Climate on Tap: Stories of Remembrance & Restoration

Day 4: Repair + Resource

September 01, 2022 Alison Corwin, Ashleigh Gardere and Flozell Daniels
Climate on Tap: Stories of Remembrance & Restoration
Day 4: Repair + Resource
Show Notes Transcript

Repair acknowledges the harms that extractive systems and corporate agendas have created. We commit to repairing the relationships we have with each other in our movements. We demand that repair starts with those most harmed historically and currently. 

Reparations now. 
Abolition in our lifetime.
Resource the work.

Guest Speakers:
Alison Corwin // Waverley Street Foundation
Ashleigh Gardere // PolicyLink
Flozell Daniels // CEO & President, Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation

Introduction by:
Colette Pichon Battle // Vision & Initiatives Partner, Taproot Earth

Tap into RECLAIM + RESOURCE by…
Repairing our relationships starts with us.  To do so we need breath to heal and move.  We invite you to tune into a meditation, sink into your breath. What guides you in this work? How and where does your breath guide you. 

Connect with us @taprootearth on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook

Day four, Repair and Resource. This idea of wealth transfer has to be something that philanthropy and other institutions think about. Are we transferring wealth to people who don't have it and from whom it has been taken? We made it to day four of Climate On Tap, Rituals of Remembrance and Restoration. Today's episode is a special one. We've assembled a crew of some of the most courageous supporters of our work. They individually and collectively engage institutions, offering a framework of how philanthropic and community development leaders can use their power to prioritize equity and center the front lines. Repair acknowledges the harm that extractive systems and corporate agendas have created on our communities. We commit to repairing the relationships we have with each other in our movements. We demand that repair starts with those most harmed historically and currently. Reparations now. Abolition in our lifetime. Resource the work. Passing the mic to Alison Corwin of Waverley Street Foundation, Ashleigh Gardere of PolicyLink, and Flozell Daniels of Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation. My relationship with the Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy dates back to the immediate days after Katrina when really, thousands of people across the state and region and the world, really, if you think about all of our allies and supporters, were assembling to imagine and reimagine the future that had to be really framed from our imagination, and from our memories and experiences. And GCCLP, the leadership of Colette Pichon Battle, and the folks affiliated with the organization were immediately on the ground with both the wisdom and the experience, the having come from the ground and the space themselves, and Colette having walked on both sides of the street, really understanding the techical elements of law, and policy, and practice, and leadership, matched with the wisdom and experience, and community understanding, was really one of, what I believe, one of the sort of magical moments of what we call the post-Katrina recovery. They were a partner in Foundation for Louisiana, then the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation's Equity and Inclusion Campaign, and were mission critical in helping us organize, helping people across Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama organize themselves and develop their own priorities. And philanthropy was lucky enough to resource and support by way of making sure that federal messaging and policy was matching what people know they needed not only for an efficacious recovery, but for an equitable recovery, one that really understood the challenges that hit the shores of Louisiana and the Gulf Coast long before Katrina did. First of all, Flozell, thank you for reminding. I think the first time I had the privilege to engage with GCCLP was through a Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation convening, and often through the Foundation for Louisiana in those rooms, in those spaces post-Katrina. And every single time, it was a conversation about a system's redesign, and a conversation about values and standards of equity as we brought our best thinking to that design work. So those would be the first times in the fog of what was that first five years post-Katrina, and then obviously into several conversations, regional conversations, about climate and the leadership that was required to move that work forward, which then allows me to then fast forward to the right-now times, in my role at PolicyLink, I'm honored to be able to work with the GCCLP team as they co-chair our National Water Equity and Climate Resilience Caucus. That is an organization of nearly 100 organizations around the country and national and local grassroots leaders who are really focused on water equity. And the partnership in the co-chairing is both about how do we bring, well really how we shape federal policy, state legislation, and local rulemaking. What really GCCLP's push has been about community voice and power in the shaping of those priorities and so, consistent from our time together. Colette Pichon Battle, in her, how she just exists as one of the most powerful leaders in our national ecosystem, also