How would you run for local office on a climate platform? We interview Max Gruenig, co-founder of Climate Candidates, about their program that provides knowledge, insights, and a peer support group for climate champions running for local and state office.
How would you run for local office on a climate platform? We interview Max Gruenig, co-founder of Climate Candidates, about their program that provides knowledge, insights, and a peer support group for climate champions running for local and state office.
Resources
Introduction
Larry Kraft 00:00
Hey everyone. As we released this episode, Abby is actually still in Europe. Make sure to go over to our City Climate Corner Instagram account, she's seeing some really cool sustainable infrastructure that she is sharing there.
Abby Finis 00:19
Cities produce more than sixty percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Big cities get a lot of attention, but most household emissions in the US actually come from communities outside urban cores, making them critical players in climate mitigation and climate justice. City Climate Corner explores how these small- and mid-size cities are tackling climate change and moving toward an equitable and sustainable future. I'm Abby Finis.
Larry Kraft 00:40
And, I'm Larry Kraft. We're co-hosts for City Climate Corner.
Abby Finis 00:46
Hey, Larry.
Larry Kraft 00:47
Hey, Abby.
Abby Finis 00:49
So you've mentioned once or twice on the show that you're a city council member, and now you're running for state representative and you consider yourself a climate candidate. What makes you a climate candidate?
Larry Kraft 01:05
Great question. Yes, I do consider myself a climate candidate. And it's because it is the main part of the platform that I run on. When I ran for city council. It was based on that we have this climate action plan in St. Louis Park initiated by young people and people can go check out some of our earliest episodes about that. And I ran because we get to implement it. And it was this opportunity to do things differently and make our community better and be an example for others. So that was the core of my platform. And it remains the core of why I'm running for state representative.
Abby Finis 01:43
Do you find it to be a lonely space? Or do you see other folks who are running for office also jumping into wanting to be a climate candidate, or at least wanting to push climate as a major issue?
Larry Kraft 01:59
When I first ran as a council member, it felt a bit lonely that I didn't know of anyone that was being explicit about being a climate candidate as I was. And I didn't have a playbook on it of how to do it. I kind of created it as I was going. I see it more now I see more folks doing it. And it may be that I'm just looking too more when I ran I decided in July and started running in August. So I didn't have a lot of time to prep and look around.
Abby Finis 02:29
We're speaking with Max Gruenig, who is one of the cofounders of Climate Candidates. And, what they do is essentially help people who are interested in running for local elections, help them navigate how to run. How did you come across Max? I know Max from several years back, but you ran into him a bit more recently.
Larry Kraft 02:51
When I was looking for potential partners or ways of accessing people that might be interested in the podcast, somehow I came across Climate Candidates. And as soon as I read it and read what they're about, I said, "Well, I have to reach out to these folks, because this describes me." And boy, I wish would have known about this group when I ran. So I reached out to Max. We really connected and bonded right away. I think they're doing great work, and you should hear about it in this episode.
Abby Finis 03:23
Let's take a listen.
Start of interview
Larry Kraft 03:28
Today we are speaking with Max Gruenig, who is the co founder of Climate Candidates, as well as the founder and principal at POCACITO or post carbon cities of tomorrow. Welcome to City Climate Corner. Max, can you start by introducing yourself?
Max Gruenig 03:46
Yeah, thank you, Larry. I am originally from Germany from Berlin actually, and moved to the US in 2014. But I've been working on climate and energy and sustainability since before then and continue doing this here stateside. And for me working on sustainable cities with POCACITO, it was a natural extension, because it brings together everything that you can think of sustainability wise. The idea to then work more in the climate policy or candidate space came from living so long in the US looking at how things are going here.
Max Gruenig 04:28
Originally, I'm totally different. I'm an economist. So kind of like what people throw things at you when you say that. Especially after the economic crisis that was not the most popular profession to be around on the blog. Doing actually only tangentially related stuff to my original profession, but very happy and very both hands full. So kind of excited how things are going.
Larry Kraft 04:55
Have you found differences between Germany and the US and our approach to this issue?
Max Gruenig 05:01
Oh, definitely. I mean, it's the interesting thing, because if you look at it from the outside, it looks very similar. Especially with English language, you have this bridge, people understand each other in Europe, you have some people really speak English very well, you can really have great exchanges. But of course, there are differences. And there are differences, like work life balance, or role plays food, or what to do about education. They're all these little differences in they add up to a bigger difference. And probably that explains some of the bigger policy differences. Not saying it's unsurmountable, but there are real differences. And very often people underestimate them. They think, "Oh, because we watch the same TV shows, and eat the same fast food, maybe from the same chains have the same clothing," that it's all the same, but there are real differences. Yeah.
