 Thank you Sarah and thank you Fran Rosenfeld. Thanks so much everyone for coming and I also want to thank Susan Henshaw-Jones, who I know is not here at the museum this evening, but really for transforming this institution, which is not only beautiful, but really a center I think for discussion for all New Workers to think about all that is New York the challenges and opportunities past present and future. I work as Sarah mentioned at New America, which is a non-profit, non-partisan think tank, and my work specifically focuses on social entrepreneurship and innovation and Fran and Sarah and I've been conspiring for a while as to how we could join forces on the issues of activism and really thinking about how activists of all stripes have changed over time from all sectors, so the public sector, the civic sector, and also for-profit entrepreneurs. So I think there's no better partnership for a discussion like this tonight and no better topic. I think environmental activism and environmental justice and I think the intersection of a whole range of environmental and economic issues. So, so thank you and thank you panelists. I think I won't we've had some great introductions. I think maybe I'll just kick it off. I'd love for each of you to discuss a little bit about how you think of yourself as an environmental activist, how you think of yourself as someone who works for economic justice and really how you came to this work. So Peggy, I'd love to start with you. If that's okay, I'm not coincidental. You're sitting to my left. Thanks. It's great to be here this evening with so many of my fellow activists. I got started in this work after becoming the Democratic district leader in West Harlem. And while I was organizing that campaign and reaching out for volunteers, my neighbors came to me and said, you know, there's a sewage treatment plant at 138th Street that's going to be opening and we need you to get us jobs there. And so I set out with my co-leader Chuck Sutton at the time and we went on a lot of radio shows and we recruited people and we actually got 30 people hired there. But of course a couple of months later, the plant actually began operating and we realized that it was spewing emissions and odors that were making people sick. Everyone along Riverside Drive was complaining, sending their kids, you know, away for the weekend because the air quality was so bad and many of those children had asthma, which it was exacerbating. And so we began an eight-year organizing campaign. Mayor Koch was the mayor at that time. He said, oh, this was a state-of-the-art facility. There's no problem. You and State Senator Franz Leichter must be imagining all of this. Let me know the next time you smell something. You know, I'll get on my car and go up there and we'll check it out. Well, after hundreds of people coming out monthly for eight years and really self-educating themselves about the operations of this plant, how it should be better maintained. We were able to hire Barry Comner, the noted environmentalist who passed away last year, to do a study and a report on the operations of the plant, which really gave us data and facts, to really begin to hold the city accountable. And so that was our first major organizing campaign. And when you begin to take a look at your community and see these kinds of challenges, it really begins to open your eyes. And so we really began to look around the community and we realized that we also housed over one-third of the entire diesel bus fleet for New York City in Uptown neighborhoods. And about the same time, this was the late 80s, we began to reach out to researchers at Columbia School of Public Health. And we said, you know, could you tell us if there are more emergency room visits coming from these zip codes that are near the plant? And then you know how researchers are. It takes a couple of years to do the studies. But we got a call a couple years later. From a physician at Harlem Hospital, he said, you'll never guess what. We've just found that the incidence of asthma in Harlem is three times that of any other community in New York City. And that really began our foundational priority issues around air quality and negative health outcomes for children. And so those are the seminal issues we began working on, strong campaigns. I mean, the campaign against the MTA lasted for 18 years, 18 long years. You really have to be committed to persevere because that's a public authority that really isn't used to dealing with the community. And just to let you know that last October, we had a large celebration with the MTA because they opened the first green bus depot in the country. And this was done with a community task force we coordinated for six long years to get the MTA to build green, to build to LEED's rating, to have a green roof, to ensure that every bus was inside the depot. So it was a huge win for the community. And again, we now have another 20 to 25 residents who are totally self-educated, understand these issues, and are empowered to work on a whole range of other environmental activism in their communities. So we have really taken the model of community organizing and public policy. So we work to integrate community residents into helping to develop and advocate for public policy changes. As a result, we have opened a Washington office two years ago, working on federal policy around air quality and climate change. And I'll just end by saying our current project is working, one of our current projects, is working on climate resilience planning for Northern Manhattan. And so we have been running something called Serious Games, and we've hired a facilitator who is well versed in game theory, and we are developing numbers of scenarios for East-West Central Harlem and Washington Heights. And we are convening those neighborhoods to understand the scenarios they could be confronted to, to understand the responses they would have in an urgent crisis. And then begin to develop solution sets. And we've also developed a stakeholder group of city agencies and the Department of Health who will be meeting with us to kind of ground truth and respond to the solution sets we come up with. And we will then be working over the next three years to implement those recommendations. So that is the kind of activism and the model that we are employing here in Northern Manhattan that really impacts city policy, state, and federal policy as well. So Enterprise is a national affordable housing organization, and we work basically in three ways. One is that we capital to affordable housing projects. We work on policies that enable the development and preservation of affordable housing, both nationally through our policy team based in D.C. as well as in our 10 local markets. So here in New York we have a local policy effort that focuses on the city and the state. And then through what we call solutions, which is the piece that I primarily work in. And by solutions what we mean is that basically we do pilot programs. So we do various kinds of pilot programs that usually last between two to five years. And what we're looking to do by doing the pilot programs in our solutions team is to identify the best practices that work and then use our capital platform and our policy work to scale up those learnings. And so when I came to Enterprise, I came to Enterprise as the first staff person to work on sustainability issues in our New York office. And the approach that we've taken around sustainability since the launch of our sustainability initiatives in 2004 is one that's moving from basically helping the people who are already at the leading edge of the industry do better to really figuring out ways to make the best practices, common practices in the field. So for example, when we worked on our national green communities criteria, which has been adopted by 22 cities and states as part of the way that they give out affordable housing funding, we started off by