suffering from systemically rising temperatures, from more frequent exposure to air pollution and wildfire smoke, to longer exposure to disease carrying mosquitoes and ticks. It’s a vicious cycle, making the plight of the unhoused even more dangerous. But in the midst of this bleak trajectory, Emeryville is actually one of the only cities in the Bay Area region that has reduced homelessness. So we jumped right in.

John Bauters (02:13):

It’s a team effort to make it happen. In my city that’s inclusive of the council and the staff in the city of Emeryville and in our region. We have been hit really hard by homelessness, but homelessness is an issue that’s very deeply personal to me. And also I a place where I’ve had a lot of professional experience. Um, so I came out, uh, as L G B T to my family in the Midwest in the nineties. Um, I went through a lot of challenges with my family’s acceptance of that situation. And that led to a period of housing instability in my life, uh, just over 20 years ago now. And, uh, in that period of time, I, you know, faced various different types of housing scenarios. Uh, first place that was actually my own was a room in a boarding house in Southern California. Um, and I worked professionally from that space to be a homeless outreach worker.

(02:57):

I ended up going to law school and becoming an attorney for people who were homeless through a HUD grant. I was a legal aid eviction defense attorney for people who were in public housing in Chicago, came out to California to do policy work on housing. And, um, it’s guided everything that I do and it’s integral to who I am. Um, and from that space, uh, a lot of the things that we’ve been doing in emoryville, whether that be production of housing affordability and housing preservation of housing or protections for people, um, as well as homeless outreach services, those are all informed by my own lived experience and my professional journey on housing justice.

Andrea Learned (03:29):

Well, that is so interesting. I don’t know that I’ve ever picked up on that and following you on Twitter. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but thank you for sharing that. And now I’m curious, um, how, how has that story or the understanding of that really helped you connect with your constituents or to forward some of these policies that you’re moving forward? I, I’m just, I can’t wait to hear.

John Bauters (03:50):

Yeah. So there’s a couple ways that happens. One of the most powerful ways that I found that it, it’s really benefited me and the work I do in my community is it offers me the opportunity to show people what’s possible. And it also changes the narrative. So I, I do a rotating town hall in town. Um, and I had a town hall in 2018 where it was January, and there were about 130 people who came to that town hall. I was at a residential complex out on our peninsula. And one of the residents got up to speak and she was very upset. And she said, Mr. Mayor, there’s a homeless man and he’s living under the Powell Street overpass and he has 40 to 50 bags of trash, and I don’t feel safe walking under the overpass to the Trader Joe’s to get my groceries anymore. And what are you doing to get rid of him? Mm-hmm. and a lot of heads started nodding. And I, I said, ma’am, do you know what his name is?

Andrea Learned (04:41):

Yeah.

John Bauters (04:42):

And she didn’t. And I said, does anybody here know what his name is? And nobody did. And I said, his name is Jim. And in that moment, I have already communicated to everybody that I know more about this person than they do. And I told them Jim’s story, 67 year old man who was renting an apartment just across our border in West Oakland and was paying his rent with social security, um, along with a few hundred dollars a month he made by recycling. And there was a recycling center right across our border on Peralta Street. And as that neighborhood continued to get built up with new housing residents began complaining to the city council that they hated hearing shopping carts, rattling with cans and bottles at six in the morning. And the city council voted to close that recycling center down. And with it, they closed down Jim’s supplemental income.

(05:26):

And after he lost a few hundred dollars a month to help cover his rent, he was behind on rent in a housing crisis in the Bay Area. And he was evicted from his home. And he spent a couple weeks on the streets of West Oakland with a few possessions he had from the eviction, and there were gunshots and he didn’t feel safe. So he came to our city because he felt safe. And those 40 bags weren’t trash. Those were recyclables from our own community that he was picking up and that he was taking to recycling centers cuz he wanted to get his own money to pay for his own deposit, for his own new place to stay. And most people just didn’t know that, uh, cause nobody had bothered to stop to talk to him. They hadn’t humanized him. And I said, we have a contract in place that goes and picks him up for a few hundred dollars a uh, a week or a month.

