 All right, everybody, welcome to the webinar today. And this is a very exciting when a millennial and a boomer walk into a climate meeting, or a Gen Z, or any of the multiple generations get together and talk about climate change. How do we do it? This is really important stuff. How do we talk about these big topics across the generations? That's what we're talking about today. And I'm joined by two very special guests who are doing some really interesting thinking into how, into this issue. I am very proud to introduce, starting with Anna Siegel. She's a youth activist. She's a core member of Main Youth for Climate Justice. And she's the campaign director for Main Youth Action. Hey, Anna, how are you? I'm good, thank you. I'm glad to be here. Yeah. And John Hagan, the former president of Manomet Environmental Science Organization in Massachusetts, and the chair of the main climate table and executive director of our climate comment. Hi, John, how are you? Hi, Nick, good to see you. Thanks for the invitation. Sure. Well, I'm gonna turn it over to our speakers in a minute, but I have to talk about our technical issues very quick. We're gonna talk for some amount of minutes and then have time for question and answers at the end. We're really hoping for sort of a free flowing discussion. So we'd love to hear your thoughts. The way to ask questions or make comments today is by putting them in, not in the chat area where we've been talking about where we're coming in from, but from the Q&A box, which is down along the bottom panel there. Please put your questions in there. We are being recorded as you probably heard a moment ago. So this will be available online afterwards. And I think that's all the technical stuff I have. So without further ado, I'd like to turn it over to, I believe Anna is getting started. Okay. Anna, I'll go ahead and start the screen share and thanks to Nick's help on how to do a new use of Zoom. Okay. Does that look good to you, Nick and Anna? Yeah, it looks great. That looks great. Okay, Anna. Anna, go. Awesome. I'm really glad to be here today. So this is how Bay Boomers and Gen Z can come together for climate action or anyone from across any generation. The name comes from, you know, the generations of me and John ourselves, but we have managed to, you know, collaborate together, work on projects together and be colleagues and friends across that generational divide. And not only are we climate activists and climate thinkers, but we're also burners. So that is one of the reasons I'm really glad to be doing this with me and Audubon today. Yeah, and I'm gonna switch slides here and explain. Oh, and by the way, if anybody can't tell, I'm the older one of the two of us today. But the main climate table started this project called the Intergen Climate Group about a year and a half ago. And we were, we've always been interested in bridging sort of cultural and political divides on climate change because our view is everybody is going to be needed. So we might as well figure out how to talk to each other and work with each other. But in the summer of 2020, I think it was, we, one of our webinars was run by youth about climate justice. And it was just a great webinar that the team put together Maine Environmental Education Association led that. And we started to think we should, we have a lot to learn from the younger generation. We should do more. And so we wrote a proposal to the Door Foundation got a grant to form the so-called Intergen Climate Group. It ended up being 16 people, eight younger people, eight older people. And we met monthly for a year throughout 2021 for 90 minutes every month. And our hypothesis was, could we work better more effectively together on climate change than separately? And largely, I mean, not always, but mostly we are working independently of each other generationally on climate change. And yeah, sometimes even adversarily, at least in the media, it's pitted against the older folks aren't doing enough and the younger, it becomes more adversarial and that's just not healthy when we're all interested in the same outcome. So we spent a year trying to learn if we could work effectively together and what we could do with that and mostly how to do that. So we're gonna share these lessons some lessons learned with you today. We hope they're useful. Some are really obvious. And then we, at the end, we'd like to know from you are there things you could do to put these lessons to use and work intergenerationally, maybe in ways that you hadn't thought of yet. Okay, next slide, there we go. Oh, this is mine too. So we had, we've evolved a little bit because our first years up some people went off to college in Scotland, no fair. So our group is evolving a little bit but we're still roughly eight people, eight younger, eight old. We're not as sober as that image looks. Most of the time we're much happier than that. But anyway, this was our first meeting together because we met a whole year on Zoom. I mean, that wasn't our plan, but we had to and we finally did meet in March, just this past March. It was like we all knew each other even though we hadn't seen each other, many of us hadn't seen each other in person. So that was the idea. Okay, Anna, I think this is yours. Yeah, so there's always been differences between the generations, but today there is a sort of new tension that has to do with our future and it has to do with the climate crisis. We often say that there's this generational divide that's just natural and we kind of just say like it's there and we had to deal with it but often we deal with it by ignoring it and that should not be what we do. Okay, I'm getting used to the advancing here. So why work intergenerationally? We've talked a lot about this with our group and obviously there's one compelling ethical reason is mostly Anna's future had not mine and we're making decisions now in organizations like the main climate table, my organization, our climate common. A lot of us who are older are in positions of decision making in some way or another government and shouldn't youth have a say in our decision making? It's these decisions affect mostly them so why aren't they at the