basically working with just a handful of developers from various places around the country who were already committed to adopting green building practices. And then we used partnerships with public sector agencies to first incentivize. So for example, here in New York, the last RFPs that went out for the Melrose North urban renewal area, for example, were the first places where Enterprise provided sort of a tag-along, I'd say, or as a right grant that encouraged people to develop those sites sustainably. And then the next step after that was really taking the experiences of the local developers and basically requiring a green standard as part of all of the affordable housing that gets developed here in New York. So the current state of the commitment on the affordable housing sector around sustainability is that if you're building a city-funded affordable housing project that's new construction or substantial rehabilitation, then you have to meet a green building standard that's a high performance standard. And then along with the announcement of the One City built a last plan, HPD, our housing agency, has made a commitment, which it's now working to put on the ground that all of the preservation programs that the city has will also now require green commitments. So over the course of basically 10 years, the New York City has gone from having an interest in aligning sustainability in affordable housing to essentially requiring it across the board as of basically this year. So I think that that's probably a first among cities in the country. And certainly a real testament not only to the work of activists, but also the appetite that the affordable housing developers have had to really be responsive to situations like the asthma situation in northern Manhattan and the Bronx where the housing wasn't there just to provide a roof over or shelter over people's heads, but also acknowledging that the indoor environmental quality and the transit access and all of those things also really matter for residents. So on a personal note, I actually am, first of all, deeply honored to share the stage with activists, but also kind of taken aback a little in being on a panel of activists because in my mind, I'm just a recovering computer programmer and my first professional experiences were during the first.com boom. And for me, wanting to work on environmental issues really only came about when I recognized that sort of the urban-ness of the environmental issues. And so when I was growing up, I really thought of environmentalism as being conservation. And so having had sort of half of a career in programming, I came to a point where I was thinking about climate change as being one of the generational problems today. And I wanted to engage in it and I didn't want to engage in it through conservation. I wanted it to be meaningful for the experiences I've had as being sort of a city girl. And so once I recognized the tie between what we do in cities and the impacts that it has, and that's really when I realized that there was a role that I could play even being a recovering computer programmer. But I would say that all of the work that we do at Enterprise is really built on a foundation of community development and community activism. Enterprise has been working in New York for, I think, going on 28 years and the office has grown up and the activities that we've been engaged in have grown up with the community development field. And I have deep respect for community organizing, community organizers and having that strong tie to the needs of the community and the will of the community as expressed through community development organizations and community environmental organizations. I think that's really one of the hallmarks that distinguishes the way that we produce affordable housing here in this country from how affordable housing gets produced in other places. And there are any number of ways that you can structure affordable housing programs and the fact that we do it in the way that we do it is not only a legacy of how the affordable housing community came about through a local response to widespread this investment, but it's really, I think, a core strength in the way that we do affordable housing here. So something that I think we'll need to be thinking a lot about in the coming years as we're facing, I think, probably an inflection point in the industry where many of the organizations that have been really active in this sector are looking at their 30th and 40th anniversaries, the founding board members, the founders of the organizations are transitioning to other things. And frankly, we look at the portfolio owners of affordable housing and many of them have portfolios that are too small to be really economically efficient. And, you know, and we're at a point where we really need to reinvest in those housing portfolios to preserve them. So I think there's a big challenge ahead of us, not only an environmental one, but one of preserving the affordable housing wins that we've had to date. And I think that these two things, the environmental challenges and the preservation of affordable housing are really linked. One of the reasons we asked everyone to reflect a little, both on their personal commitments and evolutions as environmentalists and also professionals, because I think the recovering computer programming profile is reminding us we're moving down the millennial spectrum here and actually really see some interesting generational shifts. So thank you for including your own personal tales. And Ashley, if we can keep going with you. So, OK, so I'm Ashley White, I said before, and I'm a recent graduate of Green City Forest and I'm a current intern at the Department of Environmental Protection. So Green City Forest is an AmeriCorps program and they focus on energy efficiency and just overall sustainability. So I was assigned to the the 11th month team and our main curriculum was focused around urban agriculture. And so we we farmed on one acre land in Red Hook houses. They're a NYCHA development in Brooklyn. And so Red Hook is considered a food desert. They also have high rates of diabetes, obesity and asthma. And also before it was a farm, it was just an empty area. And there was a lot of crime and gang activity there. And it wasn't a safe place for like, you know, children to run about. The neighbors and residents, they weren't really engaging with each other. So the farm started in 2013. And then the second season is the season I was a part of with my other teammates. And since the farm has been launched, we harvested. We grew and harvested 3.6 tons of food for Red Hook residents. And we also did I was a workshop coordinator. So I did like cooking demos and, you know, my plate to help them, you know, eat, eat better, show them better ways to to cook the crops that we were giving them. We also the residents volunteered with us when we first arrived. The residents, they were really to themselves. They were, you know, in there, they would just walk by. They were next question. So we had to, like, get in their face, like, hi, we're here. This farm is for you guys. So and eventually, the more that they came out, they we we told them, like, we're just doing the work. But this farm is for you all. It's for your community. And eventually they would, you know, they took pride in it. They were like, hey, I grew these tomatoes. I grew these cucumbers. And, you know, it was we also had a barter system with them. Well, we didn't sell them the crops, but we had a barter system with them. It was like, either you come and you do 30 to an hour, 30 minutes an hour service, or you will bring us your compost, you know, their food scraps and things like that. And at first, you know, like it was it was going great. But even after the farm closed, we noticed that they were still bringing us their their compost, even though they weren't getting any getting any crops in return because the