POCACITO
Abby Finis 06:00
So Max, you and I actually met a number of years ago. You had an event at the Humphrey School here, I think. And there are a number of city leaders who are on a panel who had just come back from their POCACITO exchange trip. And were sharing their experience with that, and some of the best practices that they learned. And it's such a cool program. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Max Gruenig 06:19
Yeah, pre-pandemic, we focused a lot on in-person exchanges, and bringing people both ways actually. So Americans to Europe and Europeans to the US and trying to have this peer to peer learning and talking about what's working, how is it working. Not only about technology, but a lot about participatory approaches, community building, how people can actually motivate other people to do something or motivate them to come up with their own ideas and their own plans. So it's very fascinating.
Max Gruenig 06:54
Of course, with the pandemic, we went to full stop and had to rethink everything. And then we did a lot of online programming. It's, of course, not exactly the same. I mean, it has pros and cons. You can reach a broader audience, and lower costs, and its climate friendly. But the interactions are just not exactly the same. You don't get the depth, you don't get people to really connect, when you get people in the room. And not everybody will click but some people, they will be this connection, and they will be connected for longer, and this will have a real impact.
Max Gruenig 07:33
This is really the magic, you can never really plan for that. Sometimes you have room full with 100 people and people forget after a week, but very often you have the opposite. You can have a small group, but the impact lasts a long time. And then you hear years later, "Oh, in our town, we actually started doing this and that and we heard about it first hand." And you think, how's this even possible? I don't want to oversell, it's not really something where I actually do something. It's just putting the people in the room more or less and enabling that. This is a lot of what we do. I mean, we always say with POCACITO what we want is to change the conversation. So not forcing any ideas, just getting people to talk.
Abby Finis 08:21
Yeah, and I think to your earlier point, you know whether these smaller differences that add up to a bigger difference, once you have those conversations on an individual one on one level, and you're showing what happens when you implement some of these practices that can really click and bring those ideas back. So I think that's just a really cool aspect of that program. Do you think you'll move from virtual going forward?
Max Gruenig 08:44
I definitely hope so. I mean, we're working on it. Of course, nobody really knows where the pandemic is going. I mean, I'm optimistic. I'm optimist by nature. But you also have to have optimistic funders. So yeah, working on it, and I think we'll see more activity. But I also think we'll keep at least hybrid elements that will remain to make it more open, more inclusive. There are many advantages. So I think we'll have a new normal, that's not exactly going back to what it was before.
Climate Candidates background
Larry Kraft 09:16
So Max, you and I met several months ago, when I found you and your organization, as I was searching around. And as you know, I'm currently a city council member, and now running to be a state representative. And in both cases as a very proud climate candidate. So when I saw your organization, Climate Candidates, it was extremely interesting. So can you tell us what is Climate Candidates?
Max Gruenig 09:45
Climate candidates is really at the very front of the process, trying to get people who are climate experts or practitioners or policy aficionados. But, who are not in politics to first confront them with the idea that well, actually, you cannot just say how things should be different and what should be done. But you can actually be part of this. So first, just telling people this, and then, of course, it's a lot within our own network. So all the people found that the group all come from this, the nonprofit or public administration, climate policy environment. And so we know a lot of people who are either sustainability officers or work for NGOs, or in some way in this policy, climate environment, but not necessarily active in elected position.
Max Gruenig 10:51
So, of course, we thought, oh, well, there's a huge potential, we need a lot more people, actually, in politics, talking about climate, but also taking action about climate. So how can we activate them? And then we thought, well, we can kind of have an umbrella for that. So Climate Candidates is the umbrella, getting people interested, motivated, and then energized about how much is possible at the local level at the state level too for some people like what you're doing now. So this is, of course, already a step up. We usually start with people getting motivated, very locally. And there are so many races, so many elections happening, so many opportunities for people to get involved. And to be honest, it's not always only about winning, sometimes it's already good if there is a climate candidate in the race, and people see, oh, that's an issue too. And, well, I'm not going to vote for her or him. But interesting, just to, you know, bring the climate discussion, all the way down from this global level, UN climate negotiations, or national level, Congress, White House, to actually where people live. And I think that that was our motivation.