(06:06):

We pick him up and we take him to a different recycling center with all those recyclables so he can receive cash and do what he wants with it. And I said, we offer him housing and shelter. We have a housing and shelter program with the county North Hub. And I said, and he’s declined it. And I said, and I’m not mad at him for declining it. I said, somebody knocked on my car window in 2002 and offered me a place to stay. And I said, no, because it’s extremely humiliating to have some person who you dunno offer you something that you so desperately need and want, but you can’t provide it to yourself. And I said, the goal of government should be to help people and it should be such that he feels he can trust us. And if I and the city staff create a space where he realizes we’re not here to take his things, we’re not here to harm him or move him along, but he can trust us.

(06:49):

My hope is that in that partnership, Jim will realize that it’s not a bad thing for him to accept shelter services from our city. And I said, so that’s what we’re gonna do. And I hope that every day when you walk to the Trader Joe’s, you say, good morning, Jim, to him, because then he realizes that he’s not threatened in the place he is. And it makes it easier for him to recognize that he’s welcome here. And I said, does anybody here have a problem with what we’re doing for Jim? And not a single hand went up. Wow. And I said, thank, thank you. Next question. And I came back two months later and the first thing that happened when I walked in the room, I got run over by about 10 old ladies who said, Jim is missing. Jim is gone. And I said, well, we’ll talk about that in a second. And we started the meeting and I said, it sounds like you all wanna know about Jim. And they said, yes. I said, he accepted shelter services last week.

Andrea Learned (07:31):

This is the power of storytelling. It gets to the heart of what I’m mining for. As I talk to changemakers. We’re all responding to the story of one human being. Honestly, just listening to this was devastating. John was able to connect the Emeryville community to Jim’s humanity and it really reached them. John, did this inherent understanding come from having lived the experience yourself?

John Bauters (07:55):

I appreciate that question. I think it’s a combination of those things. I think most people would or, um, who work with me would argue that I’m an extremely empathetic person. And I think that the best public servants are empathetic people. You don’t have to have lived experience to necessarily understand, like, I don’t have to be a woman or a mother to understand what women are deal with. Yes. Whether that’s harassment being underpaid mm-hmm. . Right. I have to empathize with what it must be like to try to make ends meet. Being paid two thirds to three quarters of what a man makes for the same work mm-hmm. , right? Like I, and, and what that might mean for me Right. In my, in my family. So, um, I don’t think everybody has to have lived experience. I think that elevating the voices of people with lived experience is critical to getting the best decisions made.

(08:41):

Right. And my lived experience, I I, you know, you, you noted, you don’t see me talk a lot about on Twitter because I’m really conscientious of the fact that I also live with white privilege. Right. I’m a white person who is a man. Um, I happen to be L G B T. I happen to have had my share of time being unemployed, living through housing insecurity, living in situations I don’t really wanna talk about that weren’t really helpful, that were traumatic for me, um, at a younger point in my life. But I also recognize that if I was a woman and I was black, my prognosis and the likelihood that I would be able to be where I am today is far greater diminished because of all the other variables and institutional biases that exist in society. So yes, I do think lived experience is important, but I think that it’s also empathy and understanding what really goes on in our community.

(09:34):

And I, you know, I, I chose a path of profession that was very closely aligned with social work. So I do work with people and you know, as a legal aid attorney, I’ve had thousands of clients who were low income. Most, almost all my clients are people of color. Almost all of them are people who are low income. And in that space, you know, while I don’t have the same exact lived experiences them, I’ve walked with them through their lived experience and I have been there when they’ve had to make decisions that I do not envy any person making. And it is those experiences and, and the lessons I’ve learned from over 20 years of work in that space, that guide and give me the convictions. I have people say, you’re so confident and so assured about how you’re voting on some things. And we’re, and it’s, I don’t need to study it further.