farm was down. And, you know, as we were leaving and transitioning on to another portion of the program, you know, the residents came. I was like, we really appreciate you guys being here. The kids, you know, they really, really love being being here. And, you know, there's no, you know, drug. There's no gang bangers out here in front of our windows. And it really affected me because I, you know, when I came across Green City Forest, I wasn't working, I just dropped out of college because I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I was like, you know, I want to do finance and now I want to be a psychologist. And and it never came across my mind that I wanted to, you know, be a part of like an environmental movement. And when I live in a nature development in Farakoy and I came across the flyer and when I went to the info session, I was really intrigued by the work that they did out there. They're outside a lot, which I was like, that's different from what I like to do. But I was like, I'm in New York now. I need a challenge and I need to explore my options. But, you know, I came into the program and I was like, this is cool, but I'm going to be a cosmetologist. I'm not going to, yeah, I mean, I'll plant flowers and stuff, but no, I'm still going to paint faces. That's what I want to do. And literally now I can't imagine ever, like, you know, going to beauty school or anything else. It's like all I think about, like I'm constantly with my friends talking about environmental injustice and food injustice. And I'm like, hey, guys, it's Saturday. Let's go composting. And they're like, no. So being a young person and now like I'm interning at the Department of Environment and Protection and we do mostly outreach, but it's still we still have a close connection with nature residents. And as going on in Green City Forest and with DP, you know, you you start to learn about a lot of the problems in those communities or, you know, in the buildings. And I feel like me as a young person, I feel like a lot of, you know, older people, they feel like we're young. We don't understand the issues and and the things that are happening in our communities, but through programs like Green City Forest and the young people like me, I feel like just because we live in those areas doesn't mean we don't have to care about it. Or we, you know, it's it's the projects that we don't need flowers and gardens and vegetables. And there's a lack of, I guess, like hope in education. But I feel like through the work I've done and the work that I'm going to continue to do, I feel like I can get more young people interested in the things that are affecting us, especially as far as environmental and justice goes. Thank you. I can't I can't follow. I think we should I think we should change the question. Yeah, so so so my name's Danelle Baird. I used to be a community organizer and now I run a for profit venture capital backed startup. And I guess what's the reason I would be here is to talk about why that happened or what my justification is for that. So so so I grew up in Bed-Stuy back when it was still a terrible neighborhood, not like it is now. And, you know, saw a bunch of shootings, you know, drug deals gone wrong, where one 16 year old would shoot another one in the face across the street from me and my sister. And it was a really tough neighborhood and that stayed with me. So after I graduated from college, I, you know, graduated from Duke and decided to move back to Brooklyn. I moved to Brownsville, which is one of the poorest census track or zip codes in the city and became a community organizer for three years. I learned a ton about formal, you know, solid Linsky style community organizing and what it's like to talk with neighborhood leaders to to push for public policy, although I could never hope to have one twentieth of the accomplishments of Peggy, who really represents the best of that tradition. I around that time, Obama decided that he was going to run for president. I thought that if he played his cards, right, that he could win South Carolina like John Edwards, and then he could be a great vice president for Hillary and that that would be like a good example for all the African American children in the neighborhood where I was an organizer that could look up to the first black vice president, which tells you I'm terrible at politics. So I I left my I left community organizing in Brownsville to join the campaign. Once we won, my assignment was actually one of the green jobs portions of the stimulus. And so if everybody goes back in the time machine back to 2008, just one had this great inauguration speech, the economy is collapsing. And one of the things that the administration had decided to do was to invest something like 80 billion dollars in lots of new solar and energy efficiency technologies to kind of as part of the capital injection into the economy. And so that was my assignment was to kind of go around the country and negotiate with governors and mayors and local community groups around how they were going to use their portion of the stimulus that they were allocated to create green jobs and their municipality. So I did this for about three years and we were able to win lots of significant local policy victories. But part of the idea at the time is that we were going to take something like seven billion dollars of stimulus dollars and combine it with capital from utility companies and Wall Street banks. And we were going to create this self sustainable clean energy and energy efficiency industry that was going to kind of retrofit 100 million American buildings and dramatically reduce carbon emissions. It's a great idea, right? Well, some of it worked, some of it didn't. Most of it didn't. In particular, the big investment banks at that time were not prepared to make investments in clean energy at scale for, you know, to retrofit American buildings. So I spent three years doing that and saw this huge opportunity to create green jobs or, you know, folks in communities that I care about like Ashley and others, but saw that finance played a critical role in what was possible. And at the same time, I'm just really tickled that you're a computer programmer. I just didn't know that. You know, really started to think about, you know, Silicon Valley and the fact that, you know, half of us are going to walk out of here and call an Uber to go home. And, you know, five years ago that that wasn't the case, right? Or two years ago that wasn't the case. So how do you think about taking the best parts of the tradition of community organizing and social activism and combining them with the kind of ability to build and scale and deploy new technologies that Silicon Valley has to offer us, right? And how do you think about those two traditions and create an opportunity to create a scalable, you know, for-profit company that can help us reduce carbon emissions at scale? So that's what we're trying to do at our startup. Think about how you leverage community organizing and community relationships with, you know, churches and synagogues and building owners that Bomi works with at Enterprise and that Peggy deals with in her organizing and in public housing where Ashley's from. How do you create a huge portfolio of buildings that Deutsche Bank or Goldman Sachs Urban Investment Group feels comfortable lending, you know, five, ten million dollars to it, five or six percent to install solar panels and energy efficiency and in the new boilers. I don't know if any of you saw the article in The Times yesterday, there's an article on boilers in the Bronx. I believe that the key to dealing with climate change in the United States is plumbers and boilers. And if you think about it, you know, if we're burning all these fossil fuels, you know, upstate and then running it through these crazy pipes and then, you know, bringing it here and then we're burning the boilers. They're all 50 years