agreed to serve as a part of an early table that really helped to shape policy and thinking about our next generation of work, as we thought about how to level up our overall strategy, not just around policy interventions, but also what it would actually take to win on equity in this nation. So when we were building a table of 25 leaders, Colette had to be a part of that conversation. And then the final thing I want to offer is how Colette puts all of us, and GCCLP puts all of us, to work. Colette chairs the Equity Working Group of Louisiana's Climate Task Force, immediately called and said,"We need a national voice to help set context for our work and to really help push this conversation that Louisiana is having." And so that has been our latest iteration of our work together and honored by all of them. I love this conversation. I love sort of thinking back to what brought us into GCCLP and into this work. So for me, I came along a little bit later. I think it was about 2015 when I first met Colette and was introduced to GCCLP. And the way that that happened was through Anthony Giancatarino. So I'm a New Yorker, I'm not from Louisiana, I don't have roots there, and will forever be learning from the people that call Louisiana home. And I think, you know, Anthony and I were up in New York and we had been building together for a couple of years at that point. I was still sort of, this was 2015 when I met Colette, so I was still sort of new-ish to philanthropy in a funding role, which is not the world that I'd come from. And I landed at an organization which had a long sort of trajectory and history in working with folks in Louisiana. And so I knew I had a lot to learn. And so I was with Anthony. We were actually up in Buffalo, New York, at a CommonBound convening, and he said, "Oh, well, if you're working on climate and you're trying to be in Louisiana and learn, you have to meet one of the boldest climate leaders we've ever seen. And that's Colette Pichon Battle." And I will never forget that first conversation we had sitting on some bleachers at Buffalo State, and I immediately just knew that this was someone I needed to follow, and learn from, and whose trust I wanted to earn. We've been working together ever since for the last seven, eight years, and really just following her leadership all over the globe, wherever her work has taken her wherever she's been called to, but always rooted back in Louisiana. So it's been a privilege and an honor to then be able to spend real time, and learn, and follow her lead. And other leaders in Louisiana, like Flozell and Ashleigh. So, it's been beautiful. I was thinking, Ashleigh, about your— you were telling the part of the story about the Climate Initiative Task Force, right. So after years of people pushing for an opportunity to create a climate action plan that would give us a chance to fight for some of the more at-scale policies, it really was GCCLP who really brought the energy to say, and as much as this conversation is centered around repair, Colette and the team really bought this sort of of definition of repair into that conversation. It really was a way of saying,"Yes, this is emissions and all of the technical, science-based climate issues that needed to be dealt with, but this is about people first. And this is about all of the things that have been done to the people of Louisiana, the people of the Gulf Coast, the people of the world. And this is our chance in this little corner of the world to think about what it means to repair that." So there was a lot of work put into pushing back on the governor's office, pushing back on legislators, and business interests, and others who wanted a very narrow discussion about climate action that didn't include repair, that didn't include the importance of environmental justice, and understanding from people, what had been done to them, and how we can unwind some of those things and make sure that we weren't doing harm going forward. That was such an important moment, and there's so many things in that climate action plan. It is an imperfect plan to be certain, but there's so many things that would not have been included, but for GCCLP's leadership, both on the task force itself, but also in the organizing community to inform the work of the task force, which was as important. That is one of the things I wanted to come back to, Flozell. This notion that repair also has to be brought forward in process too. And so whether it is the Climate Task Force, a standard practice of how do GCCLP has moved over these years, is recognizing that part of repair is that we shift power and who's at the decision making tables and who actually, actually not just the decision making, but the accountability tables too. And that that's part of part of a prepared framework that I think GCCLP continues to bring to the field. So let me ask, for all of us, we're either in philanthropy, or have been, and Ashleigh, you're in this national policy space now, How are you defining repair? Who and what entities need to be called forward? What is your framework? So at PolicyLink, we right now, are building a reckoning, repair, and transformation framework that really guides our place-based work. And it recognizes that the built environment in the United States exists as a geographic manifestation of historically racist and oppressive policies and power structures. And so in this moment, we really