Larry Kraft 12:15
That point really resonates with me, because when I was considering whether I was going to run for city council, one of the things that I thought was, well, look, even if I lose, I'm going to get to connect with 1000s of people in my community about climate change. Why is it important to provide this additional support to some of these candidates? And what are the challenges and opportunities of being a climate candidate?
Max Gruenig 12:43
Well, first of all, a lot of the people we talk to - they have zero experience with politics. I mean, we're not providing them the whole skill sets, we then connect them with other groups. There's a lot of groups who do candidate trainings or campaigning trainings, etc, or fundraising training. So we're not doing all that we just channeled them towards these partner organizations. But where we are, is really trying to set a foundation for it and trying to explain, okay, we're here, and voters are here. And so politics works differently from just being right. And we do get a lot of people who know a lot who have a lot of ideas about solutions. But obviously, that's not necessarily what gets you to win an election.
Max Gruenig 13:33
We're trying to get them ready a little bit mentally for this step, because it's a change for a lot of people like I've been climate policy expert for many years. And, of course, you can be stuck then on this, thinking that you know how things should be, that's a way or no other way or the highway. Also, of course, to give them a community where they can talk because they're newbies in this environment. And to be able to ask questions without looking maybe not informed or not having done all the homework here, they can ask all the questions. It's a safe space. So it's very judgment free area. And that's basically also the background. We're not coming from a partisan angle. As long as we can talk about climate and talk about taking climate action. We want everybody on board. This is very important for covering a lot of different regions and preferences policy wise.
Larry Kraft 14:33
I have to think that peer to peer connection is also really key because in some of these places, it can feel lonely, probably to be a climate candidate and to know that you're not the only one and have others and be able to trade ideas or just challenges that you're facing is probably really helpful.
Max Gruenig 14:54
Exactly. It's of course also interesting to hear from people who have run already, like hearing from you. It's very helpful, even hearing from people who ran unsuccessfully that can also be interesting to hear what didn't work or why it didn't work, because that usually works better than telling somebody how they should change. And of course, yeah, the community, it's really important that they can be in touch that they can just ask and also have this as a sounding board for their own ideas or conceptions.
Larry Kraft 15:29
Hey, we're taking a quick break to say if you like what you're hearing, please support us. You can do so by clicking the Support Us link on our website, at cityclimatecorner.com or you can go to our Store and get some cool merch.
The Climate Candidate Accelerator
Abby Finis 15:45
Cool. Looks like the main program that you all offer is called the Climate Candidate Accelerator. Can you tell us what that is?
Max Gruenig 15:53
This is like compact training, that has two days, we do have additional components as well, that we do as webinars or lecture style more throughout the year. But our main components are these accelerators. And they're really meant for small group, like a classroom setting, it's all online, but they come together and they spend the whole time together. I mean, they of course breaks in it, but it's a lot of time they spend together over the weekend. It's structured, like a mini curriculum. So you have some more input oriented sessions where they learn. But then they also practice, we have also breakout sessions. And then they can directly apply what they heard about earlier. And of course, we also have a little bit like homework for people, both before, during, and after. So it's a very active part. And then we continue keeping the people from this one class together and follow up sessions throughout the next year, where they have follow up activities. They meet in their small groups, call them pods. So it's three people usually. And then they develop their own dynamics in these subgroups. And then we have the larger group. And then we have everybody together from the various meetings. So we have different layers, basically, from very large to classroom to mini group.
Abby Finis 17:23
I'm curious about who attends. Is it usually people who are are definitely running for some office? Are there any people who are already elected officials, and they want to bring more climate into their campaigns? Who's going to these?
Max Gruenig 17:38
That's an interesting one. I don't think we have had that yet. But maybe through this podcast, we can win some people who are sitting in office and think, well, maybe I should think about climate more. Mostly, we have people who are either carefully considering this or very seriously considering. And then we have people who are maybe already in one office but are considering running for something else. And we have people who are not yet willing to run but who want to support us. And that's also something where we can connect them because people need a campaign manager, they need lots of people. And sometimes we can find people who are even in the same area, geographically speaking, who can connect. To us it's very interesting that we have different age groups joining the accelerator. So they're not all just out of college, you might think they're all I don't know, what would that be generation? X? No.
Max Gruenig 18:12
That's the forgotten generation between
Max Gruenig 18:45
zed
Abby Finis 18:46
and Gen Z.
