Hello everyone. My name is Cindy Bank. I'm the Associate Director of the Program Impactal Policy Engagement, and I am happy to welcome you all to this event. I came to the Ford School after being in Washington DC for many years, being one in the last 22 years as one of the lobbyists for the University of Michigan. And one of the best experiences I had is when students, staff or faculty would come to DC to do advocacy work. And so I was really hoping to be able to present workshops like this to help you all learn how to be an effective advocate. And I am thrilled today to welcome our presenters from the Michigan League of Conservation Voters, and I'm really happy to have each and every one of you here. We actually, two of the folks, Kip and Nicholas, I understand are Ford School alums, they're 40s. Emily is also a University of Michigan alum and Joe and Emily are dear friends of the University of Michigan, right? The League's offices headquarters is actually here in Ann Arbor. But I'm going to turn it over to Kip right now. And thank you again for joining us and thank you Kip for helping put this all together. And thank you all for joining us this afternoon for what we hope is a fun and informative workshop about advocacy and organizing best practices, using some real world examples from our work at the Michigan League of Conservation Voters. And a special thanks to Cindy for helping to organize this. She's a very good friend of mine and a great person and it's been fun to plan. Thanks to Liz and Maryam too and everyone at the Ford School for helping put this on and facilitate everything. And also a big thanks to my team at Michigan LCV. We've had a very busy past few weeks and months leading up to the election. And everyone was enthusiastically a part of putting this presentation together. So hope you enjoy it. My name is Kiff Hampton Cindy mentioned I'm a partnerships manager at Michigan LCV, and I'll be serving kind of as a moderator for our presentation. And I joined this afternoon by Nick Huckapente, who is our government affairs director, Emily Magner, our political and outreach manager, Joe, our government affairs manager and Bentley Johnson, our senior partnerships manager. And as Cindy mentioned, Nick and I are both former 40s and Bentley is the UM grad and Emily is also. So we are all excited to be here next time we do this hopefully can be in person but this is still a lot of fun and we're really excited about this. So we're going to presentation by talking about, you know, just kind of basically why advocacy matters, why it's an important tool for all of us to utilize. And how we can can advocate and various and then we're going to go into kind of different forms of advocacy within the context of what we do and how our organization is structured. And then we're going to run through some real world examples of how our team has advocated for and against various pieces of legislation, executive orders, regulations about climate change and clean energy. And so we decided to focus on that issue issue obviously to big issue. But you know it's one of the most important things we work on and certainly one of the biggest threats that we faced as a country and a planet and know that you know, everyone here is concerned on that issue so we thought it would be a good one to use as an example as we run through this. Those would be some time at the end for some Q&A. So you can hold your questions till then and then we'll prompt you, you can put them in the chat box and we'll get to as many of those as we can. So now I'm going to pass it over to Emily to talk about why we can all can and all should advocate. Thanks, Kiff. So in a representative democracy, people have the power, the power to elect their representatives to hold their officials accountable and to support or oppose issues important to them. It requires that people participate in the process and it requires that we know we are powerful. And we do this in a lot of ways through voting for the people that we want to represent us and advocating for issues important to our community. Advocacy happens when individuals and community members seek out and take collective action around these issues and causes to influence decision makers and the policies they enact. Advocacy can take on many forms. From professional lobbyists like my colleagues, Nick and Joe, sitting down with elected officials to try to influence their decision on legislation impacting their constituents, to us rallying members through phone banks and canvassing events to make sure our lawmakers hear us loud and clear on the issues that matter. And all of this applies to all issue areas. A nonprofit organization may be educating legislators about the crisis of systematic gun violence. It could be students organizing a rally at the state capitol to support climate change legislation. Effective advocacy can also happen at home when an individual makes a phone call to their local representative urging them to vote for or against a certain bill. Advocacy matters because it is the primary path for community members to have their voice heard. And what better way to kick this off by sharing with you a real-life example from one of our leading grassroots organizers in the state, Sandy, who took action and shared her story to lawmakers in Washington D.C. in Lansing, everywhere she needs to be, she goes. And she talks about the PFAS contamination in her hometown. We'd like to share a little video for you. That might have been the internet might have gone out here. I'm not quite sure what's going on. Bear with us for one second and we'll figure this out. This is inevitable when you practiced it and it worked perfectly. It's the law of the zoom nature. Well, perhaps we should move on without the video. That's sad. We can we can come back to it maybe in a little bit and hopefully Zach can get back on and keep sharing the PowerPoint. But just so we don't keep you guys waiting there for too long. I'll keep going with the presentation for now. So, thanks, Emily. And hopefully, like I said, we can get back to Sandy in her video. She's an amazing organizer and she's really a champion for PFAS, which is such a critical issue in our state and all over the country. So hopefully we can see that. But that was great context. You know, I think that's why advocacy is so important and it's so accessible to all of us. You know, it's it's one of it's something that we all we all can do and all should do no matter our background, no matter the way in which we advocate. So, now I want to kind of transition and tee up the next part of our presentation by giving you guys some background on how we at Michigan LCV advocate. And to do that, I want to give you a little bit of context about Michigan LCV in our structure in case you're not familiar with us. So we are one of the leading nonpartisan political organizations working to protect our land, air and water in Michigan. We are unique in the sense that we are actually an umbrella of organization. So we're a 501c4 nonprofit, a 501c3 nonprofit and also have two political action committees. So this structure not only gives us the ability to advocate in various ways from lobbying to issue education, the campaign organizing and spending, but also allows us to speak, hopefully knowledgeably about different forms of advocacy that we practice every day. And in this setting, give us some background to give to you on various forms of advocacy. So we have a great slide for this that obviously we can't show you right now, because our PowerPoint is down, but I'll still walk you through sort of how we loop all various aspects of organization together in our work. So, a huge part of what we do when we spent the past, you know, six months or more on is working to elect conservation and environmental champions to the state legislature, the judicial branch and when there is a federal race to the governor's office, we're focused on Michigan, and we work closely with National LCB who does our federal work, but our focus is in Michigan. And so we do that work the election work primarily through our two packs. And we have, you know, run a coordinated campaigns working with specific candidates that we identify as, you know, going to be like, they're really great champions for our work. We also have independent expenditure part of our campaign work where we work not with individual candidates but on behalf of them. And so that's it's a lot of work at a whole organizations involved, especially made Emily's team. And that's a huge part of what we do in election years, especially and that ties into our educational work which is our 501c3 side of the organization and this takes many forms in an election year a big part of what we do. There is meet with candidates to just educate them on our issues and there's there's no partisan science to that there's no backing a certain candidate we offer meetings to candidates all over the state. I think we ended up in 66 remember right this year, and just talk their issues and benefited that it's not only that they learn about our issues and what's important, but also for us gives us, you know, potentially an ally. And if they're elected as someone that, you know, they know our issues they know that that we care about them and we know that they are more knowledgeable about this issues because of that. So that's our C3 work and throughout and throughout even non election years we, we work just, you know, with not