old. They're causing really high asthma rates in Harlem and the Bronx, which is horrible for kids, parents, communities, but they're just spewing carbon emissions into the air and they're all oversized. They all need to be replaced and no one can afford to replace them in most parts of the city. And so there's just thousands and thousands of buildings across New York City that have a boiler that's 40 years old. They could reduce their energy bill by, you know, 50, 60 percent, but they just don't have the access to engineers and the access to capital that would allow them to save money and do something that's awesome for the climate and do something that would create local jobs in the communities that need it the most. So our company works with churches and synagogues and nonprofits too and small businesses and multifamily buildings to figure out how to do community scale retrofits and install solar panels and new, you know, software technologies that can help bring down energy consumption. So thank you. So I want to ask, and then I'm going to open up because I know there are a ton of interested questions and questioners, but I want to just have everyone briefly reflect maybe, I will go back again, sort of, but briefly reflect on two things. So you're all getting different issues, different related issues of environmental activism, environmental justice and the economic pieces of that in different ways. It's all a lot of hard work and you've all made progress in a huge amount of ways, but they're still obstacles. So I guess to the extent that you could reflect a little bit on what you see, I mean, some of you fight government, some of you use government, some of you need more capital, some of you need more regulations. If you could just think, if you could sort of change one thing that would make some of your work easier. And also, who are some of your allies that you think about when you go to work each day? Are there people along this panel, along the stage? Are there people in other parts of New York? Are there people in other parts of the country and other parts of the world? Can I begin? Sure. It's an easy six-part question. So what are some of the challenges? So the challenges are one, that government isn't used to dealing with community, that community residents are not in the pipeline to be in places to testify, to be on important commissions that impact things like the water board, our water prices. So we really have to make sure that residents are empowered, informed, so that they can begin to take action on their own to really have sustainable neighborhoods. We then need government agencies that are willing to have that kind of rapport and work to develop consensus in communities. So I'll give you one example. We found out that the city, at the time the Hudson River Park was getting started, the Brooklyn Bridge Park was getting started under Bloomberg, and we realized that waterfront parks were really very possible throughout the city. But at 125th Street, we had a waterfront where the piers had fallen into the water. Fairway was using it as a parking lot. There was trash everywhere. And we heard that the city was going to develop a hotel there. And we said, well, gee, everybody's getting a park where families can go and have recreation and enjoy the wonderful natural resource of the Hudson River. And why can't we have that too? And so we developed a community-based planning project because environmental justice isn't just about stopping the bad stuff, it's about bringing the green benefits to communities that have been underserved. So we began a planning process with 200 residents and we were able to develop a plan for a park. We were able to have a campaign for two years to get the city to build that park, to get the city to hold off from releasing a RFP to a developer until they saw what the community plan was. And so what we really did was we made it easy for the city because we developed consensus within the community with all of our elected officials, with our community boards, with civil society, so that the city could just come in and really be the winner here, really be able to develop a consensus project that was a win for everyone. And that West Harlem Pierce Park was that last segment that really connected the Hudson River Park to Riverside Park above 145th Street. So if you were riding your bike up Riverside Park, you had to stop at 124th or LaSalle Place, get out and walk your bike up to about 145th Street. And so we were able in really bringing this resource to our community, really provide a resource for the entire city. And so I think what the city realized was that this was a great way to interact with communities. And so they began taking that model elsewhere in the city and began working, for instance, with the Bronx River process. And that's been a wonderful process over the last few years. But again, government understanding that community can be a resource, a consensus builder and an excellent partner. So we've been able to partner with the city on clean heat. You heard Danelle reference the New York Times article because something like 80% of greenhouse gas emissions in New York City are being emitted by buildings. And so getting those building and boiler retrofits happening, now that's happened on Park Avenue because those co-ops there, people said, my God, we didn't realize we were part of the problem. We didn't realize that we had really bad air because of what our buildings emitted. And so those buildings were able to be the first adopters and to really transform. But it's been the other buildings owned by landlords in lower income communities where those landlords may not be getting the revenue they need or maybe they're just absentee landlords who don't care. But at any result, they have not had the access to capital to make the reforms they need. And then the unintended consequence of all that is that tenants might get a major capital improvement, you know, expense added to their rent in perpetuity. So again, we've got to really incentivize the right behavior, the behavior we want. And we're not quite doing that yet. And so that's really an obstacle. How do we incentivize the behavior that really will make our communities in our city sustainable? Are we other obstacles? I'm a very half empty, glass half empty person. I see challenges everywhere. So, but I'll just hit on three, three things. Yeah, so, you know, I do want to point out that, you know, from the, from the perspective of affordable housing, I want to sort of point out that when you look at the history of green building, which is a fairly short one in New York, but when you look at the history of green building in New York, affordable housing has been an in the lead in practically every way. You know, the first energy start homes were affordable housing buildings. The, you know, the first, and that was, you know, 15 years ago, the first passive house, multifamily passive house buildings are affordable housing buildings in Crown Heights. And so, you know, I think that there's an expectation among folks who are not in our industry that affordable, that green must be expensive, that it must be for sort of, you know, more luxury type housing and that affordable housing, you know, must just be left behind. But I want to point out that when you have the opportunity when you have the capital, when you're building new, affordable housing buildings are arguably better, probably then the most market rate developments. So having said that, I do think that there are some real meaty challenges that we're gonna, you know, be able to chew on for a while. And one of them is just what happens not 10 years from now, but after, you know, after 2025, right? So, you know, we have this very ambitious climate goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by, 80% by 2050. And I think that generally speaking, we're generally agreed that getting to like 30% by 2025 is more or less