(10:20):

Mm-hmm. We joke about studying bus seats, right? Yeah. Yeah. There’s the same thing for the human condition. I don’t need to study whether or not it is right to help an undocumented person. Right. When I got elected the same day as Donald Trump, the first thing I did was make our city a sanctuary city. Oh. That was the very first thing I did. Wow. And because I don’t have to be an undocumented person to understand what the plight of that person is from the position of a person who is an ally in that movement. Mm-hmm. . And that is, I think there’s too much overthinking and there’s a lot of people with power who wanna analyze and study everything, including the human condition. And you study the human condition by working with humans.

Andrea Learned (10:59):

Oh, . Yes. Wow. I, I you are so articulate on this topic and I’m just feeling kind of goosebumps cuz I that is a wonderful way to put it. And how lucky Emeryville is to have you leading, you know, and, and making these changes. Your story about Jim covers the whole system of city infrastructure that needs to change housing, affordability, parks and open spaces, transportation, community safety and wellness. Mm-hmm. , it’s incredible how just that one story intersects with all parts of the system. And so that makes me wonder, you tell those stories in the human stories is that, is talking about it as a systems change. Is that starting to resonate with your constituents and understanding that each of these pieces is all interconnected? Is that, is that helpful? Or do you try and go at it from individual, let’s focus on transportation and by the way, that will help these other issues. Tell me about the whole system’s view, how you use that in your work.

John Bauters (11:56):

Yeah, that’s a good question. And it comes back to advocacy too, right? How do advocates do address these things when you’re, when your leaders can’t or don’t? Um, I think it depends. The, the most common thing that people mis misunderstand, whether they’re they’re speaking from a dais or speaking from the, the public comment is who is the audience? Right? So my answer to your question depends on who my audience is. Um, am I speaking to a group of people who are, um, understand systems, three dimensional thinkers who understand the, the intersectionality of these issues? Do I have, they have a baseline understanding of how systems of injustice and oppression operate today. And how people don’t even wittingly understand that they benefit from the continued operation of those systems. Be that zoning, be that, you know, car dominance be whatever that is. Right? What is, what is continuing to exist and do we understand the impacts that has now and has had historically on people?

(12:51):

And it becomes, it, it comes back to being self-educating oneself about like, why I am where I am. Like what brings, and that’s recognizing my privilege again, like why I am where I am. And I think that when you speak to different constituencies, there are different levels of efficacy with which people come from, right? They have different levels of knowledge. So sometimes presenting the intersectionality of these five things we’re trying to solve is, is like to some people, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and, and then the, the effectiveness of me as a leader or a spokesperson on an issue is I may feel like I’m being really smart, but it’s not doing me any good. Right. And I need to then boil it down to singular topics. And as a follow up to the conversation on Jim, you know, I went back and told folks these accepted shelter services, people were very happy.

(13:41):

I said, I’m glad you’re happy. I said, I’m running a housing bond to house people like Jim, I would love it if you would vote for it. And we passed that bond three months, four months later. And, and so helping people see the connection mm-hmm. between something that we’re doing that they now feel connected to, they, a lot of them felt connected to him. I had the same group of residents, some of these older folks call me about a homeless man sleeping across the street from their building next to the fire station. And the parks district had put a notice to a victim and they were showing up to remove his stuff while he was gone out at the store or wherever he was. And old ladies were across the street fighting the parks district officials against removing his stuff. And one of them called me about to have a heart attack on the phone asking me to show up.

(14:20):

And I showed up on my bike 10 minutes later and I, I got the parks district, I said, can you give us 48 more hours? We’d like to work with them. And we moved him 20 feet off of their district property onto the city property. And it’s like, you can empower people when they see that you have an understanding of an issue and that you’re willingness to lead them on an issue and support them in what they know is right. That’s when you actually accomplish change. And so I welcome when my, I, I still get constituents who say, I want this unhoused person, he’s been sleeping over here. I feel unsafe and it’s scary, whatever. I always write them a nice email back that says, thank you so much for your concern for the welfare of our unhoused neighbor. I don’t let them own the narrative about this is a spooky person who, because I don’t like looking at it and it makes me feel guilty or uncomfortable, I should therefore be rid of that.