table more than they are? So it's just to could use that for diversity of any kind of reason but especially youth because it's mostly their future. So there's an ethical reason but there's also a practical reason like Anna and I are going to talk about a project later in this presentation where I just need to know what, I need to know what Anna knows. She knows things I do not know and I know things she doesn't but the point is there are some very practical reasons to have youth a part of decision making process and we'll talk a little bit about that. So it's not just ethical, it's also very practical get things done that most people maybe don't appreciate. Okay, next slide. So there are competing narratives between people in the media within our society and they're counterproductive and neither are helpful for working generationally. So often I hear as a young person from adults, I'm so sorry my generation messed this up, you're the future, it's up to you to fix this. And often these adults mean well, they're praising me for the work that I do or telling me that my generation is gonna change the world but it shouldn't be the responsibility of young people to have that burn on our shoulders because the decision makers, the adults are still and we still need your help. And then there's also a youth narrative that I've seen with a lot of young climate activists. You caused this just get out of our way, we need youth voice, youth power, everything else is a distraction. Neither attitude is helpful because we need a mobilization from every sector to solve the climate crisis. We agree on that, but every sector also includes every generation. Okay, so we got like, I think five lessons, major lessons that we learned that we're just gonna go through one by one with you here. And the first one is our methods of communication differ. Again, it's one of those things that seems very obvious but we really ran into this as kind of an issue. For example, I don't text, I know how to text, but I don't like to text because it just interrupts my day. It interrupts my thinking and I don't like to be disturbed when I'm, but texting, I get that a lot of other people use texting especially young people text, that's a primary means of communication. So I had to, okay, I guess I could text, learn how to text and interact with the younger members of our group by texting, it really worked. I liked, I prefer, I think a lot of people in my generation tend to prefer face to face, one-on-one meetings. That was hard to do, been hard to do with COVID, but I don't know, I don't understand it, but I think we didn't have a lot of other methods when we grew up, but we tend to be more comfortable with face to face, real-time meetings. And I'm more comfortable with email. A lot of times I would send email to my younger group and I just wouldn't get a response. Then I would text and get an immediate response. So the point is we both, both of our generations realized we needed to develop our communication skills to adapt to and accommodate the other generation instead of just complaining about them not answering their emails. John, why don't you learn how to text? It's not that hard. But it is, seriously, it's something, if you're gonna work intergenerationally, you need to be aware of this and be willing to work on it. Okay, Anna. Another one of our lessons, and I believe one of our most important ones is the ability to combine generational assets. Because people say, okay, so if we need to mobilize all generations and ages to work on the climate crisis, why don't youth work independently and adults work independently? What we need is to be working together because we found that the younger generation is greater passion and energy and the older generation is more pragmatic and knowledgeable. And by combining these two things, it promotes a maximization of our abilities and greatest efficacy with policy work or any sort of activism. So we all have different assets and we all have different liabilities and we can help each other through that. A really good example is that representatives of youth representatives to the coalition which is an adult led coalition, me and climate action now have been giving valuable knowledge and youth representation to main climate action now. And then main climate action now takes the interests of the youth and advances them into spaces where youth voice is not affirmed. So it works both ways and everyone learns in the process and we get things done. And then the next slide is our assets list. So we inventory mid-year through the process, we inventory the prospective assets of the elders and youth. We thought that the most important ones were elder life experience and youth energy, not to say that older folks can't be energetic or young people can't have life experience, but just that these are the strongest trends and assets. And there are a lot more here. Other notable ones are elders, tolerance for complexity, kind of being able to parse through the really complicated policy documents or being able to see the root of things, authority and influence already being in that position and power rather than having to work your way up to it. Other assets of youth are just the ability to cut through complexity, take away all the layers of bureaucracy and say, this is what we really need, this is climate justice. And then also kind of the flexibility of youth, being able to shift to different modes of communication or different ways of doing things. And because we did our assets, of course we had to spend a little time on our liabilities as well. So I'm embarrassed to say the elders had the longer list of liabilities. We got a lot of liabilities. But some of them are obvious, like the elder group, we maybe sometimes lack passion, we didn't lack inertia, we had too much inertia, we were going in one direction and didn't know how to stop doing what we were doing, who kind of rigid in our thinking sometimes. I mean, I think those of us are as late in their career as I am, at some point you just get tired of trying to solve problem after problem after problem and it can just wear you out after so much time. And then on the youth side, some of it is