Max Gruenig 18:48
But anyways, there are different age groups. We have people there who are already seasoned, who have many years of career and now I think they want to give back. We have people who are in college still we have some people who are at the very beginning of their career, and then we have a lot of people in the middle. And then we have people come also with different interests. We have people who are interested in public utility commission's we have people interested in city council with people, you know, school board is also interesting.
Max Gruenig 19:23
There's a lot of decisions in all aspects of public offices, where you can bring in a climate component most of the time there is no such consideration. And so this is very broad spectrum. And so we try to also match people accordingly, both geographically and then also by what their focus topic is. And when I say climate, of course, it's also very broad. We have people were more worried about the impact of climate change. They're in very exposed communities, for example, where they feel climate change already. And we have people who are more urban, I have to be honest, a lot of people come more from an urban background, but not all, we also have rural participants. This is also very interesting because, it's very different challenge, very different questions. It's a broad field, we want to differentiate and offer them different inputs tailored to their needs.
Abby Finis 20:21
Yeah, that's awesome. And I'm glad that you brought up the breadth of the different offices that can be held, especially the Public Utilities Commission, there's such key decisions that are happening at that level, or municipal or cooperative boards. There's a ton of opportunity for people to get involved and join these races and bring climate into the conversation. Have you seen a growing number of participants and people who are interested in running on climate?
Max Gruenig 20:46
I think it's actually a pretty steady interest, we get more requests. That's true, we get more questions, we also get a lot of expressions of interest from people who say, Oh, I would like to come. But I can't on this and that date. That's always a problem. Because it's a set weekend, that's when it's going to happen. And then people have other things happen. So we have a lot of people who are on the standby list for next time. That's a very long list by now. And for the accelerators themselves, we try to cap it in a way to classroom size. So we don't want to have too many people to maintain an intimate atmosphere also, so that people remember the names of I mean, we're already trying very hard with icebreaker games and so on to stimulate this. If you have too large group, especially in an online meeting, that's really very energy draining then if they try to follow so many different faces and people.
Abby Finis 21:50
It's easy enough to turn your camera off and tune out.
Max Gruenig 21:52
Yeah. Yeah, we try to keep them on camera the whole time. But yeah, we're also aware, it's not always possible. In general, the interest is rising, it will be very interesting how things evolve. We do have different rhythms. So we're talking a lot now about 23. But then, if somebody has the idea of possibly running for a campaign, there could be many years in the future. Some people plan that's very long term, we had one person who had this plan for ten years. I mean, this is really long term planning. We also have people who do it last minute spur of the moment, I don't know, Larry, how long in advance did you plan yours? When you ran for city council?
Larry Kraft 22:39
I would have been in the sort of last minute side of things. I think I decided in June or July, filed in August, and the election was in November.
Max Gruenig 22:51
Right.
Larry Kraft 22:52
So it was a crazy sprint for a couple of months.
Max Gruenig 22:57
Yeah. And that's the thing. I mean, even if you plan ten years in advance, it doesn't minimize the effort you have to bring in the campaign. It's different personalities. Also, you know, some people are more the plan, or they need this long term framework, working towards that. But it's not necessarily something that you have to have. But what we found is where it's very difficult is if people move a lot, and they come in, they're relatively fresh in a community. And they see things don't work so well. And they want to run right away. This can be very difficult, and especially in younger communities. But even in a bigger city, that's like a tough lift. That's definitely one lesson is probably more important than the long term planning is having the credibility of being from the community.
Advice
Larry Kraft 23:49
We're at a time now where pay attention to the science behind climate change, it's pretty critical time to up our game. The federal level here in the US, not nearly enough as of yet. So it feels like this is the time or future around climate change is kind of hanging in the balance and will be decided over the next five to ten years. For people that are out there that are concerned about it and have considered running for office, what advice do you have? Especially you're thinking about people running at a local level.
Max Gruenig 24:26
For one, it's a personal commitment, and it's also exposing yourself making yourself vulnerable. It's very important to be clear about that. So we're not trying to lure people into this telling them that it's just a comfortable, comforting experience throughout. They have to want to talk to people. You mentioned this earlier, you have a lot of conversation. So it's very important that there are people's people and that they want to engage and also, of course they need to want to win but they also have to enjoy every step of it. So they have to like this campaigning process.
Max Gruenig 25:07
It's a very complicated to find this where they're also very climate oriented, and office or public oriented. This is what we're trying to bridge. What they can do and where there is the hope now, for people, I think there is so much because in the end, all emissions are local somewhere. And also all emission savings are local somewhere. Washington, of course, it's important but it's all local government. They're not always in control. Some things can be done in this can be, of course, also very tricky. In some states, you have more leeway, more freedom to make decisions.