(15:10):

Mm-hmm. . Right? That’s like disposing of a human being because you don’t, you haven’t taken the time to understand their problem. Right. Right. And there’s some people who say, oh, there’s so many of them and people will come up with all these reasons. Well, they’re addicted and you can’t really help them and this and that. And the the truth is like, homelessness isn’t something that comes in a package that is sold to everybody or given to everybody the same way. Mm-hmm. , it’s an experience that’s as unique as the user. And it’s this, it’s an experience that can be entered into and can be left. And people forget that like a person is not homeless as if they are a static experience. A person experiences homelessness. And for the same reasons that I may have lived through housing and security, I left housing at security through my own process.

(15:52):

Right? Mm-hmm. , other people have that same, and I’ve, I’ve helped many people through that process. And so it’s about helping humanize it. And there are some people who have no patience for it cuz they see it every day. Right. They don’t want it. Mm-hmm. , they don’t understand it. They think it should be the government’s problem to solve mm-hmm. , the irony is that when you say, well, the solution is for me to build more housing and they don’t want it in their backyard, I like, so you would rather the person live across the street in a tent, so you should stop calling me about that, right?

(16:17):

Yeah. Like you should, that’s when you start presenting the intersectionality of why am I building this housing? Right? Because people say, oh, you’re just ybi, you’re right. No, no, no, no, no, no. They do, they’re all over that. And I’m like, no, actually part of the solution to homelessness is an abundance of housing for people of all incomes. Right. And people get down, the people go down the rabbit hole of affordability and this and that. It’s like they make it more complicated than it should be. It’s like, I don’t, again, I don’t need to study that. Housing ends homelessness. Mm-hmm. , when there are more roofs, there are more, more places to put people. I don’t need to study that. That’s an answer.

Andrea Learned (16:48):

This is so simple and clear. I hope other local leaders take a page from John’s book. He’s helping connect his community with humanity of the person on the street. His name is Jim. He was collecting cans and recycling them to supplement his income. And when the recycling center near him was shut down, he lost access to his income stream. He doesn’t want a handout, he wants to support himself. It’s street level advocacy through storytelling.

(17:19):

Before we continue with the conversation, I wanted to tell you about a podcast I love an honorable profession, brought to you by the team at New Deal. It’s the go-to podcast for learning about the rising stars and American politics. Past guests include Pete Buttigieg, Jason Candor, Senator Alex Padilla and Mandela Barnes. These leaders share their innovative policy ideas as well as their inspiring stories about their path into public office. In a world of soundbites and attack ads, an honorable is a thoughtful conversation from the front lines of American democracy. I love finding conversations that give me hope that we can address climate change and the policy challenges of our time. Tune in to learn more and listen to an honorable Profession. Everywhere podcasts are found, John’s work is part of the Bay Area Air Quality management team led him to be selected as a member of the US sub delegation to COP 27, the United Nations Climate Conference in Egypt last fall. As someone who watched the conference unfold from afar pretty much exclusively online, I was eager to hear John’s experience from how he ended up on the delegation to his big takeaways

.

John Bauters (18:32):

The Alameda County Mayors Conference has seats on several regional boards, and one of them is the Bay Area’s Air Quality Management District. The oldest air quality district in the nation. Uh, it serves nine counties and almost 8 million people. And, uh, I was elected by the my fellow mayors in Alameda County to represent our county on that board. And, um, I’ve been elected by that board. I’m now in my second year as chair of that board for the region. And, uh, there’s 101 cities in the Bay Area and mine is the second smallest by land size. So it doesn’t matter how big of a community you’re from, it, it matters what you lead with. And in that role, we have a seat as a sub delegate to the US delegation, to the Climate Conference. The UN cop, as you noted, the convening of parties. And, um, for the last two years I’ve attended the COP on behalf of the Air District.

(19:20):

And in that role, you know, I’ve gone mostly to learn and to bring back lessons from other people. I really feel that even though our Air District is a leader globally on a lot of issues where other countries and regions are very far behind, there’s still a lot of things that others are innovating on that we could be doing here to make air quality here in the Bay Area better for everyone. Mm-hmm. . Um, so I go and I, I use that space mostly to, to learn, but also to share, uh, COP 26 in Scotland. I was part of a panel presentation on the role of redlining and community and how we use the lessons we’ve learned on community engagement. And this year we also, um, I I moderated a panel around, uh, some of the things we’re doing in the Bay Area that are innovative.