just elected officials but other organizations and community leaders to educate people about about our issue. And then the last part is our C4 work and this is really our accountability work and so a huge part of what we do is is hold elected officials accountable for their record on their environmental votes. We're talking about the legislature and we do similar things with the initial branch and executive branch. So it's primarily works through our legislative scorecard which is a digital accountability tool that lives on our website. And we literally track votes of every sitting state senator and state representative on their voting record for environmental issues and then we can give them a grade and score and make that public and and that way hold accountable. And so we also do positive accountability for a lot of our champions that do really good work, government, governor's recent executive order on climate change being being one of one of those examples. And that accountability, you know work ties into who we endorse in election year and so our C4 team government affairs team Nick and Joe who you hear a lot from today, determine what candidates we endorse an election year and then that moves back into our electoral work. This circle and again if we could see the slide you would see that it really is a circle with arrows that are green. That looks like a recycle thing, but we don't have that right now but anyways that's that's our organization, kind of in a nutshell. And so now we're going to dive more deeply into those aspects of our work and we're going to start with our legislative advocacy work. And for that, I'm going to pass it over to Nick. Thanks. Thanks so much kiff and, you know I first want to say I cherished my time at the University of Michigan and particularly at the Ford School public policy. It was invaluable I can't do every single day I apply lessons learned from the Ford School I apply the processes the techniques and the substance of the policy issues and just found that period of time in my life to be a wonderful one, and the only reason I'm in the position I am right now is because of that time so I'm very happy and honored to be back in virtual form today presenting to the board school and encourage you all that have an interest in public service to follow it because it is a rewarding one. Even when things aren't going your way sometimes you win and sometimes you lose and that is true in the environmental sector certainly. I'm going to speak about one piece of those three just described by kiff, the cycle of accountability, again elections issue education and lobbying and I'm going to quickly give some more background here on lobbying and accountability. But as we know you know lobbying is seeking to influence a decision makers position or perspective on a specific bill, a policy, or action that you support or oppose. You know, in our case, Michigan LCV that usually happens in Lansing, and it involves elected officials and lawmakers but it also involves appointed officials administrative staff and the executive office. And it happens in multiple forms in person by text, email, you know over the phone and private and in public meetings and in hearings. We also put pressure on through the media. Now effective lobbying doesn't just happen at an ask phase you don't show up in a lawmaker's office and just, you know, drop a big ask on the decision with them it involves relationship and trust building. And just like any human relationship. It's difficult to communicate effectively, if you're in a transactional relationship with them. So, you know, it happens iteratively over time and one can work to build those relationships and there's all sorts of techniques which we'll share today to do that. We engaged in recently I can just share you know after the election, one of the first things that we did was we called and congratulated the winners a lot of them were returning incumbents that we already had relationships with. And others were not and that that at moment to say hey, you know what you saw how hard you worked during the election, and it deserves being recognized and congratulations on your victory. It's been a great day take this moment to celebrate. And that's it. It didn't come with, you know, and asked to sit down and talk about clean energy. That was the end of it and those types of interactions. In overtime support to building that relationship. Now when it comes to making an ask an effective lobbyist has a lot to consider to really look at all the angles. And there's going to want to know why it's a good idea to go with us substantively. They're going to have varying interpretations of the politics in situation. You know, does the district we represent care about the issue do they have strong businesses that are lobbying on your behalf or maybe in an opposition or in a slightly a skew manner. You know, we're ideological philosophy, you know, we talk a lot about Democrats and Republicans but there's a whole assortment of ideologies within those libertarians are present in our state capital, for example, and don't neatly fit into the Democratic Republican to divide. It's critical to know those things going into a meeting, and, you know, to compel your audience to look at things in a way that will tap into that background that they find to be the most pressing, instead of influences on them. There are other ways to maximize organizational influence. It's not just the lobbying in person by professionals that works. It's very compelling to connect the lawmaker, the decision maker directly with their constituent. You know, we had the video about Sandy that didn't work unfortunately for us today but who is in their district that can put a human face to a story. That's one thing when I talk about the parts per trillion that PFAS represents in a water supply. It's another thing when Sandy speaks about how her and her husband had cancer and it directly related in the science to the correlation with the PFAS chemical in the water supply. And to tell that story from a personal perspective puts a face and human emotions to the facts that an organization is responsible for presenting. So that's just a little bit of a flavor of that, you know, one of those three pieces, the lobbying and accountability flavor. And I'm going to hand it off to Emily here to talk about another piece of that accountability triangle that Kiff referred to, which is community organizing and advocacy. Emily. Thanks, Nick. People can probably imagine Nick and I's work really goes hand in hand. If he's telling us as a professional lobbyist that stories are the most compelling tools for them to share with the lawmaker, it's on us who work directly with the community to connect them with those stories. Now, we all know that the halls of Lansing aren't the only place to create change for our state. That power come from our backyard. In an ideal democracy, the legislature's work is reflective of the work that must be done in our communities across the state. That being said, this work can manifest in a few different ways. So we may be working to engage the community, for instance, during lame duck, and we may be asking these communities to oppose imminent legislation. This is specific, and it's focused on a piece of legislation. Or we may be in a community focusing on large scale capacity building by organizing around an issue area rather than a specific piece of legislation. So we know that the issues that folks in our state face vary greatly depending on where you live, from water shutoffs in Detroit to shutting down line 5 to building support for PFAS maximum contaminant levels restrictions in our state. This is accomplished by a few different methods of interacting with the community, largely considered best practices. So to educate our neighbors or to ask them to join us in taking action, we phone bank, we knock on doors of the canvas, or we attend a rally as an entry point to the movement. This work is slow and steady, and it takes many of us doing it together to make it effective. But when we do that work together, I can tell you this, in my career, I've been doing this work for about 14 years. I have seen communities move mountains on behalf of bills and on behalf of issues. And so by engaging and educating the public, we're expecting change that it will still likely in fact lead to legislative or electoral wins on behalf of our issue area. But how do we build a movement? It's not an accident. And I think the whole lot more than sending in postcards or signing petitions or even showing up to one protest. It's methodical and it's premeditated. Organizations like ours invest year round in the leadership already existing in our communities. And it will take this type of continual year round investment to affect long term change. And so let's talk about how we do it. The leadership ramp of engagement is generally the gold standard for how do you start from talking to two people to having 50 people ready to take action. And so these are methods for building genuine non transactional relationships that we foster. And when I say non transactional, it doesn't mean that they don't do things on behalf of our movement or our organization. It means that it's a reciprocal relationship that as you can see here, you know, it isn't just one sided. We may start out by meeting at a public event. And then what we do is we, you know, in this case, I'm going to use a specific