the flip side of the assets, maybe not appreciating the complexity of some of the problems we're trying to solve. Like if you pull on this thread, a bunch of other threads are gonna come undone too. And it's good to know that before you start pulling on it. And of course the impatience because we wanna solve the climate problem like yesterday, by the way we need to. But sometimes we need to stop and slow down and understand the complexity of whatever trying to solve. But again, elders can, we have been operating in much the same box. We've been operating in for decades. That's the box we know. And youth help us see, you guys are in a box over there. So anyway, it was useful for us to take this, sort of a left-brained analytical approach to what we each bring to the table. Okay, Anna. Yeah, however, these assets and liabilities are not reason to not work together intergenerationally. It's not, oh, the youth have these problems or I don't wanna work with them or flip side. It's just something to be aware of as you approach working together and as you approach tackling problems. Because each generation needs to marshal the courage to seek out the other generation. You can't just wait for it. Your perfect collaboration doesn't happen. It's as a miracle, it's like networking. You have to put in that effort. But at the same time, just be aware of those assets and liabilities, know what you bring to the table and what you need to work on. Yeah, I was gonna, Anna, maybe we'll come back to part of the story, but when I first met Anna about two years ago, I was just, I was scared to death. I mean, she was 15 years old. We had a bird thing going in common, but I was, you know, I was afraid I was gonna say the wrong thing or something politically incorrect or just, I mean, just anyway, it took me a fair amount of courage to reach out to Anna. And but it was worth it. And we'll talk more about what's come of our work together in a minute. But it does take a little bit of courage to reach across the generations. Yeah, and I was scared to death. Number three, I think at some point, we, maybe earlier in our year, we thought, well, you know, the older folks have more stressors in our lives. Where many of us are at the peak of our career. Some of us are a little past the peak, but we're juggling a lot with our jobs, you know, in positions of leadership. Sometimes we've got elder parents who we need to help ourselves. We've got multiple things going on, but then you have a different set, but stressors too. And at some point, we just began to appreciate each of us had things going on in our lives that challenged us, that didn't have anything to do with climate change. And we just developed a real respect for each other, each generation and what we were having to handle in our lives. And so we, you know, if there was any accusatory point, we just got past that and just entered into a zone of respect for each other. But it was something we had to sort of reconcile and initiate. Is this me, Anna, or is this you? No, that's you, John and Anna, but Anna, if you could take the lead. Yeah, for sure. So there are a bunch of self-created obstacles that come with working intergenerational, and one of them is a learned generational hierarchy. Every child is taught that their parents know best and to sit back and listen when adult figures speak, such as mentors and teachers. And it is super important to respect elders, but this learned generational hierarchy can stop us from approaching each other in an authentic way. So this leads to young activists being uncertain of their position in intergenerational spaces and worried the lack of experience means their contributions won't be recognized as valid. So youth need to be willing to occupy the space and learn how to yield their power and also to speak up. It is a problem that we saw in our meetings was that the adults were talking too much in the intergen meetings and a lot, John, talk about that. Well, yeah, I think it was about our eighth meeting of our 12 where one of the older folks said, how come we're doing all the talking in this meeting? And we were, and if you go back, it was like 80% of the meeting, it was older people talking. And part of that comes naturally. The older you get, the more stories you have to tell, more experiences you have. And the more comfortable you are and saying whatever's on your mind. So we had to take, I think our ninth meeting, we said, okay, we're gonna have a time out. And the young folks are gonna meet together and the older folks are gonna meet together and we're gonna reflect on how we're either dominating the meeting or not speaking up in the meeting. And that helped a lot because when we came back for the next meeting, we were all much, we didn't, older folks didn't talk so much because we were conscious of what we were doing. And the younger folks started to step in and lean into the conversation more. But this is not something, I mean, this is a lesson it seems obvious now that we talk a lot as older folks. But it's good to know if you're gonna work intergenerational and you really wanna hear the voice of younger people, you need to be quiet more than you're normally. So it's an important lesson. Okay, now. So the secret ingredient of intergenerational collaboration is relationships. You wanna know each other as people. You wanna care about each other and be friends rather than just coworkers. As John mentioned earlier, he was kinda scared to approach me at first about a bird study that he was putting on in Northern Maine Woods and he was gonna invite me to do some research work there. I was really scared when I received his email. My first question was, oh no, does he know how old I am? I thought he, I was worried that he thought I was a graduate student and he didn't know. And then when I said yes, but told him I was 14 or 15, I'd get rejected basically. Like I wouldn't be allowed to come because that's something that's normally allowed for older folks. So I was scared too. Then once we got to know each other, we got really comfortable with each other and now we do these presentations and we built this slide depth together. And John's a great, I consider him a