(20:06):

But this past year, uh, I’ll be very candid, I I have become concerned with cop. Um, I’ve become concerned with, uh, greenwashing and the taking over of this forum by corporate interests, um, including oil companies, which are, I believe next year going to have some people who are in partly in charge of this conference. Right. And I have a very, very significant concern about that. And so while I recognize and, and I, I, I struggle, the activist to me does not want to be part of something that I think is masquerading as climate action. Um, I also feel that there are other stakeholders and partners like myself who are there for whom I need to show up and be present. So I went this past year to Sharm El Sheik Egypt for the conference, along with vice chair of the board, Davina Hurt, and a couple members of our staff.

(20:54):

Um, we went together, we did a presentation at the cop, but I made an effort this year. My goal was to only attend panels and conferences that were put on by women and indigenous people. And I did that on purpose. One, indigenous people make up less than 5% of the people who remain in the world, yet they’re responsible and oversee the lands of 80% of our natural resources that have been untouched and are at risk by inaction on climate. Similarly, women are the demographic most likely to be negatively impacted by a climate change. And they, uh, women in third world countries, equatorial countries, are most likely to be displaced, to be resource burdened. Um, whether that means going further distances to retrieve water, whether that means trying to provide agricultural resources to their families or villages with less battling changes in natural phenomenon that will be variations in short periods of time that differ from hundreds of years of lived experience that they have as a culture.

(21:52):

Mm-hmm. , um, women will be disproportionately impacted. And it’s girls the ages of nine to 11 who are most likely to be climate refugees. Mm-hmm. . And so I felt that it was really important to center my time, again, listening to humans who are actually impacted. And, uh, I came back with a lot of new knowledge. I spent my time, um, interviewing and talking to some of those folks. And I believe that if we’re gonna really address the climate crisis, we need to listen to more women and more indigenous people because the, the commitment to science is, is, is good, but science without a cultural or human understanding of the world is not anything but an opportunity to be bought in soul and repackaged by somebody who has a monetary interest in monetizing nature. Mm-hmm.

Andrea Learned (22:35):

. And were you connected with other city leader people that are city leaders from across the US while you were at COP? And I’m kind of curious is what you’re sort of focusing on common or like when you were around your peers in city leadership and I would say probably Global North right? Or maybe US Leader City leadership. Mm-hmm. , what was your experience with your peers and are they thinking the same way you are? Do you have hope?

John Bauters (23:03):

Yeah. Um, I always keep hope . Uh, I do. I you have to if you don’t, here’s the thing. One of the very first panels I went to two years ago was a youth panel. And their entire refrain was, we have hope, and if you don’t, then there’s no hope for us. And so, uh, I do this work mostly for young people. I always felt as a young person, I was not represented, I was invisible. And I don’t do public service out of a desire to serve some interest. I have, I do it because I believe young people really are left off the table, um, left away from a seat where this is their future. And a bunch of who won’t be here 10, 30 years are deciding the futures of who have entire life ahead of them and feel like we have a moral responsibility to center our discussion around them. Mm-hmm. and, uh, they, they asked for us to have hope. So I keep hope, and I’ll tell you that my experience in Scotland was very different than my experience in Egypt.

Andrea Learned (23:57):

Oh, tell me. Yeah.

John Bauters (23:58)

:

In Scotland, I had all the, I had all the hopes and underpinnings and conversations you spoke to. I had dinner meetings with, uh, officials from Canada and the United States and parts of Europe. And I attended, uh, some of the, the venues where, uh, language to the Glasgow Declaration was being debated. And I got to watch how certain western powers opposed language and the African and Asian states united against those amendments. And it, it just was really interesting to see the global economic and, and, you know, foreign relations dynamics take effect in real time and to see where people’s interests were and what was really moving them. I didn’t have that opportunity in Egypt because in Egypt, it, the location for this event was a resort community on a peninsula in, you know, next to the Red Sea. And they put us all in gated resorts every evening.