example, because I'm a big believer in specific examples is I went to an event organized by high schoolers around client. It's called IP VR in person volunteer recruitment. From there, I said, Hi, we find the petition and join the Michigan League of Conservation voters. And they're like, Yeah, who are you? Let's do it. And then they sign up and then I call each of them within 24 hours. And I say, Hey, do you want to grab a virtual coffee? You know, let's talk. Let's let's know each other. And then they're like, Hey, you're not the worst. Why don't you come talk to our student group? Then of course I do and then more people find out and then I invite them in to say, Okay, you know, we have to actually enter that data from the event that you through so that we can call people and invite them into the movement. So then I've trained these high schoolers on how to do data entry in the van, which is the voter activation network. From there, they phone banks, they did a volunteer recruitment phone bank for a canvas where they invited people to knock doors and then in this case it was in support of the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. And so they were so excited that they got all these adults to say yes knocking doors they decided they wanted to do it too. And so they knocked these doors and all the while I'm getting to know these young people. I am listening for their superpowers. I am learning about them. I am basking in their light and reminding them how powerful and incredible they are. It's a reciprocal genuine relationship. They had never even heard of Lizzo and I made sure to bridge that gap. So from there, they knocked doors, they're getting comfortable, they're understanding that there's processes to activism.  What do you think about attending our train the trainer training? It's a mouthful. And they're like, Okay, that's cool. And so we train them how to do a training. And then we have them are young people, they were both 16 years old, so preventing a top training that we did a pressure on politicians, how to talk to your lawmaker. And from there we have them training adults on how to tell their story of self, how to take the passion that they have for an issue area and translate it into a meaningful moving conversation with a lawmaker. From there we kept investing. We invited them to more community organizing opportunities. We re-engaged them after a break. It's all very methodical. And you know, we write them letters of recommendation and then it starts over because you know what, they invite their friends to join. And so it is incredible to see what happens when we do this work. And so as you can see, it's very intentional. We're intentionally growing this movement. And understanding this leadership ramp of engagement is actually one of the biggest struggles that I've seen young community organizers and advocates in the field do. This is an area that nonprofits really, really struggle with. And so it's all about creating those avenues for community members to be heard and to take on leadership roles. And to be clear, all forms of taking action are not created equal. I've highlighted a few of them here, which are widely acknowledged as the most impactful methods of engagement. Community phone banks, canvassing door-to-door, calls to legislators, lobby day events. The closer you can get to talking to someone in person, the more effective you are at communicating to them what you need them to remember. And I also want to add that there is a difference between advocacy and activism. Advocacy is strategic. It's a social science. It isn't a one-time event, and it builds off of institutional work to leverage the most power for a community as possible. It's all about creating opportunities to invite community members to take meaningful action on behalf of their own community. And now I'm going to hand it over to Joe. Thank you, Emily. And you guys are hearing from one of the best organizers I've worked with in my years in politics, Emily Magner. So you guys have a treat today. So I want to build upon what Nick was saying. Lobbying is important, absolutely, and that's a lot what Michigan LCB does to advocate for our interests. But we don't stop there. Just as important to lobbying is actually meeting with these legislators and candidates to simply educate them on an issue without specifically asking their position to vote a certain way on the bill. It's perfectly legal to do, perfectly legal for 501c3 organizations to do this kind of work, and they do. The types of groups you may think of as non-profit actually do have the ability to meet with decision makers and educate them simply on the policies and issues that may end up becoming legislation or executive action in the future. You know, it's not lobbying. There's plenty of space between the two. You know, sometimes the issues we work on are complicated, especially for legislators who come from a variety of different backgrounds before they're legislators. Many different professions, I mean, you name it, we have, it's cliche to say for sure, but we do have nurses, we have insurance salesmen, we have, I think we have a dairy farmer in the legislature. So they're coming from all sorts of backgrounds. A lot of them just simply don't have the scientific background that's really needed to dive into the policy on our issues. We happen to advocate for environmental conservation issues, which are technical times. One of the most glaring examples of this in our world right now is educating them on PFAS and water quality. We spent hours and hours educating candidates on PFAS and its effect on public health. What we can do about it to solve the crisis, what is it in a nutshell? You know, the best example, what recently happened was based on our educations on PFAS, we had a candidate up in northern Michigan, a public candidate running for office. We sat down with them for an hour, just simply talked about PFAS as a nonpartisan, didn't ask him to give us anything. He ended up building that into a candidate form two days later. Reference Star meeting was well versed on all these intricate positions that we laid out to him. And that's an example of when just simple issue advocacy can be effective. I mean, you can have candidates build this into their campaign platforms just based on knowledge. So for us, that's not just PFAS, you know, obviously we have issues like clean energy, air quality. All these require some scientific understanding that we provide to help decision makers come to a final conclusion. It helps prime them, you know, to adequately address these issues if they're ever put before them. So they're not doing this work on the back end, they can be ready to go for the next session. It also helps to simply elevating our priorities in their minds. You know, once it's a priority for them that might trickle up to their leadership, their legislative leadership, who may build it into the legislative agenda, which is going to help us out down the road as well. So just want to highlight the importance of issue education in addition to lobbying. I think they pair one and the same. I think they're both necessary and required to be effective. And with that, I'm going to get you back over to Kiff and he's going to set the stage for what real world advocacy looks like. Thanks, Joe. Thanks Emily and Nick, too. That was a great run through of sort of different forms of advocacy and how, you know, with some examples mixed in there of how we do it at MLCV. Before we go to this next section, though, we did want to loop back and show you this video of Sandy. Again, one of our, one of our, you know, best grassroots advocates that we know and so I think it's really worth showing and ties into a lot of, you know, the Nick Joe and Emily, which we've been talking about. And apologies again for the snafu there and the PowerPoint. Now we know what this whole virtual teaching thing is like. So if your professors have done this, then cut this from slack. So let's run the video and then we'll come back to this next section in a second. In September, advocates across Michigan headed to Washington D.C. to urge the U.S. Senate to act on PFOS and protect us from this dangerous forever chemical and our drinking water. These are their stories. The three of us came here and just made the decision to come here on our own, not connected with any group or anything. We wanted to put a face to this issue that has some serious health crises and serious property value losses. What I want my elected officials to do is to design a comprehensive way to address this and fund that accordingly. Once the Flint lead crisis came out, it had to be a concerted effort by everybody. And this is going to have to be the same way on a federal level. Five to ten years we can decide if it's a hazardous chemical.  