are recognizing that spatial injustice in places is directly linked to capital investment in the built environment for the production of wealth, right? So whether it's roads, factories, wharves, whatever we can think of, the infrastructure has really been in service to wealth production, regardless of the harm to people in place. And so as a result, generations of Black folks, Indigenous folks, people of color in the United States, have lived in the shadow of smokestacks, elevated expressways. And so then all of us really have suffered from asthma, from chronic pulmonary disease. We've been displaced and dispossessed. We've lost intergenerational wealth to redlining. And witnessed the demise of really once thriving communities caused by the development of that same infrastructure, those roadways, the bridges, the airports, our rail lines in the interest of commerce. And here in New Orleans, the construction of the I-10 expressway really is just one of those visible examples of this reality. So for us, repair is more than just mitigating the harms of past policies and investments. It really is, first, about a reckoning and acknowledgment of the racialized harm to people and the places that we live in. And then from that reckoning should come what we really are framing as spatial reparations, and transformation of the places where the 100 million economically insecure folks in America, particularly those that are facing the burdens of structural racism, really live, work, learn, play, and worship. The negative and the intergenerational impact of environmental racism, and what we call "spatial segregation" based on race and class is well documented. We all know it. So then for us, repair are the policies and practices that do a couple things. They elevate redress of place-based inequity. They shift and advance policy and practice from mitigation to repair. And then ultimately they promote transformation in the built environment where the 100 million live so that all people are thriving, specifically those that really are enduring the burden of structural racism. So we're really taking—you hear me saying that we're taking a frame around spatial repair. I love that. I really do appreciate your framework around that. One thing I might add to it,'cause there's hardly anything to add to it, what you said is so amazing, but I think there's also this idea of harm that's been done. One of the conversations I had recently, the Funders Forum on Oil and Gas met in New York last month, we were talking about the physical harm and the danger of being an activist in this work. So we were talking about the role of funders needing to step up and resource the security and safety work for people. And so GCCLP and others have also been in that space for years, reminding us that both locally in this space as well as across the globe, corporations and governments have been physically harming people, harming their economies on purpose, like there's a sense of security and safety that has to be baked into this idea of repair and how we define repair. What it means to keep people safe from a going forward perspective. And, you know, I think there have to be tangible financial reparations for this kind of demonstrative harm. And as you put it, Ashleigh, at-scale policy change and practices to stop current and future harm. But the discussion really is pushing in that direction. Obviously global governments, the public sector, the private sector plays an important role in that. But philanthropy and think tanks also have to do this reckoning that PolicyLink is talking about and that GCCLP has been saying for years based on false promises, false solutions, false narratives that are being set forth by, unfortunately, some of our colleagues in the field. And it's really been great to have GCCLP and others who are coming from the ground to say,"Make sure that you're not only following what you think is a science, but also follow the people that you're supposed to be serving." That's where some of this wisdom really exists from, from a repair perspective. And I think, Ashleigh, as you rightly called out, talking about repair, being about shifting power largely and talking about not just acknowledgment, which I think you also said reckoning, but that accountability. And for me, sort of with my funder identity, one thing that's very clear to me about repair is that it is not my place to name what repair looks like. And so in working with folks and following folks, to your point Flozell, I always think about the folks who've been most harmed by whatever issue it is that you're working on. Those are the folks that get to name what repair is, feels like, is an action for them, for their communities. And so even if it doesn't make sense to me or my lived experiences, that's not for me to sort of have a judgment about or an opinion about. It's for those folks who've been most harmed to name what repair is. And so that's just one guiding kind of practice that I think about as a funder, and that really having those honest conversations, not just acknowledging, but thinking about what are the actions that move us towards accountability and what role has been played in creating, perpetuating, enabling, covering up decisions that have been either intentionally or unintentionally made, right, for the outcomes we're talking about and how to be accountable for that. The other thing I'm really clear about