like the path that we're on. Like, you know, we're doing the things that we need to be able to get there. And, you know, there'll be incremental improvements in what we do, but by and large, the new buildings that we build are pretty good. And where the challenge lies is in that sort of, if you look at, you know, if you break it out by, basically, you know, quintiles, the worst quintile has to, by the time, in order to be able to meet the 2050 goal, the worst quintile has to reduce the greenhouse gases by 65%, right? So, I mean, that's kind, that's a big number. It's a big challenge, particularly since, you know, since we're talking about buildings that are resource constrained. And so I think, you know, so, and then, so the long range picture is really challenging. I think that we need to be, you know, doing everything that we can with the things that we know how to do today, but then really start very, very soon to think about, well, what are the big wins that we need to have in place 10 years from now? How do we move, you know, the conversations around having a world-class BRT? How do we really start to think about density in a way that is, you know, based on collaboration and responsive to, you know, local needs, but at the same time recognizing that the places that are dense already in New York City are dense already, and that additional density, if we're gonna, you know, continue to grow, needs to be able to go into places that are currently not as dense. And so, you know, these are difficult conversations to have, they're very difficult, you know, individually at the community level. So I think that's all very scary stuff. And then the future of NYCHA, right, that's another, you know, big moving crisis. Did I just say I was gonna do three? I guess I'm doing more than three, I apologize. I lump that all together into big, long-term, post-2025 challenges that we need to be thinking about today. The second thing that I deal with really a lot on it, just to be, you know, inclusive. Well, the second thing that I think about a lot on a day-to-day basis in the work that we do with existing buildings today and retrofitting them is sort of figuring out the right balance of attention between, I guess what I would call hardware and then people. So building performance basically depends on envelope performance, mechanicals performance, operator behavior and resident behavior. That, you know, those four things are it. And we have a really good, we have, we focus primarily on mechanicals efficiency, right? We don't feel, and this is in the retrofit space particularly, we don't really feel like we can do much about envelope performance by and large. We haven't seen deep energy retrofits really happen in New York City yet. Hopefully that's, you know, on the horizon, but it's yet to come. We have sort of started thinking about operator behavior, but probably not enough. And we have a hard time figuring out how to engage with the residents and sort of, you know, particularly how to foster communication so that they are understanding that they're a part of the machine, right? And that their behavior is also, you know, what drives the overall building performance. And so I think, so sort of recognizing sort of the hardware, so the building bits and the role of the people I think is also, you know, a challenge. And then I can be really short on my third one because I know Donnell's gonna go there. And that's figuring out, you know, there's a lot of conversations going on right now about how to use opportunities like the reforming the energy vision process that's happening at the state level to create mechanisms to build real community equity through, you know, doing, you know, renewable, distributed renewable, you know, disparate generation through renewables and sort of, you know, being able to retrofit buildings at scale and things like this. There's not, this isn't something where like somebody has figured this out and we just have to sort of replicate it in New York. It's really something that we need to build and, you know, build a car as we drive it as it were. And so I think that's very challenging and I think that particularly the reason why I and my colleagues at Enterprise are thinking about this is not because, you know, it's probably because it's green and we're big sustainability people but it's also because, you know, community development has been with us for 30, 40 years. It is fragile, right? Those of us who work in community development can think of three or four pieces of, you know, like policy that if they were different we would be undercut in a really significant way. And even now when you look at community development organizations, they're, you know, they're very much resource constrained and many of them are forced to go from sort of crisis to crisis, right? In whether it's in property management or in responding to changing funding streams and what have you. And so, you know, if there's an opportunity for there to be economic activity generated from the way that, you know, really radical shifts in how we think about energy and greenhouse gases then, you know, what great opportunity to be able to plug in the community development industry there so that we can, you know, the sustainability of the field as a whole could be improved financial sustainability of the field could be improved. And it didn't have to be just a negative, half full question. Part of it was about obstacles but also if there are additional obstacles in your work if there are bright spots and, you know, partners that you expected or didn't who've been helpful in your work. Ashley would love you to end, thanks. If one of the obstacles goes, obstacles go. Well, for myself personally, I feel like I'm in the infant stages of like my activism. So I'm still learning a lot. And another thing is trying to place like my focus. I know, you know, dealing with Green City Forest, we dealt with NYCHA and now I'm still with DP. I'm still involved with NYCHA developments or residents but it's like what, you know, do I, you know, wanna do, I learned about, I learned about green building and the lead and all those two classes at Solar One. And I was wondering like, well, maybe I could, you know, have the plumbers and the maintenance guys like go through new green building training. And I was like, well, I don't know how to go about that. And I was like, well, maybe I can, you know, get, start like, you know, like an RGC or like where I live and it's like, it's, for me it takes, I'm still learning a lot. And I feel like my allies are, you know, my superiors because they have a lot more experience than me. And they're very passionate about the work that they do. So I feel like when I continue to grow and learn, I can find like a set of focus but I know definitely it's to preserve NYCHA and also to beautify it. And another obstacle I noticed is the residents sometimes. A lot of times I do notice like a pattern with the residents in order to really see a change or get them, let's say I'm bringing a program into Van Dyke per se. And it's like, you know, we're just gonna pass out flyers and it's not gonna, oh, the residents are gonna be like, oh yeah, we're totally on board. Let's do this. I feel like it takes a constant presence for them to, because there's like this battle against the residents of NYCHA because, you know, every time I live there and there's always problems during the winter. Here's no heat, but when the summertime is here, they wanna cut it on. Or when there's plumbing problems, they have to turn the water off for like two days or like just recently, a few months ago, we didn't have a working shower for like almost two weeks. And it's, you know, it's difficult to wanna, you know, why should we help NYCHA? Why should we help them get their energy costs down? Why should we, you know, clean up? Why, you know, it's very, it's like this battle between NYCHA and the residents. So I feel like