The joke around my neighborhood is they're waiting for me to die anyway before they do anything. So I think that's kind of absurd. I work in government actually. I work for community mental health. It doesn't need to take that long. When there's a crisis, when Katrina hits you can manage it. You can respond. So they can respond to this. That's just a delay. So there we go. Yeah, we're closer to Sandy and she's a true champion on the PFAS issue. And she's been personally affected very much. Her husband passed away from cancer. She's had complications as well. But she's really been an advocate in Michigan and nationally for identifying this as a dangerous substance that's all over the place and something needs to be cleaned up and addressed and identified in various water, food, packaging, all the ways that it comes into our lives. And so we definitely wanted to get that to you. And it really does show, you know, going to DC and advocating and just as a person who's been affected is such an effective thing to do. So God, we got to do that. So now we're going to move on to the next kind of part of our presentation. And we're going to run you through kind of a real world example or examples from our work at MLCV about what advocating looks like. And this is going to take us up to the Q&A session at the end. So coming up, Nick, Joe, Emily and Bentley will walk you through kind of the process of advocacy from start to finish highlighting work that they and their teams have focused on in recent months and years to combat the ongoing climate crisis and our kind of clean energy work more broadly. So Nick and Joe will speak to the legislative and lobbying aspect of our work. Emily will talk about the importance of community-based organizing and Bentley will give us an insight into what it's like to work with a legislative staff member. He used to work for Senator Peters and so has a lot of insight on that. And as we go through this, I just want to, you know, point out that, you know, we're, as I mentioned at the beginning, kind of an organization of multiple organizations. And so we'll talk to the, you know, to the work and the organization side on the legislative side. But it's important to remember that these things, you know, in the way we advocate really happened together.  They're done it really in concert. So whether it's Emily taking direction from Nick on an issue that we really, you know, want to focus on based on a piece of legislation that we want to support. And then Emily goes and gets community support and builds a coalition and really gets, you know, voice behind that bill to support or oppose it. And the other times Emily will be touching Nick and say, you know, there's an issue that's really important in this community. You know, can you go talk to the state representative and, you know, try to try to work with them on that side of it. So just keep that in mind as we walk through this. This is all, you know, when done well done and cohesively. So now I'll turn it over to Nick to get us going. Thanks, kid. I'm going to jump in and handle a section here if you don't mind. Now, I think the first step in the process here, we're going to need to identify the issue to focus on and why it's a problem. I think that's the first step before we get any further on strategy. I think we identify what we're looking at here. You guys can probably guess we had a machine LCD spend a ton of time thinking about clean energy resources on climate policy resilient communities to to to adapt to climate change.  In Michigan, we've seen some of the wettest years on record recently. We've seen high lake levels causing coastal erosion, extreme heat days, extreme storms. You guys remember the polar vortex from a couple of years ago. We contribute a lot of this to climate change. But as big as the problem it is, is it is climate change is also a massive opportunity if addressed properly. We spend a bulk of time advocating for strong policy to facilitate the development of clean energy, energy efficiency and electric vehicles. Clean energy policies are good for the air and water, say break payers money can grow jobs and opportunities in Michigan, and also, you know, reduce the US dependency on foreign oil. So it's important to remember we can't view these issues in a vacuum. When we're dealing with them, we need diverse strategies and approaches to solve the climate crisis and any other environmental issues we advocate for. So, you know, now that we've identified the goal in this case climate policy, we need to determine what we need what we want policy policymakers to do to solve the problem. So fortunately, in this case, I don't want to say we're cheating here but we had Michigan also be had some really strong existing relationships with government witness administration, who we knew would be the main target to move this climate policy. So we did play a huge role in helping to elector in 2018 that helped some of these relationships. We knew she had an existing commitment to address climate change and other environmental issues that we care deeply about in Michigan. But even with her commitment to solving the climate crisis, she and her team around her, they still need some strategic and technical support to craft the environmental agenda during her first term, while also embedding climate change into that agenda. So, you know, we supported the support we provided, including recommendations, we put together a package called what we call the environmental roadmap that her advisors have been using for the first two years of her time in office to keep it on track to address our state's most pressing public health and conservation issues. With so much going on in the Whitmer administration, elected officials in general's probably can guess at this time fighting off pandemic and a response. And it's hard to deal with. It's really important we keep them on track and stay in constant contact with them, keep them accountable while urging them to really stay on track for our agenda as much as possible. Our team does check-ins with high level staff within the administration on a weekly basis to review policy made policy outlines, like, you know, for example, in that roadmap I mentioned that we provide and we also offer additional support and technical expertise so whatever they need they can lean on us. So lastly, once we determine what we want the policymaker to do, we need to know our target audience and determine, you know, who the authority is that who has the authority to achieve our intended goal. So who in the Governors Administration did we initially focus on? Well, again, we were fortunate to have some really critical relationships. One of the governor's key policy advisors actually her environmental policy advisor used to be a Michigan LCD staffer so that definitely helped. So she was front and center with helping craft the administration's environmental policy, as well as the main driver behind crafting the climate EO. We also had existing relationships with some of the other governor's hiring staff or deputy chief of staff. We had relationships with her dating back to her time in the legislature. Also, a lot of other partner organizations we've worked with ended up in the administration. So this is a perfect example of the importance of maintaining these long relationships, long term relationships. The professional relationships you build in Lansing or DC or wherever you will end up working, maintain those.  They may be your enemies opposed to you on an issue one day and you may find them as an ally under their issue the next. So with that, I'm going to give it back to Emily. She's going to discuss how to best target community members and constituents to help us achieve these shared policy goals. I'd like to remember this. People come because they care about your mission and they stay because they care about the people. I want to look for a back to the leadership ramp of engagement again. That is the recipe for continued relationships with local advocates. And in this case, that example was with young people fostering these types of relationships are critical to the movement. Since creating that on ramp, those high schoolers have multiplied. They have taken on critical volunteer leadership roles during the election, one of them completed more than 60 volunteerships. They are literally so good that they can launch phone banks, they can do tech support, they're incredible. They couldn't vote, but they knew their power. And we couldn't have done that effectively with now knowing and honoring our audience. We need healthy grassroots movements to create a widespread culture of support, which matters when we start to see climate focused legislation. Citizen led climate movements and a changing world view on climate on the climate crisis has played a big role in someone like Governor Gretchen Whitmer being able to have an executive order that hits so close to home. And I'm going to hand it back over to Joe to talk a little bit more about what the process looks like on their end. So now that we know our goals and our targeted individuals that we think are influential to getting our intended goals, we've got to find those opportunities in the right timing to achieve these goals. So, you know, in our case, I go back to this example of the climate deal we knew, given the party controlling the Michigan legislature right now really didn't have climate action on the top of their agenda, it'd be really difficult to do legislatively. So we really honed in on executive action and administrative action solving this problem. So first we had to figure out the governor's agenda, her priorities or timeline or can only look like for the first few years, particularly this year we targeted this year in 2020. As of the year we really thought we could get the climate deal rolled out. And we hope to have it rolled out to be honest at the beginning of the year beginning of 2020. But you know with the graveyard of policy priorities that that is 2020 took us quite longer than we expected to get that rolled out. But we quickly shifted to