mentor and figure in my life, but also a friend on that equal level as well. So what we learned this thing about relationships only two way, two thirds of the way through our year with Intergen. Because before we had these over engineered meetings where we were looking at bullet points and we had a specific conversation laid out and we would get through our agenda and then we'd be done. But we didn't actually learn about each other. We just learned about opinions that others had. So once we abandoned our over engineered meetings that were super rigid and we just asked each other, what do you care about? How's your life going? That's where relationships really started to begin and that's where the work happened because then people realized, oh, you're really interested in doing this. Let's do this as a project together. Let's take this on. Let's take action. So having that relationship basis was super important for us. And then just as one of the, I organized the Intergen group with Katy Perry, a younger, a 26 year old. And we had, when we set up the meetings early on we really were scared to, we were scared of not having a conversation or a structured conversation so that people would get through 90 minutes. And that's why we had engineered them so much. And we learned that we shouldn't have done that from the very beginning. But as Anna said, we learned soon enough at the end that, okay, let's just abandon the structure and have an open free ranging conversation. So the one thing that, so the relationship, personal relationships matter more than anything, it's to me anyway, matter more than anything we've said already in this webinar, you just have to know people as people. And just forget the climate issue, get to know each other. That's, and right now, the 16 or 17 of us, I truly believe we do anything for each other at this point, irrespective of climate because we know each other and respect each other. And it just took time to build that kind of relationship. One of the, at least to me, one of the greatest things I heard all year might have been our last meeting when one of the younger members said, this group, the Intergen group, is the first time I've worked with adults where they didn't have some kind of power over me as a parent or a teacher or an employer. And I was so pleased, I hadn't thought about it that way, but I was so pleased to hear her say that because that was the essence of what we were trying to create with the Intergen group so that everybody felt totally comfortable. Nobody had any power over each other. And apparently we accomplished that because that was Emma's take on sort of her summary of that year together. So if you're working intergenerationally, older folks generally are in positions of power or leadership, just what happens when you get older. But you've got to be careful in this intergenerational relationship not to wield that power, just not to wield it at all is the best thing I could say about that because the relationships will flourish more. The trust will build more if you let go of that power. So a great example of combining assets. So what does this mean in real life? Okay, sure, like youth of energy and passion and adults of pragmatism and experience, like those are all nice traits. But in real life, what's an example of this happening? So not last legislative session, but the one before, my first legislative session, there was an intergenerational coalition to push forward an extremely important bill. And so this legislation was LD99, an act to divest Maine from fossil fuel companies and youth activists, such as myself, organized advocacy effort. We got it going grassroots and we got it in the public eye and in the media. And adult activists and allies worked on the technical side. They analyzed the holdings of Maine PERS, the public employee retirement system to see how much money they had in fossil fuels. They figured out the legality of different kinds of bill language. And with those two skill sets and those assets, we were able to have this bill passed. And it's a huge climate bill. So this is a great real-life example of how working intergenerational helps climate projects. And so our year, Anna's talking about a project that was independent of our particular group, but a great example of intergenerational work. So we came to the end of our year, our grant ran out and we said, okay, group, what do you wanna do? Anything? Or are we done? Is our work done here? So the full group wanted to continue to meet and we are continuing now. We felt like we spent all that time building trust and social capital that we'd like to do something with that now. So we pivoted into our second year, 2022. And we are pivoting from talking to doing is the way we like to put it. So we're trying to come up with different projects, real world projects where we're working intergenerationally and getting something done. We still meet every two months and we talk about things, but we're pivoting to projects now. And Anna's gonna tell you about maybe a couple of them. Yeah, so one important project that we are taking on now is the Youth Leadership Initiative. And the goal is to place youth in positions of board of municipal leadership to be decision makers at the table. And so we're gonna be collaborating with different folks like the Main Environmental Education Association and hopefully various organizations to place youth on their boards because we have a disproportionate stake in the future and we need to be at those seats of power. But as we mentioned earlier, there is a power differential that comes with age. There are these issues of adults talking too much or youth feeling not respected in these spaces. So both boards and youth will have to be trained to work with each other, to learn how to relate to each other and to communicate with one another. So that's why the goal of this project is not only just to match youth and boards or municipal positions, but also to prepare both the adults and the young person for that position to be filled by them. And another great project is the one that I mentioned earlier, the bird study. Lovely photo of myself, probably 5 a.m. I was very, very tired in this