with the presence that we had at the farm or when you're constantly in a certain space, you start to encourage the other people who are there. So it's like, I wanna maybe, you know, start some groups in certain NYCHA developments to encourage other people. Cause, you know, people think they don't care about us. They don't even wanna, you know, they don't wanna fix our sink. They don't wanna turn on the heat. Da, da, da, da. And I feel like it's more just encouraging the residents to take pride in where they live. And, you know, it's more than just, you know, not throwing trash on the ground or this and that, but it's like, you know, get some cute, you know, some gardens going, you know, get some, you know, just growing your own vegetables alone can solve a lot of problems. More than likely, if you live in a NYCHA development, you live in an area that could possibly be a food desert. If, when you go to NYCHA buildings or areas around it, you see bodegas, liquor stores, things like that. There's no whole foods next to any NYCHA developments that I know, you know. And, and more than likely, most, a lot of New Yorkers depend on public transportation. So it's not like me out, I do it just because I like being in the city. But who is gonna travel all the way to Union Square, stand in line for like half an hour, stay for your groceries and then travel all the way to Brooklyn or Queens or, you know, Farakoe or wherever you live. You know, it's all about convenience and it's a lot of issues as far as food injustice goes. But just growing your crops alone will help you with your health and just, you know, get you outside and get you going and getting the residents together. Like one thing with the farm is at first, I noticed the residents weren't engaged. They really didn't mind. But as the season went on, so there's no gate around the farm. It's like free space. So you just have all these vegetables. You can just, we tell them it's for you, but we didn't want them to harvest when we weren't there because it can possibly damage the crops. So sometimes some people just didn't want to, they didn't want to bring compost. They didn't want to volunteer. They're like, we just want our Oak Grove, just give us eggplants. And, and so what they started doing, the residents started telling on each other. So we got to the farm Monday and we noticed our Oak Grove was a little lopsided. And the day goes on, we're just trying to fix it. We know somebody was in there harvesting incorrectly. This guy opens up his window, hey, hey. They're like, yes. He's like, you see those ladies on the bench right there? They took your Oak Grove. So, you know, if someone, I'm telling you, you couldn't get away with nothing. There was like, that guy threw his cigarette down in a pumpkin bed. I mean, they're just screaming and telling on each other, but it helped. Like we weren't, you know, we weren't coming to the farm with these lopsided crops and it was less trash. I mean, they would go in and it's like, it took us a while, you know? And I feel like if we just came and handed out flyers and it was like, oh yeah, recycle, bye. There is no, you know, but we were there for like so long and when they, you know, everyone in our program was from a NYCHA development. And I feel like actually living there, we sense like we know what you're going through. And it's just generally a lot of people in NYCHA feel like just people just genuinely don't care. You know, politicians are where they may come, they take some pictures like we're here and then they leave and then it's like, you know, there are no changes, like nothing came, you know? But I feel like an obstacle is mostly just, is getting through to them because a lot of the ideas that we have can work if we can just show some genuine concern and get some spark in them. So, yeah. So. And now next time you can sit on this end because that's a tough set of acts, but try your best. Yeah. No, I think, I mean, Ashley, I think on the issue of climate change, I think that many people, you know, like NYCHA residents also feel really frustrated and feel like they're not sure what they can do to get the kind of changes that they want to see. I think that, you know, climate change is important to so many people. And I think that there is a frustration, certainly at the federal government level and maybe even at the local level, I know that. At the local level, the mayor's made these tremendous commitments. And so we've talked about, you know, what's the implementation, right? Like the devil's in the details and what's it actually gonna take to get there. It's one thing to set a huge vision. It's another thing to implement it. I think that, you know, as Bomi mentioned, to his credit, Cuomo has taken a significant national leadership role in trying to force utility companies in New York State to move to a business model that is not based on new investments in fossil fuels. He has, right? And incentivizing them to see the profitability in installing distributed solar and clean energy technologies in New York City. That's what the man has done. So you may not like what he's done on ethics reform or whatever, right? But on energy and fossil fuels, he is pushing for significant changes. But again, the devil's gonna be in the details of the implementation. I think at the national level, what can I say? Our startup was fortunate. I graduated from Columbia Business School and we were able to win a contract with the Department of Energy to focus on the retrofits of small commercial buildings in New York City. So I'm certainly not gonna criticize my biggest customer. It's not a joke. I think that what they're doing with the EPA and coal plants is significant. I think at all levels, right? As New Yorkers, we're the beneficiaries of a local, state, and federal government that is doing the best it can in some ways on climate. But I still think that lots of us feel really, really frustrated with the lack of a really bold vision and really tremendous progress and a specific plan with a lot of resources and political mind and political will. It reminds me of one of my favorite movies, Spielberg's Lincoln, and he's trying to abolish slavery and free all the slaves and do this really awesome thing. And at the end of the day, he has to hire these two guys to basically literally run around and bribe all the congressmen. And the guys are running after the congressmen saying, you know, vote to abolish slavery and if you lose, we'll make you the postmaster general of Ohio, right? Because there's these very narrow parochial interests that are preventing something grand and large and significant from happening. I think on climate change, many of us feel that way. I think for me here in one of the most powerful neighborhoods and one of the most powerful cities on the planet, there is an opportunity for us to really lead. I think we spoke about the needs of financially underserved communities in New York, not as charity cases, but that if we can think about how do we meet our self-interest as people who are interested in making a difference on climate change and carbon emissions reductions and what are the things that we can do to help facilitate or enable large scale investments in carbon emissions reductions and energy efficiency reductions and solar power in the Bronx and in the Rockaways and out in Brownsville where I was a community organizer. I think that's what's on the table for us. This is all a backdoor pitch for my company, by the way. Whatever. The way that we think about it is that government can set the table for a set of policies, but then it's gonna be up to the private sector and the civic sector to really come up with a set of solutions that's gonna scale quickly enough to actually allow us to address climate change in a significant way. So government's gonna be a huge partner in that, but there's just lots and lots of things that we're gonna have to do as American citizens