the governor's team on the climate deal, not only from an environmental angle, but we pitched it through a clean jobs and recovery lines. And it was so many people filing unemployment claims throughout the state. We, we thought the governor could have some great messaging through, you know, getting people back to work getting him good and high paying jobs getting people retrained to work on clean energy systems. So that was kind of our pitch. It did help. You know, we kind of pointed to the Biden campaign. They rolled out a climate policy plan as well throughout the summer so we said look I mean they're dealing with with pandemic response and it's doable right you can have both both messages at the same time so we also partnered with a number of organizations who shared our climate interest and this is where coalitions are important. Not just environmental groups we got outside of the traditional allies and traditional coalition members. But we really got together with non traditional folks the business interests the the solar panel installers the conservative energy folks with free market principles we got all them together. Had everyone pressure the administration as much as possible in a friendly manner, but we really wanted to roll in the same direction get all these interest aligned, and to have the most pressure of administration as possible to get this done fairly quickly so take away here I think as coalitions do matter and be creative with the coalitions you build. It doesn't have to be in your specific sector. I mean we don't stick to environmental organizations when we do have a great relationship with them in Michigan but if you really want to be effective you got to build those broader coalitions here. So, I'll get back to Emily one more time and over passing this back and forth here but I'll get back to Emily she's going to talk about building these strong coalitions through community organizing. Yeah, just a couple things to add to that. So, you know, I attended the University of Michigan School of Social Work. And so I come to this field with a social work perspective and background. And so something that you would hear me if we work together saying over and over and over again is we have to meet people where they're at. So show up to meetings, introduce yourself to people, go to rallies and bring a sign up form for you to call people back to later engage them on their issue. Be aware of the space that you take up, be respectful. How you enter a community matters and how you build coalitions matter. Be aware of your privilege. Had I not known that it was my job to pass the mic to the youth at their very first climate strike, they would have dismissed me. And they wouldn't have asked me to come to talk to their student group. They asked me to speak at the event. I didn't go to them to claim my space. When I spoke I reflected back to them that they are powerful. These are really nice things to do but they're also strategic things to do. And maybe again those couple days a year where where they are really bombing about not being able to vote but the more we can remind them that they have ways that they can contribute to the world of advocacy better. And I think another thing to note about coalitions is it's really worth noting that there is a lot of room for community collaboration. We aren't competing. We are building together. It's important to keep that centered in your work. Artificacy and community organizing is all about utilizing best practices and not reinventing the wheel. And this really extends to how we find the folks we're going to do this work with. And I'm going to bounce it back to Joe. So, yes, legislative champions are what we think about. When we're talking about building power, when we're talking about policy making, having some policy wins, we always think about finding those legislative champions, getting something past the legislature assigned by the executive. What happens when you don't have those legislative champions? And I'll keep going back to this example here. As I mentioned, we didn't have a ton of influential legislative champions that were in the majority's leadership that were lining up to really solve the climate crisis. It just wasn't there. And we knew that. So who were our champions? So we really steered, again shifting to our administrative strategy, not just the governor herself, but we took a holistic look at this. How do we take a comprehensive look at the state government in general? So we partnered with the director of EGLE, the environment, Great Lakes and Energy, director of DNR, Department of Natural Resources, and then Department of Health and Human Services. You can write a last show, too. Michigan is having internet trouble today, Brian. Yeah, this is crazy. Sorry, everybody. This is what happens in these Zoom presentations. So, well, Emily, we can, Nick and Joe can hop back into this when he, when he gets back on, but do you want to go to the coalition building part? I'm ready for that. So messaging is a really important part of how we do the work that we do. And so how do we identify a message that would be effective in bringing on partners, volunteers, community members? How do we do that? You know, when we're working with a coalition, I think it's really, really critical to the health of that coalition to be able to form consensus around language and a healthy process for discourse and decision making amongst that coalition. I can tell you this from experience. People struggle with this. I can tell you that I've seen it done really well. So my favorite example of a really healthy coalition is the work being done around shutting down Line 5 with the Oil and Water Don't Mix Coalition. It's a hybrid group of local and statewide organizations that collaborate with incredible respect and incredible efficiency. You know, they move as one unit. They have an entire process for how they communicate, how they agree upon messaging, and how that messaging is delivered. And it's really been very effective for youth really across those organizations because of that culture of consensus. And so that being said, now I'm going to go ahead and hand it over to Bentley to talk to us about how we approach decision makers. Thank you, Emily. I appreciate that. Yeah. And as a recovering Senate staffer for Senator Gary Peters, you know, hindsight is really helpful. But while I was in the, while I was in the senator's office, you know, he, he is a decision maker and the staff is inundated with information. And a major challenge for him was filtering through the information, filtering through the different messages and determining what that criteria is to make a decision and very tough decisions or very minor decisions, and then like, you know, at whether to join an event or, or what to order at the event, like what flavor of frozen yogurt to order, which is the type of decision that makes V by think the most realistic political show. But, you know, what are those things that they're looking at that they're looking for when they're making a decision. There's really no substitute for all the pieces that my teammates have have laid out today, but you can work through the office, and you can get their attention. And one of the best ways to do that is to go through the staffers, and staffers are, you know, likely to be knowledgeable. In many ways more knowledgeable than, than the decision makers on a particular issue because they may be specialized within the office. But with that said, they likely don't have a deep understanding of the particular issue, especially in you may have there's a good chance that you'll be more knowledgeable.  So, all the more important to apply the lessons of relationships matter so as you're approaching a staffer and a lawmakers office I think there's a few things to keep in mind to get off on the right foot. You know, know that there are a lot of staffers that have different roles. So it's important to understand who you're talking to and reach the most appropriate staffer you know the staffer that covers the particular committee that your bill is going through, or something like that. It's also important to approach each interaction as an opportunity to work together, you know, just like if you were to try and build a relationship anywhere in your life. You don't want to start out, you know, super aggressive and combative, but I think you're looking to come across as polite and friendly, but firm, you know, and you're there to, you're there to advocate. And then, as we've talked about have a clear purpose a clear ask, and but be ready to defend your view, you know, don't be surprised that there's a back and forth. And that you're, you know, you're questioned or put on the spot, but, you know, be honest about what you know and what you don't know and that that credibility will carry forward.  