photo. I remember it distinctly, but here we're doing a point count where we're standing in the woods and we're listening for birds. This is a study that John has been running and it happened 30 years ago and now it's being replicated 30 years later to see what birds have, how bird populations have shifted in a changing forest and with changing climate and changing timber industry. So it's a really important study. And as you can see, it's an example of intergenerational action because John has been involving young people like me to learn both about birds and about how to be a scientist so I can grow up and do that work myself. But also the collaboration goes both ways because now I'm working on the project as the outreach lead and I'm helping John get news about this study out into the world. Yeah. So we're wrapping up here just to start to think about what you could do. Knowing what you know now on our last 30 minutes or so, are there things that you could do? I'm speaking now to maybe the older folks on the webinar. Are you on, think about, most of you are probably on a committee of some sort. Some of you are on boards. Ask yourself, are there youth on this committee that I'm on? And if not, get them on. Your job is to go see, find out and get youth on that committee. You will, that your work will be enriched by it and so will the youth. And Anna maybe you can speak to this too but if you're youth on this webinar, go. There's no end to things, committees and decision-making bodies, big ones and little ones that you could participate in. Just show a little bit of initiative. Everybody needs to meet the other wherever they are. In the middle would be nice. But just tremendous opportunity for working intergenerational. But we have to think about it and recognize, oh, there aren't any young people sitting around this table. I guess I should go make that happen. Huge opportunity. So if you're on a committee, think about what you could do tomorrow morning, this afternoon, one o'clock soon as we're done to get that ball rolling. And anything else you wanna add about that? I mean, yeah, and if that seems daunting, how do I change the rules of my organization or the bylaws to allow youth? The first thing that you can do before then is just to reach out to someone. This goes for either generation. If you're a young person, if you're really passionate about music and you wanna do something about music but maybe you reach out to an older person in your community and say, hey, why don't we put on a concert to fundraise for Ukraine and refugees? And you start that collaboration, you start the conversation. Same goes for an older person wondering, I really have things I'm really passionate about climate action and I wanna build young people but I don't know what to do. You just have to take someone up your courage and reach out. And so that's the first thing you can do is to start building those relationships and then also thinking about committees and also thinking about empowering youth movements through financial means and through your own influence. If you know that there's a youth message, like if you know if a youth organization has something they care about, pay attention. If means for climate justice says we really are in support of this bill and we need everyone to be focusing on this, this is really important. That's something that you can do as an adult is vote for candidates that support that bill and take action in that sense. I know this is our last slide but I think one of the, I guess maybe Anna, probably the thing I'm most proud of is that we published this paper in Stanford social innovation review. That's pretty cool. A 15 year old, I guess you were 15 at the time and now 65, we worked together to write this paper, this essay that got published in Stanford so about what we learned over the last year. And it was, I don't wanna, and I saw things I would have never seen when we wrote this. I could not have written it without her and I'd like to think she couldn't have written it out without me but she probably could have. But it was a really good example of something else we did together and really enjoyed working together on this. So we'll end there and we're open to questions. We're open to, you may have an idea that you'd like to bounce off of all of us that you might ways that you might engage youth but we're here to answer questions and just talk as we can, Nick through Q and A. Sure, yeah. And if, first of all, thank you so much. What an interesting, awesome project you were working on. I have some questions of my own. If other folks want to ask questions, please put them down below in the Q and A box. That's where they go. I'm interested, first of all, in the communications lessons that you learned. I'm really interested in that, how there was some of those issues you needed to work through at the beginning. That also relate to how you're communicated to in terms of where different generations receive information about climate change and how those affect worldview or affect actions or consumption of information. It does. I definitely think that, for example, young people are often not consuming media through channel television. And channel television, kind of a TV like CNN or Fox News, as we know, both channel television often known for being famously biased. And I think that I like to think that young people often get a more diverse representation of media because we often get our media just from the internet, which we'll just throw anything at you. But at the same time, algorithms and social media do tell you what you want to hear. So I think both generations can have, can get like their information tailored in very specific ways and have narrow viewpoints, but just in a slightly different manner. And part of what can be helpful about working intergenerationally is getting a different perspective. Oh, you only hear this? Well, I heard this about that issue. Wow, that makes me realize that really is a bad thing. Okay, I'm glad that we talked about it. That sort of thing. Yeah, I don't know that I have anything to add. I don't know that this isn't a generational thing so much as a scientist thing. But when I see