is that repair is sometimes rooted in self-interest. And, you know, for those that are trying to take actions and acknowledge and be accountable, and so I'm clear that those repairs can't be in service of self-interest, which is where I think the shift in power comes in, right. It's not for someone's own legacy or financial gain so that they can continue to benefit while others are being harmed. And so that kind of brings me back to why I think it's important for those harmed to name what repair looks like, because otherwise we may unintentionally continue the cycle of perpetuating that harm and not actually getting to the repair. Alison, it sounds like you're talking about the billions of dollars, right, that we saw move in response to Mr. George Floyd's murder. And we can't even— what was the framework, and who informed, right, like that's what I'm reminded of when I hear your wise counsel. It's actually an excellent example because now we're seeing that actually most of those commitments didn't actually move, right. And people can hardly tell where they moved and under what circumstances. And so it's instructive as we think about this repair. And I think Alison's point is spot on because so much of what is needed for the kind of change that we're looking—this transformation, Ashleigh, that you talked about, is trust. And there will be no trust. Either between institutions, or quite frankly, between people in movement space, which is another important element of this. Without the kind of repair, and acknowledgment, and transparency, and honesty that it takes to be able to have the relationships necessary. Someone wrote some years ago,"Relationships are the infrastructure of the South." I wouldn't think that's any different anywhere in the world. So it's a really important part, I think, of how Foundation for Louisiana and other philanthropies have been thinking about, how do we fund the future if we are imagining and reimagining a different kind of future for ourselves? A part of that funding has to be not only at the grassroots level, not only unrestricted, but actively seeking out those who have been not only on the front lines, but who have been demonstrably harmed so they can have the resources, not just financial, but the time resources to heal and be healed, to be in space with each other, to reimagine a way of being with each other going forward. So much of the leadership that we've seen and have been able to follow from GCCLP and others has been about what are we learning from communities that are making space, that are slowing down so they can speed up? My pal always tells me that. It makes a ton of sense to be able to make sure that we're moving those resources in a way that honors that, and that we're doing so in scale. This idea of wealth transfer has to be something that philanthropy and other institutions think about. That's the best measure of whether we're doing reparative work— are we transferring wealth to people who don't have it and from whom it has been taken. And if we're not doing that, we're not really doing the work. One of the things that's been so inspiring to me about GCCLP's shift to this next level as Taproot Earth is, is the scaling and being clear about what's the scale that our interventions have to be at in order to matter. And so just the frame, a global frame that really meets the urgency of this moment and certainly over the next eight years is a call and a charge, really, to all of us at PolicyLink. Our frame has really shifted again from those incremental policy interventions to really holding the 100 million folks in America who are economically insecure. That's a third of people who live here. You know, we accept Taproot Earth's invitation to really level up.'Cause that's the invitation of this moment. And I think if I wanted to just— if I have permission to extend that invitation, to anyone who's listening, and really honor Taproot Earth for calling us to this new scale. Scale can mean a lot of different things. And I want to speak to this opportunity around a scaling of resources that Flozell and Ashleigh were just speaking to, but also say that the way in which I've seen GCCLP move with community for so long in scale has also been about translocal work, or connecting people in place and geographies that are experiencing similar conditions and fights in other places and kind of unifying folks and building the bigger "we" in the bigger collective. That to me is scale also, in a different way than what we were just discussing but not unrelated, and— I kinda can't help myself as a funder, to say when we talk about the scale of resources and what we're being called and invited into by Taproot Earth, that I was sort of speaking to following folks before and part of following them as sitting in a funder role with that privilege means you're not setting the strategy, right? To Flozell's point, trust. You're building trust with folks who will let you in and tell you what the strategies are, and have been for a very long time. Those visions, dreams, and the strategies that have been moved translocally for many, many, many decades and longer than that, right. And so following that, trusting that to Flozell's point will lead us to, I think, that bigger scale of resources that Taproot Earth is calling on us to show up for. And I think when you learn alongside folks, and as a funder, you don't pull back when conditions