And so, another way to earn the respect and trust of staffers and become that resource is help make their job as easy as possible. They're trying to do a lot they've got a lot on their plate they're doing a lot of meetings. And at the end of the day, they need to be able to distill down an issue to basically a one page memo that they put in front of their boss, you know, the decision maker the senator in my case. And so that the senator can read in a short time get to the heart of the issue and make a decision, or go back and get some more information but so what is that kind of criteria, you know, distilling it down. It's things like a brief like, let's take for instance, cosponsoring a, you know, a climate action bill or clean energy bill, you know, a brief over a brief overview of the bill obviously is necessary description, but also who asked for for the support, you know, Michigan LCV requested your support on this bill, the lead cosponsors are this the existing cosponsors are this here's the impact on Michigan on Michigan and people in Michigan. They also want to know where the other stakeholders are you know so and so supportive of it, but you know so and so against it and you've got to kind of weigh those. The cost benefit and the pros and cons just like any other big decision in someone's life. And you have to know, like Joe was talking about the process the procedural posture. You know the bill was introduced on this date referred to this committee, the market was scheduled, you know, next week so we have an opportunity to, you know, maybe shape it a little bit.  And so understanding the, the procedural posture will help determine what other steps you need to do to get across the finish line. And at the end of the day they make that recommendation. But I think a lot of us that have have done advocacy or even people that have just dabbled in it a little bit, feel like, Well, I feel like are they really listening paying attention. Like, I felt like I was I made a, you know, I sent a letter, I, you know, got a form response. And what are some of the best tactics to cut through the noise and to get heard, you know, letters and postcards like Emily said, you know, not really that effective because, you know, they get a ton of them, put them in a stack, send a form response. You got to have, you got to have that either the time on the phone, and really kind of disrupt their, you know, usual day. Or find creative ways for that one on one time that face time, more tricky in a pandemic but certainly possible. And also do little tricks or shortcuts like, you know, if it's a if it's a DC lawmaker, you know, go to the district office they're not as used to getting as many calls, or meeting requests, and you might be able to get up the chain, a clicker that way, or show up to a decision makers town hall in their district, where they may see the same 10 people every time. But if you show up and show up in numbers, that'll get their attention for sure. And then other tools like, like media, our media pressure is just absolutely critical. Social media can be really effective tool, but social media is also very noisy. There's a lot of trolls, there's a lot of hot takes on social media. So I think it has to go along with building that relationship and all the other pieces. And then the last thing I'll say is messengers and we got, we got to that a little bit with with talking about coalitions but you have to think about the messengers that are going to resonate with your decision, your targeted decision maker, whether it's a business or a community leader. And we really are understanding and the environmental movement I think especially is needing to reckon with, we need to be having community leaders, especially impacted community leaders, those disproportionately affected by toxic contamination, particularly in black and brown communities, indigenous communities at the forefront because they are the ones that are literally a matter of life and death so all that factors into, you know, the most effective messengers and to talk a little bit, you have a couple other tips about messaging to volunteers and community leaders. I'm going to pitch it back to Emily here. Thanks Ben. So on our end in this world, it's really important once again, what is my mantra, meet people where they are at. And that absolutely applies to messaging. Most of us aren't policy wonks. That is just the truth of the matter. And one of the biggest barriers that we have to regular folks getting involved is that they don't think they know enough about policy or politics to impact those systems that are impacting them. So fun fact. Advocacy is actually kind of a dirty word. Most people don't use the word advocacy in their daily lives. It's kind of considered jargon. And when you ask focus groups to reflect on the word advocacy, they think it's elitist. They don't like it. So when you're communicating with volunteers or community members, you need to be using accessible language that people identify with that will deliver your message from anyone from a high schooler to an 85 year old who is wanting to get involved. If the language isn't accessible, you can mean well all day long, but you aren't inviting people in effectively. This goes back to one of the community norms that we use in organizing, which says assume best intentions but honor the impact. That norm applies to many different ways on how we do this work. But in this context, it's especially important. How do we execute these these forms of communication, you know, one is find your community and do the hard work together. I said earlier, people come for the mission and they stay for the people. You have to create genuine connections because at the end of the day, we're all passionate people who want to see the world better. And this isn't just about getting a call in this isn't just about numbers. This is about making a genuine connection for me to you saying we can do this when we go together. And so again, that's why we lean on community organizing best practices to make sure that we're keeping folks engaged. For instance, before every phone bank, we talk about the importance of the work, and we center ourselves on the mission. And that's why at the end of every phone bank, we debrief as a team to celebrate each other's wins and to shake off the difficult conversations. Because, fun fact again, this work is really hard, especially in this political environment. It's very polarized. There are people who aren't thrilled about getting a political phone call. Can you believe it? I can. But we know that this work is hard. One person may have done one shift and maybe they only had two good conversations with voters, but maybe someone else had a few more. It's about understanding the importance of collective work, flow and study, because those conversations and those votes add up. It's not just about what you've accomplished in your hour or two hours volunteering. It's about what we were able to accomplish together. You know, this work is all about finding ways to not rebuild the wheel. Whatever issue area matters to you, there is likely someone like me out there looking for you. So get involved with issues with organizations like ours that exist to protect. Take collective action. Do the hard work and build community as you go. You know, I want to kind of reflect back earlier to Bentley saying, do they listen? And I'm going to be frank. Sometimes they do. And sometimes they don't. But either way, your time and your energy spent on sharing with them what their community thinks on an issue is of critical importance, whether or not they agree with you and whether or not they're going to change their vote. Be willing to talk to them. And I would actually like to show you how easy it is to make a phone call to your lawmaker. Not to put you on the spot, but Kiff, would you mind coming off mute and do a very quick role play with me? Of course not, Emily. That sounds great. Thank you. Okay, so I'm calling you. I'm going to go to the office. How can I help you? Hi, my name is Emily Meagher, and I live at Bloody Block Street in Traverse City, Michigan. And I'm calling today to thank Governor Whitmer for her climate focused executive order addressing climate change matters to me, because someday I might want to reproduce. And in that case, I would very much like an earth that is habitable. So it really means a lot to me that she did this. So I just want to say thank you. Absolutely. Thank you for calling. I'll be sure to let her know. Awesome. Thank you so much for your time. You too. Have a great day. Yeah. This takes like 30 seconds, but I can tell you, when these calls come in, fast, it matters. You know, as I'm sure any of these guys who have worked in Lansing can attest, legislators and even the governor take note when their phone starts to ring. Why? Because it's disruptive. They have to stop what they're doing to record the reason behind your call. And this is an extremely important tactic, not just when we're thanking someone to reinforce the behaviors we want to see more of. But this is really important during times like lame duck, which is often used as an opportunity to ram incredible amounts of often harmful legislation through the legislature. In those cases, us, you know, us phone banking and calling into those communities where there's a lawmaker who's undecided on their vote can actually be the difference between a win and a loss. Following that process is important for our communities to take action. So I have to pass it over to Joe. Thanks again, Emily. And sorry, I lost you guys for a little bit, but I'm back. Thank you for bearing with me. You know, I don't have a lot to add here. I do want to build quickly on what Bentley said about relationships and give you some examples of how our team has continued to leverage those relationships and our example that I will continue to harp on. So after we we built our relationships, we've made an effective pitch based on our goals that we figured out to stop there. Not quite. I