information about climate change, I usually want to go to the original research paper and see, is that true what the media said about that? I want to know. It is a scientist thing, I will tell you. It is a scientist thing, not a, I think Anna probably has the same thing going. She wants to be a scientist, but yeah. We got a couple of good questions in the Q and A already. One from Emily, and this is a big one. So she says, I'm interested in your thoughts about communicating climate change across generational lines to climate change skeptics. Is this something that you guys talked about in your sit-downs or what do you think? We didn't talk about it so much in our intergen group because we were trying to bridge the, this is a good question, because we were all the climate in group on our 16 person. So the barrier we were trying to bridge is just generational, not the climate issue. We all got the climate thing. But the climate table or chair is hosting, as hosted a series of workshops, there'll be another one tomorrow morning on how to talk about climate change to skeptics. And so we've, I've thought a lot about that, Anna maybe you have too, but our view is that the Democrats and liberals are not enough to solve the climate problem. We need rural people, Republicans. So we might as well just go ahead and get to work on that. And it requires, but now that you mentioned the question, a lot of the principles for working with climate skeptics, and I work with a lot of climate skeptics, is just listening. And that was what we ended up learning from. I'm embarrassed to say, why didn't I start the intergen project with just listening? Cause that's what I do in the rest of my life. But listening is key to working with skeptics or even having a conversation with skeptics. So if you wanna learn more about how to do that, go to our Climate Commons website, and you can register before tomorrow morning and or catch the one we do in the fall, but it's full of examples of how to talk to climate skeptics and get something done. I also think generationally with climate skeptics, the moral imperative often can really, got them within the sense of you can, it sounds weird, you can say no to facts, you can look at a graph and say, no, like that's what climate skeptics often do, they take numbers that exist, they twist them to mean something else. But you can't often say no to your own child or your own grandchild who's saying, but this is my future. And even if you don't like those numbers, they are real and that is what's happening right now to me. And so I think that moral imperative can with intergenerationally can work with climate skeptics. And not only climate skeptics, but also kind of pushing action, I'll never forget there being a town council meeting, we were trying to get the city to pass a climate emergency resolution and a young person walked up to the microphone and said, I don't wanna have kids because of climate change. And we've had so many testimonials from a bunch of adults talking about the facts and how much money the city would have to spend on repairing climate damages and how it's super important to get this policy passed. A young person went up there and said, I don't wanna have kids, it is morally imperative for you to pass this resolution. And all the city councilors started crying and they passed unanimously. And so that like almost a youth appeal really does something. So I do think there is a role there for that kind of intergenerational communication to climate skeptics on both the issue of climate itself being skeptical that exists and not wanting to take action being reluctant. Thanks, and we had an anonymous attendee weigh in with I think a plug for a little bit of, you mentioned that town meeting with some of the cause and effect on a local level. She said that this attendee says that that can work too, like looking at water conservation and how it'll affect water bills and availability for use that this person says. So she said, I don't know why I'm saying she but the anonymous attendee says, I have seen people be have success in getting septus involved in a climate in climate actions by looking at cause and effect on the local or personal level such as looking at water conservation and how it will affect water bills and availability for use. So thank you for that discussion. A good question here for I think for Anna probably from Nancy, but I'll of course leave it open for both of you. What are some good methods to invite high schoolers in my town of Topsum to become interested in town government committees, excuse me and join the energy committee on which she serves? We have public programs online but no youth participation yet. Yeah, so I think something, yeah, I think something you need to do is really analyze the structure of that case. So there's a few different things here. There's the communication of the committee itself. Are young people even aware that it's open for youth? Lots of people, we just assume that those spaces aren't for us. We assume it's not made for us. We assume that they're not welcome, that we're not welcome. And so just looking at those flyers or those, however you're spreading awareness about those committees, does it say high schoolers welcome? Like does it explicitly say ages 15 to X? Does it say you can get community service hours as a young person? Otherwise, we often ignore it because we just think that, oh, that's not, we have to be in school right now, like that's not meant for us. Because that's what we're told. Like when I was first really anxious about climate change and I wanted to get involved, people told me the best thing I could do was to stay in school. And to be clear, I am in, like I did stay in school. Like I am in school right now. But just to focus on school and when I grew up, I could deal with it. And so that's the messaging that we often get. And so what's really important is to look at your flyers and make sure that you're clear that involves youth. So that's the first thing. Second thing is, okay, so you've made it clear that the youth can be engaged, but are your meetings actually welcome to you? Like are they actually opening? Are they at good times for