shift because they're going to shift almost daily at this point, right, where things don't go as planned. Mistakes are going to be made, right? How do you create room to continue to follow these leaders like Colette and so many others, to have them continue to create, and breathe, and dream? And it means there aren't punitive measures by funders if it doesn't go on the timeline that you had anticipated, or in the sequencing, or the pacing, or whatever it was that you sort of had in mind. That's where the trust to me comes in, and I don't think it does anyone any good, any of us, to have our frontline leaders really spending their time figuring out where that next dollar is going to come from to resource the beautiful work that they're moving. It's a distraction, quite frankly. And when I think about that as a distraction, you know, it's part of a larger system of that extraction, and colonialism, and capitalism. And because if we're not producing outcomes in the way that the system intends, and your efforts, your body are not being used in service of the system for output and production— And so anyway, that's my way of saying as a funder, I think you have to trust and follow folks at the pace at which the work is moving, because otherwise, again, we're unintentionally doing harm and feeding into a system that is about replicating production for production sake so that only a few are going to benefit economically and otherwise from the work being produced. Right? I think you all are really on an important thread. If you think about the connection between this kind of reparations and abolition, I know at Foundation for Louisiana, we talk about practicing freedom work, and I'll be honest with you, when we came to that sort of way of contextualizing the work, someone said,"What does that mean? How do you—where are your measurables," right?"How do you frame that inside of your theory of—" you know all the stuff that we do.[laughter] And we said to them, we learned early on from people like Ambassador James Joseph, and Linetta Gilbert, and others that this is generational work. This goes to your point, Alison, about not only scale, but the time, and the patience, and the respect we must have for the practitioners of the work, and especially as funders, as policy leaders, and think tanks, and government leaders, and others of us with power, there has to be respect and patience. Because there's no evidence in modern history, we could just talk about US history, which is the track that I have taken. But every time movement work significantly transform the lives of people, it took a generation or two to begin to see the bubbling up of the opportunity. We have to trust that work. Whether it's labor movements, whether it's women's suffrage, whether it's civil rights, right, whether it's Stonewall and LGBTQ— we look at all the evidence we have. So there's no reason for us to believe in this climate and environmental movement work, that something magical is going to transform tomorrow. When it took hundreds of years to poison the land, the water, the people and all the places. To undermine the economies of communities on purpose and by design, to make sure that we trap people inside of the oil and gas, and chemical refinery economy, if I could just speak about Louisiana. It was a very purposeful trapping. We currently see it. Legislatures deciding not to support renewable energy, even though all the evidence says that's where we're going, but they're actively pushing back on it. I think there's something really important about establishing timelines that are responsive to the reality of how long it takes to actually move this work, and how we should respect people with both our funding and our practices, accordingly. This conversation about timeline brings forward to me this notion of, transformative solidarity is how we describe it at PolicyLink, and when I think about the urgency that Taproot Earth has laid out, that there's going to be a real push in these next eight years, right, to shift behavior in the moment that it even still matters, right, because the planet is on the line. And so that urgent call and a real clarity about, so we're going to be leaning all the way in, in this time frame then meets up. At PolicyLink, our frame is about this generation. So the next 20 years. So when, you know, that is what calls me to think about transformative solidarity. So how are we aligned and connected enough to make sure that we are standing with and for Taproot Earth and the partners who are really moving with urgency in this moment within having that progress to inform the generational work and the structural change that we're after over the next 20 years, those things go together. Right? And again, just for our listening audience, I still see it as an invitation, especially in the noise and the chaos of this moment in our nation's history, to not be distracted, but instead to really accept this invitation to redesign our nation. That's how I experience it, right. And that these timelines, and when we put them next to each other, especially around shared result, it's no longer just transformative solidarity. But the outcomes that we'll achieve together through that alignment, quite frankly, it's the only way we can win. You know, I'm thinking about the experience that all of us have with the role of capitalism in this discussion about climate and repair, and the challenges inherent in a country like the United States, but globally, as Taproot Earth is really, to your point Ashleigh, pushing us on, we have to completely reimagine it seems, what that means. You talked about transformative solidarity. I'll be stealing, Ashleigh, all of your terms, I just want you to know.