mean, there's one more step, maybe two more steps. So even after this time, my healthy climate plan was rolled out, we continue to offer our expertise and connections to the administration, particularly when it came to one piece of that, which is the climate council. So the executive order established a climate council, which requires the governor to appoint people to that council. So we want to be as influential as possible to that council and hope to achieve this by finding some strong candidates in our relationship network that share our values that fit what they're looking for as a potential appointment and then share those names with the with the governor's team. So we've done that the last couple months here since the rollout. That's one way that the relationships with not only with with that target I mentioned, but also your broader network, finding those those names would be critical for us. You know, finally, I guess I'd say to keep that relationship strong, we've also we've planned to thank the public, the governor publicly a couple of different ways we can do this. We planned a series of C three non partisan ads just highlighting her work, just so the public can see what she's doing. Her team can see and our appreciation, kind of positive reinforcement positive accountability we call it. It's always best practice it's always good to have that thank you for something for a policymaker that did something you agree with. Again, the accountability doesn't have to be spending 1000s on ads. It could be as simple as tagging them on social media publicly taking them for an awesome meeting or an awesome vote that you think that's perfectly okay, or just, you know, ready an email sharing sharing your, your agreement on that issue or you know your opposition to there could be negative accountability so I just want to reinforce that that that's always good practice. You know, once you have a big policy when you're not done there, finish it off with some with some accountability. And with that, one last time get it back to Emily, and she's going to explain how to keep these members and volunteers engaged. Yeah, you know, again, just like, just like Joe said, being you know, thanking folks is really important. But at the community level, we just want to make sure that at this point we're still updating our members are volunteers who worked hard on this issue. We continue the momentum that we've gained for building movements and taking action together, leading up to the passage of legislation and executive orders. And that's what's lost within our communities. And at that point we just continue to engage folks and continue to bring them up the leadership ramps of engagement. Thanks Emily. And thanks Joe and Bentley and Nick you guys are awesome. That wraps our, the bulk of our presentation. This is a lot of information and apologies again for the, the internet issues there but hopefully it wasn't too choppy and this is informative and you guys learn something about effective advocacy and the work that we do. At mlcv so we have anything about 20 minutes for questions now. And I know Miriam said to put them in the chat so I see a couple here. So feel free to ask us any questions about any of the content here, or anything about us and our backgrounds and how we got into this work. More than happy to talk about that too. And you can direct any questions at all of us or specifically at Nick or Joe or Bentley or Emily. So, let's see. First one that I'm seeing here from Catherine. How do you keep the faith in that I'm just going to read these guys and then and then jump in. How do you keep the faith in the face of rejection and how do you reconcile what can be accomplished in reality with what is most ideal but far but a far reaching result. Jump in. I love to answer Catherine's question. You guys want me to take the first crack at it. I guess in the face of rejection. There's two paths, I would say, one, the, what I already mentioned earlier, I mean there's there's multiple ways to get to an end and result, at least in the state legislature and I'm sure in Congress as well but multiple ways to get there you get rejected by I mean, there's other ways, you know, do it administratively do it through local governments. There's plenty of ways, you know, hopefully maybe if you have federal administration on the federal level you could you can have you can have action there as well. Don't stop there. I would say the second and then the more fun way is you change the players. So if you don't like the answer you're getting. You develop a strong political action committee strong election network and you play in the electoral arena. I mean I know a lot of our work at C3 but some organizations like us can kind of, you know, get into the political side of things as well and maybe you can change the game a little bit and have a better answer next time around. And I could add in a little bit too from my end on this because you know when you're working with community members like it's such an intimate thing to be working so hard to leave it all on the field and to lose. And losing happens. Unfortunately, it happens a lot in some states. And so I would just say, you know the importance of making sure that you're building a healthy movement and the importance of actually building like a culture of support with your volunteer base can really get you through a lot. I want to give an example that's not directly from Michigan LCB so I hope that's okay. But it's from my time working for Planned Parenthood out in Maine. And you know, there can be unspeakably high stakes. And in this particular example, you know, Mainers were really tasked with convincing Senator Susan Collins to save the Affordable Care Act. That meant that these volunteers were running phone banks four days a week, four times a day for months and months and months. That has an incredible amount of emotional wear and tear. And whether or not you win or lose, what gets you there is an understanding of the value of the process. And I feel like there would be a great moment to like talk about Victor Frankel here, but we won't. But understanding that even in loss there is value in moving toward the world that you want to have. And when you create your team intentionally with all of the heart in the world, a loss will not stop you. Yep, that's great. Thank you, Emily and Joe. Okay, going in order here from Elizabeth, what student opportunities do you us, I assume MLCB anticipate in summer 2021. I'll hop in there again if you all aren't tired of hearing from me. So first of all, there's always great opportunities if this is an area that you would like to practice in professionally. I would encourage you to look at our internship opportunities that exist across our organizations, across our departments. And also, you know, there's always opportunities to be practicing those bread and butter pieces of community organizing.  And so anyone who wants to get involved, anyone who wants to talk about ways that they can learn a little bit more about advocacy on my end, I'm happy to drop my email address into here. And please email me, let's connect and let's talk more. And I think fair to say that that goes for all of us as well. I'm happy to share any of our perspective and make connections and, and, you know, share thoughts about, you know, different groups different, different, different working, working in Lansing, working in DC, etc. Next question from Kate. Do you work with any indigenous groups? And if so, what does that look like? If not, is there a plan to include indigenous groups in environmental advocacy? I can, I can start and Emily may have, or Emily and Joe may have things to say, but yes, we do work with indigenous groups. We're a critical partner. One of the, one of the biggest issues that we're working on right now with, with tribal communities in Michigan is the line fives oil pipeline that crosses the Straits of Mackinac. And that is, that's a, that's a critical, first of all, the whole pipeline route from Superior, Wisconsin to Sarnia, Ontario with, with both peninsulas of Michigan as the, as a shortcut through the Great Lakes region for this oil that jeopardizes tribal lands, fish and wildlife, not to mention the health of many Michigan communities. But that Straits of Mackinac is so critical in terms of a really a subsistence fishing grounds for, for several tribes and they have sovereign tribal authority in the Straits of Mackinac to the point where there is an excellent case to be made that just the very existence of line five sitting there at the bottom of the Straits of Mackinac where Lake Michigan and Lake Huron come, come together is, is just an inherent risk to, to many tribes and there's actually an authority called the Chippewa Ottawa Resource Authority or CORA that is made up of treaty fishing tribes, including the Bay Mills Indian community, the, the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians or the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians and several others. And so they have so much knowledge for us. They have often the strongest legal arguments. So both it's not only the right thing to do to be working with them and have them have them lead, but it's also strategically advantageous in that particular instance. So that's just one, one example. Also student groups, please if you are a part of, you know, a student group in this area, I would love to connect with you. There's a