young people? Are they in the middle of the day like this? Which is often not a good time for young folks. Are they in the evenings, if someone can't drive, do they have the option to zoom in? So that sort of thing. And the last one is, are you just kind of doing generic outreach to email lists that youth may not be on or may not check their email or it could be ignored. So I recommend to Berkeley contacting, we really value this personal relationships to contacting a science teacher at a high school and saying, hi, I'm on the town energy committee and we would love more students. Your science teacher, are there any students in your class who are really passionate or worried about the climate crisis and can you connect me to them? Getting that direct communication one-on-one is really valuable and it really means a lot because youth, we love mentors. We love people to say like, this is an opportunity, we can take you under wing, you can join the energy committee rather than kind of just seeing a flyer somewhere. So those are my thoughts there. That's a great answer. But that was a little broad and rambling. That's great. John, do you have any thoughts on that? No, but I was gonna say part of what Anna said and if for a while I was on the conservation commission in Georgetown and why didn't I go to Morse High School in Bath and give a presentation to a class, it must have been a class that would have been interested in what the conservation commission is doing and invite people to participate. It's just we tend not to think of these things but I could have done that. And I think probably most of us could, Anna can, if people wanted to come to a high school and give a presentation about something, would we go through the principle or how would we practically, who would we call to do that? Do you have a thought? I mean, often you wanna go to the department chair. You wanna say to the science teacher, like the head of the science department, if there's space in your curriculum, we'd love to talk with you about the local impact of removing the dam from the Royal River. I just made that up, but that's the climate issue that's happening in my town right now. We're looking to remove the dam. And that'd be a great thing to tell high schoolers about that directly impacts us. You know, like we swim in that river, we fish in that river, like that means a lot. So probably a department chair. And then engaging youth in that presentation, not just going to talk at them but also saying who was interested, who was interested in helping organize this, what students would like to put on this presentation with us and then moving forward after that presentation, not just to tell you about the dam in the Royal River, but are there any students who are interested in volunteering with the effort to deconstruct it? Or who'd like to work on rebuilding a fish run and not engage in the dam projects. I'm kind of making up these examples, but that is sort of the basis there. It can't just be one and done. It's not like, you know, it's about the relationships. We talked to it earlier. You don't just give a presentation, like I mean, kind of like we are now and walk away and be like, okay, we're all good now. You continue with those relationships. You remember, like who was interested in that presentation? Who can I reach out to? And, you know, continue building up that until you have, you know, an authentic non-transactional relationship that leads to great actions. Great, we have a few more thoughts in the chat about this. Well, Nancy, the original question asker writes, good idea to reconnect with the local science teacher with whom I've done programs. I'm also on the regional school board, which does have two high school representatives, non-voting, but very helpful. Only recently have volunteers been able to come into the schools, right? The pandemic. Bill writes, does the phrase all ages welcome feel inclusive or would you suggest teens and young people welcome? Something similar. I would specifically say teens and young people welcome. That's just, you know, like I was saying earlier when I got that email from John, very explicitly asking me to come and work on the study. My first thought was he must have made a mistake. He must think I'm a college student. And, you know, just stating that high schoolers and above or even middle schoolers, I actually started doing climate work as a seventh grader. And my biggest barrier to opportunities was I couldn't go to conferences because I wasn't 16 or 18. But so yeah, that is definitely really important. And I really appreciate your consideration of that question. I like that question a lot. Yeah. I want to ask now about surprises. What were the, you know, I'm sure you both had some ideas going into this, you know, into the project and the sit-downs about what would happen. What were you most surprised about? John, I'll start with you. We talked about it in the presentation. I was surprised that I shouldn't have been, but I was surprised at how oblivious the older folks were on dominating our meetings. It's like, and it surprised me because we didn't even know it really. We weren't self-aware enough to know what we were doing. And it not only surprised me, but it shocked me. Fortunately, we corrected it, you know, we corrected it before the end of the first year, but it surprised me and shocked me because we didn't know we were making that mistake. And so I'm glad we learned it and I will never forget it. That's great. Yeah, what surprised me was how valuable kind of really getting to know each other was. I kind of assumed that this whole thing we wanted done, John would invite me to the study and then I'd go home. I'd be like, great, something I'm gonna put on my resume for the rest of my life, because that's a great opportunity. And then John invited me to join the Intrigen project. I was like, okay, this is the thing that's gonna happen for a year. I'll just do some calls, move on on. But the Intrigen project is still a huge part of my life. And now I'm still engaged with the bird study. And John and I have been talking about after the bird study, what do we do then? Are we gonna create a birding trail up