and New Yorkers to really lead the way on this stuff. Thank you. All right, let's open it up because I know a few people like lots of questions. I got more, but I want to give everyone else a chance to get. I'll bring you the mic if you have a question. Thank you. My question really was prompted by Peggy Shepard's description of her work. Very impressive as all of you are. You talked about how things take three years, six years, eight years. And this is the way change happens. I have two questions about it. First of all, how do you keep people motivated in community areas to continue to work when the payoff is so far down the line in a society where we're all used to sort of instant gratification? And secondly, specifically in the area of climate change, when the most activist people are saying, this is something that can't wait. You know, the climate is, I mean, this is urgent. How are you going to wait six or eight years to make it pay off and not lose people's support and have them go off and do something much less valuable? Yeah, so in terms of climate change, certainly Congress has not moved ahead. And one of the reasons that we think that the environmental community really lost out on the McCain Lieberman bill was the lack of diversity in the environmental movement. And that's been a very big, very big issue. Right now you're seeing all of the major mainstream environmental groups hiring diversity managers, developing strategic plans around diversity because they understand that they are at the table making decisions for all of us, yet all of our voices are not being heard. And that they can't win without us. And they can't win without everyone. And of course, looking at the changing demographics, unfortunately that seems to be the big driver, not simply the value that all of our opinions and experiences and perspectives are valued and are needed to craft the kinds of policies that are really going to ensure sustainability. So as a result, we have seen the EPA move ahead, the Clean Power Rule, which is part of Obama's climate change plan is being promulgated. It will be devolved, the authority will be devolved through the states. So the action is really gonna be at the state level with all of the states developing the regulatory implementation for the plan. So we are really working to, we've developed a 33-member coalition around the country of EJ groups and we are re-granting to some of those to do really deep work in the states to ensure that the states have the best implementation plan so that we have the best national plan that really reduces carbon. And I'm sorry, the first question was. How do you keep people motivated? That's right. Well number one, most people have never really been fully engaged in something that impacts their community and their life. So you really can't discount the idea that when people are engaged, it really changes the way they see themselves in their community. For instance, we had about 100 members at the climate march. And when I looked around at not only young and older people who were with us in the march, I realized that most of them had never ever done anything like that. And just how transformative it was for young folks, for brother, sister, soul and older, elderly folks who are out there marching in the street talking about the impact that changing what we're doing around climate would really make in their communities. And so that was very empowering. It was motivating. So some of those same members had a teach-in before the climate march. We now have a work group of people who are still working to develop those issues. So again, that's a motivator. Having short-term victories is a motivator. When we brought the community together around the West Harlem Piers, the fact that within two years, we had our elected officials saying, yes, we support this. Having the mayor say, yes, we support this and we're gonna build it and we're gonna develop an advisory group of community residents to advise us as we move ahead. Those things are very transformative for communities. And it keeps everyone going. I know it keeps me going when I get up every morning and I can look out at the Harlem Piers and know that we've created a great resource or that I can see that every bus in New York City is now a hybrid diesel or compressed natural gas. Those things keep me going. And it keeps the average resident going as well. And now our neighbors realize that all they have to do is get their next door neighbor involved. And one of the things we realized in the climate resilience planning meetings we've been having, at every table, at every meeting, what I have heard is the lack of social cohesion. The lack of social cohesion. And not just what happens in an emergency if I'm stuck on the 20th floor, but how do I work with my neighbors so that if someone is stuck on the 20th floor with no elevator, no electricity, that we can come together in some sort of unity to work those issues out while we're waiting for the city or the other emergency responders. But social cohesion is something that nobody's trying to fund. The city is getting the millions to get people back in their homes out in Coney Island and the rockaways. But I keep saying to them, what kind of money, what kind of support is going to go to the groups on the ground that kept the food coming, that kept doing the volunteer work that kept people going in the rockaways in Coney Island when all of the stores were closed, when the subways and buses weren't working, when they couldn't get to a drugstore that was open to get their medication. It was those groups on the ground and it was neighbors helping neighbors. And so how do we really incentivize and support and sustain that kind of social cohesion in a city like New York City? Yeah. Yes, is that on? Okay, I can talk now. I'm from Iowa. I've been living there for 40 years. Before moving there, I stayed in New York City for two years. So during the early seven years, when I came back, I was excited to see the city vibrate. Then I realized in my seven month stay as a caregiver to the cancer patient, having a lot of time in my hand, walking around the city. Oh my gosh, what's going on with this state, which is 18 times larger than the urban population of Iowa where I do live. And unfortunately, we do carry a lot of undeserved political power. I see that you have one of your super fun side. And let me just qualify to who I am. I'm the director general of energy and environment research group. And I was advisor and a SELAM to privately to the senators who come to me and seek environmental advice on international and national level. And I have had all the other presidential candidates, some of them perhaps, except in my house. So I know what you're going to, it's not really helping the way you are handling it. And I'm sorry, the way I'm saying it like that, because the friend is somebody who tells you the truth and enemy is the one who say that or I wanted to tell you the nice way. So why is that nothing moving on in New York City or near the state is very simple because things are handed too much by the committee. The best approach to most everything is a power of one sometimes and not necessarily involving the community. This is about the super fun sites? Yes, yes. That the super fun sites aren't moving forward. That's the question. Well in my terms of super fun sites in New York and I could actually show you some of the sites without remediation that have been built over. Okay. So is it a question for the panelists about the super fun? Yeah, the kind of is why is taking you to clean up, for example, in this state and this town to not being able to clean up one super fun site. Super fun site. 25, sorry, 27 years while we have done for the rest of the nation in less than two years. Almost 1500. Why is New York City unable to take care of cleaning up its super fun sites? But I'm not going to try to answer that question but I think that one