(24:48):

Oh, so you left the co We were in the middle of a desert. They built this, this venue in the middle of a desert, and they put you on a shuttle bus to your specific resort, and you went back to it and there was no community space. Mm. There was no desire to put us in community with each other. Whereas Scotland was the opposite. Scotland was, there were protests outside. I spent a whole day just engaging people who were involved in civil action. There were no civil action forums that you could see. There was no protests allowed in Egypt. And it wasn’t a place where people who wanted to, from the public could even get, you couldn’t even get to it and stay there. You’d be in the middle of the desert. Right. So I felt it was an extremely inhospitable place to the world voice. Um, which is why I didn’t engage anything outside of what I wanted to on the inside of the venue because I felt that it had already been, um, tailored in a way that was designed to give people a very specific experience and an impression. And to me, it was contrary to what I had experienced the year before, which was very uplifting and joyful and optimistic. I felt very, I felt very depressed about my takeaways from COP 27. Yeah.

Andrea Learned (25:51):

And to think COP 28 next year is in Dubai. Oh, I’m skeptical. But were there any events at COP 27 that were actually focused on cities and what cities are doing?

John Bauters (26:02):

There were some speaking events about cities and what cities were doing. Um, it was a little show and tell Yeah. To me mm-hmm. , uh, that it, it felt like everybody came to just share what they were doing, which can be helpful. Modeling, you know, good behavior or actions that make change is, is helpful. But it, it, you know, I can probably be labeled impatient on this issue, but I feel that cities are talking a lot and not doing a lot mm-hmm. . Um, and, and, and the time for talking is over and there’s a time for action. And it’s been for a while now, and I definitely think that cities could be doing more. I’m really grateful to the Biden administration for the amount of money that’s been put out through the bipartisan infrastructure. And, um, the Inflation Reduction Act has a lot of climate action money.

(26:46):

I know a lot of us think it doesn’t have enough, but I’ll be honest, it is the single largest package of financial resources to cities and states to do these types of resiliency and sustainability projects that we’ve seen before. And so, I’m, I’m hopeful, but if you, if you’ve just followed the math of what science tells us about where we’re headed and what we’re doing, we’re not doing enough. Mm-hmm. . And so whenever I met with, you know, proposal or responses to proposals I’ve put forth at the Air District or in my own city, which is, this is just a lot. It’s too much. I actually say this is incredibly moderate compared to what it should be. That’s, again, this comes back to the same thing with homelessness. Instead of letting people say that the person across the street is a spooky, scary boogeyman, re reframe, reframing around compassion.

(27:29):

Right? Like, let’s have compassion for that person. When the leader has compassion, everybody else has to question why they’re not exercising compassion when you say that, oh my gosh, you know, uh, you know, putting in zero NOx emission standards for building furnaces and water heaters, it’s gonna be so dramatic. Well, really, we should probably be doing it to everything in the building. Right? It should really be NOx emission, everything. Mm-hmm. , uh, and people find like, then you want radical, I can show you what radical is like that’s, you know, but it’s still not gonna be enough if we don’t take action. So that’s, that’s kind of how I felt. I felt like I heard a lot of things from folks, but it felt like a lot of what people were presenting was, this is what we’re working on. And what I wanna see is what if people accomplish? What are we actually finishing?

Andrea Learned (28:12):

What are we actually finishing? People go to these climate conferences and say, we pledge this or that, and then they show up next year and say, we’ve adjusted our pledge. Ugh. I share John’s restlessness for action and Solutions-Oriented impact. We had such a great conversation and it doesn’t stop here. Stay tuned for part two airing next week when we get into biking, public safety and infrastructure. Identifying, building and leveraging your leadership is something few may feel prepared to do, but climate influence can’t wait. If your organization is ready to make the shift, reach out to me. I’d love to help. Find me@www.andrealearned.com. I’m also easy to find on Twitter until it is no more. And LinkedIn. Living Change is produced by Larj Media. That’s L A R J Media. Until next time, pedal safely.