north? How can I be engaged in that? It's just it's self-perpetuating process. And now there's all these possibilities that keep branching out ahead of me all from that one first contact of, let's do this together. So that really surprised me. Also, what surprised me was how valuable I found the meetings. To be very honest, I was like, okay, I'm just gonna sit on these hour Zoom meetings with some older folks and some younger folks and just get through it, maybe do my homework on the side. But that's not what they were. They were like lively, amazing discussions. We talked about the generational difference on how we thought about nuclear power as renewable energy. There was some conflict there and some great discussion generating from it. We cataloged our various assets and liabilities which was super interesting and more. So it was like really rich conversation, which was surprising. That's good. Now we start our meetings. We'd start our meetings, probably spend a half an hour just going around saying everybody, what's really exciting right now that it doesn't have anything to do with climate. We don't care what it has anything to do. What's meaningful to you this month or this week? It could be something you're excited about or something you worried about. Doesn't matter, just tell us. Tell us. And so it's again, we're building a relationship. We get to know, we know each other as people. This is not, Anna used the word transactional. It's not transactional anymore. It's non-transactional. And I think we can't emphasize enough how important just the relationship of trust is. It's really nothing new. Didn't we all know that before? But we don't apply it. We don't appreciate how powerful that is. Anyway. Yeah. Anna, has this experience made you more likely to reach out to an older generation? And maybe did you learn about how to do that differently if you're going to reach out? I just, this experience definitely did. Something, a project that I'm looking at now is seeing, could we potentially divest from fossil fuels, other main institutions like universities. And originally I would have only reached out to students, but now I'm reaching out to faculty because trying to see who's interested in these sorts of projects. How can I connect to students? And also, I guess again, reaching out in different ways. I'm really trying to implement more in person and one-on-one meetings. Because it's true, I can't drive. It is convenient for me to be in person, but it's inconvenient. But it leads to a richer and more meaningful discussion. And I think a better working relationship where it goes from being kind of acquaintances to real colleagues. So that's something that I've changed in response to the Intergen project. That's great. John, we talked about surprises. What about challenges? What was the hardest part of this for you? Well, that's interesting, because I'm thinking the hardest part was keeping my mouth shut. I had things I wanted to say. And I think, as I said earlier, when you've lived several decades and working in a professional situation, and you run into problem after problem after problem that you've had to solve, it could be a little thing, an organizational thing, or a bigger conservation challenge of some sort. You can't, after making decades of mistakes, you can't help but learn, that doesn't work. If you want to tell the younger folks, that's not going to work. But then you have to be careful and remember that maybe that's because I've been in my box and I just haven't thought about it differently. But that's been a challenge to just stay quiet and listen. But that's okay, we can all learn. Anna, do you have a big challenge? I think it can be challenging for me to remember that, well, sorry, I forgot how to phrase this. I think it can be challenging for me to remember that folks have probably gone through these situations before that we've, climate action isn't new, and we've been doing this for years, and that it's really important to lean on the older generation and say, what have you already worked on? What was successful? What wasn't? Because you don't want to make those same mistakes. And so that's been a challenge for me to remember and to take into action. I also wanted to flag for attendees that the article that we referenced briefly at the end of our presentation, which is a synthesis of all these lessons, I put it in the chat a few minutes ago. And if you weren't able to take notes or you're not a note taker, but you want to remember this later, almost everything we said was in that article, just in a less interactive and less fun format. But it's still a nice read. So if that is of interest and you want to save this for later or share it around and you don't want to look at the recording of this meeting, you can also check that out. Excellent. And I've also put the websites for our climate common and the main youth for climate justice in the chat. Those are ways, I assume, you can reach out to both John and Anna. There may be other ways as well. For follow-ups or to get involved, it'd be great. Nancy, if you want to and others, you want to get some youth into the town committees, that's awesome. And so let's act now. We're bringing it in right on time. I want to thank John and Anna so much for your participation. This has been, the work you do is fascinating. And I thank you for tackling it. I want to say quickly before people jump off is that this is part of a series of three webinars that we are hosting with Grossmart Main. Our next week, the 26th, our final presentation, same time Thursday at noon, we'll be hosting a webinar called Saving Money and the Planet, which will have revision energy and efficiency main on to talk about all the ways that, all the rebates available for weatherization or electronic or electric vehicles or solar, all the ways that you can save money and do your part to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. So please join us for that. I should have the link handy, but I do not. So it's on the main Audubon website. Again, I want to thank John and I want to thank Anna for your participation and thanks everyone for joining. Thank you, Nick. Have a good day. Bye, everybody.