of you can. And do you mean super fun or brown fields? Well, Brownsfield is a contractor. Yes. In the black trade group, some of the most brutal who tarry to super fun sites. Well, you know, the super fun reauthorization bill just quickly in Congress, just doesn't have enough money to clean up all of the sites. No, you don't get money because it has a provision in it which he calls cost recovery. I wrote almost all the room for this one. Okay. Thank you. Well, I don't know if my answer, so. Yeah, a lot of it has to do with the state legislature and the state super fun or brown fields law. It's complicated. In front right here. I guess just following up on what Danelle said about government sets the table. The question is Manhattan above 96th Street and all the other birds don't seem to be invited to that table. Even when the discussion comes up about preservation, it's sort of, it's a battle downtown and no one looks at the fact that in Washington Heights, Northern Manhattan and West Harlem, nothing's preserved. And I guess my question is, how do we get the conversation to include not all these other communities who have a vested interest? Because all I hear about affordable housing is when they looked at locations, they forgot about the fact that at least in Harlem, we have five gardens that weren't paid attention to when they selected the sites and sent out the RFQs. So I guess my question to the panel or to the government, if you're the one token person from the city, how do we get consideration of everybody who's not invited to the table to be brought to that table? You've got to get yourself to the table. Just two nights ago, actually, a woman named Valerie Bradley and UN Chen held a meeting to develop a new historic preservation group here in Northern Manhattan. And so people are beginning to organize because you've got to be your own advocate. People don't necessarily invite you to the table. Generally, you've fought your way there and you have developed the kinds of recommendations and the kind of consensus that makes government's life a little easier and so they then want you to be there. So, for instance, there are two environmental justice folks on the Mayor's Sustainability Advisory Board. That would not have happened many years ago. We have worked in Harlem to preserve a number of sites and we had an advocate who used to go down to the Landmarks Preservation Society and I think I went with him 10 or 15 years ago and we were chained to the table there and we weren't going to move until they decided to grant preservation to some of the neighborhoods in Hamilton Heights, for instance. So a lot of that, and I'd love to hear from everybody here who has had to fight their way to the table, it really is developing the advocacy and the organizing to make your voice heard. I'm not gonna speak as a city planning commissioner, I mean that's not what commissioners, what our role is. So, but on the issue of how you can engage, I think that, so I also serve on the Board of Asian Americans for Equality and I think that one of the things that, and many organizations have really continued to strike this balance, but I know I'm gonna speak about AFI because I know it better than other organizations and I think that one of the, I talked earlier about sort of the roots that community development organizations in New York have in activism and AFI, for example, has maintained that connection to activism, right? So, on the one hand, AFI is a very capable and nationally recognized affordable housing organization that really is an efficient manager and developer of affordable housing. But at the same time, the organization continues to have an organizing on it, continues to have a legal aid type community service activities that keep going on and so I think that, this is what I mean when I say that we really have a unique history in the way that we do affordable housing development here that's very tied to the community. So, I think that figuring out ways that we can preserve that tradition for the future is really important and I do sort of feel very strongly that we can't take that infrastructure, that civic infrastructure that we have in the city for granted. These are organizations that are very, they're in many cases fragile organizations and they're being small for, it kind of goes along with being very locally community based and that's a tension that we continue to have to negotiate. So I think that supporting the community development corporations and the community organizations that still provide that really strong local connection is really important. Yeah, getting yourselves to the table. Yeah, I mean I'm struck by the story that Ashley shared earlier about working with nitro residents who became very defensive of their vegetables in the community garden and I think what's cool about the story is it illustrates one of the central principles of community organizing which is that you work with neighborhood leaders around something that's in their self-interest and I think a lot of times, particularly in the environmental movement, we have a tendency to communicate on an abstract, idealistic level about climate change and things are happening and our grandkids and this and that and it can be tough for parts of the city that are struggling with more immediate concerns to prioritize working on policies that impact those kind of abstract concepts but the role of a good community organizer or activist is to find ways to meet the direct needs of communities above 96th Street where I live on 127th and what I found in my time is that unemployment rate is really high and lots of the boiler replacements and solar panel installations that we need to bring down carbon emissions in the city are gonna require a ton of new jobs and the communities that need the most boiler replacements and need the most solar panels need the most jobs and to tie it all together, one of the roles of city and federal and state government is to make the investments that allow us to hire people who then have a self-interest in climate change because not only are they benefiting in terms of the future of their planet and being a good steward for their grandkids but now they have a job and or just like growing their vegetables they have a reason to really start to listen and learn and kind of participate in the civic conversations or pay attention to what's going on in the news because so for example, we cut a deal with the mayor of DC for $100 million to train and hire ex-offenders to install solar panels and energy efficiency retrofits in the poorest neighborhoods in DC and those ex-offenders not only gained a set of construction and electrical skills and were trained to kind of understand building efficiency at a pretty high level but they actually became really politically active as climate leaders, right? Because their job and their paycheck and their family's health insurance was tied in with all of the local and national policies that impacted climate change and so they were watching CNN and they were emailing me hey, you know, Senator so-and-so just said some nonsense on the floor about how climate change is not real and we need to visit him and they would and so sometimes they say we need to visit him with a baseball bat in the trunk that's not how you go to a senator's office you want to but you can't or we'll see, go back to jail anyway, the point is that we met their self-interest and so that was a way for them to have a real reason to always fight to be at the table in a way that even after I left that work in DC those folks are still down there they still have those jobs they're still participating in civic life one of them is trying to run for city council to continue to push policies I think over the long-term good community organizing is meeting people in their interest and helping them discover the real reason that drives them to participate in these conversations in a serious way