[laughter] I'll be giving you credit, but—[laughter] And so this, you know we've been thinking a lot about what does it mean to start shifting the way we define what the economy looks like in some of these discussions? Because it's such a throughline. You know, we went to COP 21 with Colette and GCCLP back in the day. We had global roundtable discussions both here in Louisiana and in Italy. Colette was a critical part of that, with GCCLP. And in all those ways we've learned that when you talk to community, they want to know, "Okay, but what does this mean for my ability to raise my kids, to take care, to pay for college, to retire, to pay my bills," and we have to have answers. I think this is such an exciting moment for us, in this moment that we're thinking about shared economies, and co-ops, the reimagining of what should be public versus private, and how community actually gets to own the places that create energy, the way that we invest in future investments and things of that nature. I'd love to hear what you all are thinking about the connection between capitalism, the challenges, but also like, what's the opportunity for us to reframe economies so that the general public, so that all of our neighbors can really be on this journey with us in a way that feels good. The first thing that comes to mind is, you know, when we say "the economy," it invokes the, you know, the "Wizard of Oz," right? Like that there's just this magical[laughter] wizard behind the curtain and we have no control, right. And so one way in which we're really starting to think about this is our economy, because there's no such thing as private money. Government makes money and decides where it goes. Right. If we had any disillusion about that, the COVID pandemic really helped us to see that the government can literally direct money wherever it wants to, right. If it's to checks to individuals, which we said was impossible, you know, when folks were thinking about universal basic income. Like, all of it is possible'cause it's our economy. I think we start from that place, and then when we get clear about our role as owners, it then means—this comes back to this conversation we were having earlier about them leveling up, the interventions. So I haven't exact—'cause I'm not, I want to just acknowledge, I'm not a climate expert, so I gotta be, I gotta stay in my lane here. But the example that I use when I think through the frame of capitalism is like, "what if?" And I'm going to critique my own work from earlier in my career. What if we didn't just accept the rules of the game as handed to us, and think only through the lens of, like, individual local hire policies one jurisdiction at a time, right? Or aggressive, inclusive procurement policies, individual jurisdictions, or state by state. That's important work. I don't want it to be misunderstood. It is very important work. If we thought about this economy as our own, we could also look up to the role of the Federal Reserve Bank itself. Right? That's our institution. And so it's not just about CRA, and Community Reinvestment Act resources that get deployed to banks. We could think about how we measure the success of the Federal Reserve. Is it enough to year over year just measure growth, and more growth, and more growth, which we know is harmful,'cause somebody is losing every time, and maybe change the measure to poverty reduction. That's market shaping, that's market shifting. It changes how the banks have to move, what they're rewarded for, how they're incentivized. And that's not just with, you know, I'm offering this example, not just around homeownership and housing, but it would directly impact climate, too, right? Because now it's not just enough to show more growth that harms people and that ends up extracting from our communities, but instead really requires folks to center for, again, for us, the 100 million folks who are economically insecure, and have the institutions' outcomes be directly linked to the outcomes of people, which is what we were talking about earlier. I just want to build on, Ashleigh, you just sparked a thought for me because I think part of what I'm taking away from your brilliance is how do we, in building new things, not replicate the current systems of harm? And so I'm just sort of sitting with that. And part of what I think about when we think about solutions and inside this larger, first of all, inside this larger conversation about climate reparations, which is, you know, the money that's due to folks who've been most impacted, from the folks who've caused the most harm. And globally, when we're talking, Global North owes the Global South those resources and that money, but also debt cancelation. So just thinking about not reinforcing, right, this cycle, where does that come into the conversation? And the other thought that you've really sparked for me is a framework that I've been so fortunate to learn from so many, largely across the US, but globally, this just transition frame, which really talks about, you know, stopping the bad and all the fights that we know folks have been on the front lines