ton of ways to take action and we're very eager to expand who we're working with. Thanks guys. Okay, next question from Judy. How do you avoid partisanship, especially with issues facing the environment which recently mean pretty left. Take a stab at this and if anyone else wants to weigh in. So I myself have actually never worked for a party. I have chosen to do my macro social work practice in issue based settings. And so I've just completely let go of those words like they don't exist in my day job at all. We're talking about conservation champion or people who are not conservation champions. And although I'm aware obviously that there are, you know, some popular issues amongst the parties. That's for over there. That's for over there. That's for someone else. It's my job to say, you know what, this isn't about politics. This is about the issues that matter to each of us. And I can remain focused on that by just taking tonight issue conservation champions. Yeah, I think that's right Emily I think emphasizing the non-partisan nature of our work. You know, I think our our endorsement process is important. I think people look at that and we do endorse, you know candidates on both sides of the aisle, based on issues. We really try to remove the part of partisan nature of it. And then just de-escalating suspicion from from one side of the aisle or another, and really, you know, trying to meet with them, maybe even before they get to Lansing and before they're ingrained in that partisan environment before they have a notion of what each organization what side each organization's on or whatnot. And then one on one, you know, building a relationship early really does help to de-escalate the suspicion. Thanks so much. That's great perspective. I think this is also an area just not even speaking about command LCD, but just as a, as a, you know, citizen, a person who can, you know, who cares about their community, their environment. It's a perfect example of, you know, no matter where you live, I mean, in Ann Arbor, you know, we live in a place, not everyone on this call is named Arbor and Emily is not. We're, you know, our likes and officials care a lot about the environment and, but it's not the case everywhere and a lot of people care about the environment in other places. So I think it's a, you know, perfect example of when people can make a difference in their community.  So a lot of ways to do that. Next question from Cindy. Do you sometimes have to have different messaging on a different issue for different audiences, i.e. different political parties? Do you have an example of that? Absolutely. Every day. Every day. I'll kick it off here. And I know I saw Nick, Nick Agrippini jump back on. I think he'd be appropriate to answer this too. But yeah, you got to speak different languages depending on your audience. Whether, you know, the folks Kiff mentioned representing Ann Arbor will be receptive to our, you know, our work for the sake of the birds and the bees and pretty, you know, clean air and public health for everyone, but not everyone naturally is going to be receptive to that. You know, you got to speak about jobs, recovery, sometimes even free market principles with some of those libertarians Nick was mentioning. I'll kick it over to Nick. I know he's got some thoughts on this. He's probably chomping a bit to chime in here. No, you got it exactly right. I mean, it's finding the language that best matches the world view of the person you're speaking to but in a way that's earnest and honest because it's the moment you try to step into a language you don't kind of you're not comfortable with or that is comes from a place of, you know, it's a little bit opaque or even dishonest. It doesn't work. It's not effective. So on the clean energy, for example, we are very confident that we're advocating for energy efficiency and now utility scale clean energy, it's going to not only create jobs but it's going to drive down costs for ratepayers. And it's going to grow businesses in the meantime so we argue that forward with the folks that care the most about those issues, and we do it every day. There actually was a recent example I think we could highlight here. You know, there's a recent legislative fight to prevent upstart EV electric vehicle manufacturers from being able to facilitate sales in Michigan, which have really, really hurt the industry as a whole. We partnered with some, again, going back to the non-traditional coalitions and partnerships. We partnered with a lot of different folks that you wouldn't suspect we'd be working with. Even the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free market think tank, we were side by side with them, lobbying Lansing. You know, they were making the free market argument to their folks that we were receptive, we were making our arguments to our folks. One of the biggest allies in that fight was a really conservative representative from West Michigan, Representative Steve Johnson, who's probably, his voting record is probably the most conservative in the house. If not, then he's got to be in the top one or two. So, but yeah, non-traditional allies, as long as we get to the same end goal, it doesn't necessarily matter how we get there or why we get there. One more fun example. So the Michigan Manufacturing Association is a very powerful, large business group in Lansing that we often buy heads with. They're typically anti-regulation, particularly in environmental sphere. But there was a push earlier this year to undo the bottle bill in a way that would pull money away from contaminated site cleanup. And the Manufacturing Association said, whoa, you know, we don't want that to happen. Then we might have to cough up more money on our side of things if that money's not going for contaminated site cleanup. So we connected with them and said, okay, let's start lobbying members against the bill together. And we absolutely did. We carried, when we talked with members, we said, hey, and the Michigan manufacturers are opposed to this. This isn't just an environmental thing. And that kind of thing happens often. So I think that wraps up our Q&A. Thank you, everyone, so much for joining this.  Again, thank you to Cindy for helping to organize this. And to Miriam and the Liz for helping us make this happen today. We all had a great time. I know Miriam's going to follow up with all of you with filed information, including our email addresses. I think Emily and Bentley put them in the chat here too, but I'll make sure she gets all of them. And thanks again, and Bentley, yeah. Before you go, Cindy, I was actually going to talk about you because you may know this already, but Cindy Bank is really one of the most effective lobbyists and just advocates in general that you can find. So you all have an amazing asset with Cindy and her experience, especially in Washington, D.C. And the relationships that she was able to build over just the years that I was there and got to know Cindy was remarkable. And she's really one of the most effective and she did it in a way that was full of integrity and authentic. So really, I think Cindy, you know, we can learn a lot with you and I'm so glad you're passing along to my favorite school, University of Michigan. So I just wanted to say that. Okay, now I'm totally blushing. Thank you, Bentley. Thank you all. And I really thank you everyone from the League of Conservation Voters. You hit on so many of the important pieces of identifying issues, getting your messaging, working to how to speak to audiences. And what you just talked about Bentley to the, I think the most important piece are building the relationships. And I hope that this will, you know, be one of the many times that we'll get to work with you all. And I really appreciate everyone from the university who signed on we had a really nice crowd it fell off a little bit around five but people have other things to do but we have a really great crowd and everybody's voice you know we are our vote was our voice and now our voices are way to is our power. Each voice does matter and some issues, you know, take a long time I once worked on a piece of legislation for I think was 15 years before we finally got it passed. Hopefully, people don't have to wait that long to do things but thank you all for the passion that you're doing in protecting our environment are very special mitten state and all its wonderful water and people. And, like I said I look forward to seeing you all soon, everybody else. Look, look for other program and practical policy engagement programs we've got one next week with the Michigan Municipal League on women leading local government, which will be a great event. Emily, would you like to join us love to have you. And many thanks to my colleagues Miriam and Liz. Really appreciate everybody doing this and a go blue. Thank you.


Natural fibers are increasingly being used as reinforcements in polymer composites due to their abundance, low cost, light weight, renewability, biodegradability, and high specific properties. This paper reviews the different sources of natural fibers, their properties, modifications, and effects of treatments on natural fibers. It also summarizes the major applications of natural fibers and their effective use as reinforcement for polymer composite materials. This article was authored by Yashas Goda Thayavihalli Jirihappa, Sanjay Mavinkara Rangappa, Jyotish Kumar Parameswaran Pillai, and others.