of for a very long time. Stopping the bad, I think changing the rules, which is what you were just speaking to, Ashleigh, and building the new. And it really has to be all three. And in that, in the changing the rules and the building the new, what so many folks have told me and taught me is about governance. And a lot of the boldest leaders have said,"If we're not prepared to govern, we're not prepared to win." And I think about all of the hyperlocal work that goes into governance. I think electric co-ops are such a great example of that. Folks who are owners, right, of these energy systems and may not even know that because it's intentionally being kept from them, that information. That's just one example of so many. And I just have to give a shout out to participatory budgeting,'cause I think when we think about how decisions are made, Ashleigh, to your point about the public dollars and the way in which the government, you know, through COVID and so many other examples have— has decided who's worthy and how the money moves. That participatory budgeting for me is just one of many tools, right, as we think about governance and resource flow strategy. So I just wanted to add that in as we talk about, sort of, climate justice and climate reparations, it feels like an important solution, important component of a larger set of solutions. Wow, I really love that. And you both are making me think about the importance of remembrance and memory. Right. So to your point, your earlier point, Alison, about how hyperlocal and also translocal this work is, what you find in common no matter where in the world you are doing this work, people are on the ground, telling stories of old, they are telling the actual truth about how they once lived, and how they're not living better. They're living worse in how they live. And so I think, you know, it makes me think also also about this moment where—and Ashleigh, where for the first time, not only is the economy bad, however one wants to define that. Not only do we have the wrong measures, right, GDP versus Gini coefficients, you know, get into the nerdy stuff. But for the first time in plain language, this country is not mobile the way it once was. Even as inequitable as it's always been, there was at least a little bit of mobility from generation, one generation to the next. The data is now telling us that nobody except the very, you know, 0.1% of the 1% is actually upwardly mobile and able to move from one generation to the next in a way that makes sense. So it makes me think there's something really important about the connection between memory, and narratives, and being able to tell more truthful and provocative, not only thought provoking, but provoking people to action by way of understanding what's actually happening to us, right. And one of the narratives I hear in Louisiana, General Russell Lowery says this all the time. He says, "You know, they've been telling us that these jobs are here for us locally, but when I drive down to the refinery or the oil and gas place, that no goddamn people from Louisiana are in the parking lot," that's a hyperlocal thing, but it's one small example of how the whole story has been a lie. And I think there's something important about investing in narratives that really help people understand what we're dealing with as well. Absolutely. It's a part of the organizing strategy. It feels like Taproot Earth is taking that up and we are absolutely a committed partner to that. We need new tools. One that we're testing is really polling around these issues of the American public. Those people who agree with us, we got about 17% with us. And so to this point about narrative, that we have to have a strategy for the other 83% who are not. What's the language, what's the message that, you know, for the folks who are just explicitly racist, we don't got 'em. But for the folks who are persuadable, that that's got to be a part of our strategy, the narrative work plays a part in us kind of changing hearts and minds. You know, I think so much of what we've learned, to your point about new tools, we're wired to make decisions from a fear perspective. So I think there's something really amazing about what Taproot Earth is calling us in too, to remind us that there is abundance and that we get to be brave and courageous. We don't have to be scared, as you put it Ashleigh, this is ours. It belongs to us. And we really get to stand inside of that. So there really is an opportunity and it's something I am thinking about in my own leadership capacity. It is something I'm dreaming about for all of us in our institutional capacities. And I'm so glad that Taproot Earth has created this frame that really is important from a climate perspective, but quite candidly, it's important from a life perspective and all of the things that we get to do, and how we get to stand up in this space. Thank you Alison, Ashleigh and Flozell. Tap into repair and resource by starting with yourself. To do so, we need to breathe, and heal, and move. We invite you to tune into a meditation. Tap into your breath. What guides you in this work? How and where does your breath guide you? And connect with us on Taproot Earth on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook using the hashtag #ClimateOnTap. There's still time to share Climate On Tap with your people. Send them this episode or invite them to sign up for the series.