Max Gruenig 25:53
Just thinking about this whole discussion about banning natural gas connections got very politicized, very confrontational, but even small things like banning plastic bags got a lot of pushback. And, and so you really have to see what's possible where, but there's always something possible. And there are always small things possible, even without money, and especially having this conversation about what does climate change mean for us as a community? How does it affect different people? It's a first step to just acknowledge this, and to hear people and to hear their concerns. We have people in very different places. But the challenge is, of course, everywhere. The challenge is voter turnout, especially in off year elections, and then how to talk to people who you've never talked to before. That's a major challenge for a lot of people. Maybe not for you, Larry, but for a lot of people that's a hurdle. Getting people into that, I think it's a huge step.
Larry Kraft 26:59
I think the local focus is huge in so many ways. You pointed out, emissions happen locally, somewhere. But also, part of the challenge with the climate movement, in general has been this focus on science, and that it's something that's coming and it can seem far away to people. So this act of having climate candidates run for local office, and have these conversations locally and bring it down to a much more connecting personal level, I think is tremendously impactful. And then things spread. We see that and part of the reason we have this podcast, so love what you're doing.
Max Gruenig 27:44
Well, thank you. It's really contagious in a way, especially if it works. And if people see that it improves the quality of living, and that they can actually have direct benefits from it. I think it's very, very important to make things very directly relevant to everybody's life on a daily basis. There is no point in talking to people about abstract, like saving the polar bears. Most people think okay, but I'm not actually that directly concerned. If I have to sign somewhere to save the polar bears. Maybe I'll do that. But I'm not going to do a heavy lift activity. But if I can maybe keep my street from flooding, maybe I'm willing to do something for that, because that's really relevant for me and my neighbors and everybody in the street.
Larry Kraft 28:38
Well, Max, thank you so much for what you're doing and for being with us today.
Abby Finis 28:42
Yeah. Incredibly important work.
Abby and Larry debrief
Larry Kraft 28:48
All right, Abby. Any takeaways?
Abby Finis 28:51
I just, again, want to underscore that I think that this project is really important. And there are so many different offices held in this country, that could certainly use an infusion of climate perspective and preparing people to take that leap. And to jump into this. It's no small feat to make that decision and then run a campaign and then should you win, be responsive to to the public, and why you're supporting different things. And we've been missing a strong climate voice among elected officials. I think it's certainly growing and we saw in the last presidential election on the Democrat side. Governor Jay Inslee, really pushing it and having that impact and changing the conversation, getting people to talk about it more, but that doesn't translate to actually passing policy and pushing a climate agenda unless we get more people elected into those positions to make those decisions and move the ball.
Larry Kraft 29:53
Yeah, I really also appreciate the discussion of the different local offices the PUC's and the school boards and city councils, And also Max's point that emissions are local somewhere. And local officials can have a significant impact.
Abby Finis 30:12
For sure. And, Georgia has had very, very close elections and their Public Utilities Commission's that are hugely consequential. And that's one to watch. There's a couple of candidates down there, who could really change the makeup of their Public Utility Commission to be in a much more climate friendly PUC. It's a coal heavy state. So making those decisions about electric utilities is huge. And it's not just the statewide PUC is there. I think I mentioned this before, if you have a municipal utility, if you have a cooperative utility, there are tons of opportunities to get involved in having an impact on the electricity that you're purchasing.
Larry Kraft 30:55
You often hear people ask well what can you do on climate change? And sometimes you talk about individual actions. But we know that climate requires systemic change. And it requires systemic change at all levels. And this is a way of starting to make the systemic changes that we need to, by running for local office in your local community. And then these things grow. These things spread. And as one community does things, it spreads.
Abby Finis 31:31
I do kind of love the concept that he was talking about of trying to keep the class sizes on the smaller end, so that you create that sense of community among your peers who are running. And I do think that it's important both from getting to know people and leaning on one another to learn together and to share and replicate ideas. But it's also important for those relationships to support people who might feel really alone in the space, you know, you might be running in a more conservative community. And nobody's really talking about climate change and here you are talking about climate change. And it's just a good reminder, I think, to know that we are all connected, and there are other people out there who are supporting you, and will help you and your journey and that, you know, the conversations that you're having back home are going to be really important. They might be really frustrating and feel like you're walking through mud at times, but you're making headway. We can see that by the number of people who are putting climate front and center and in their campaigns and joining this effort.
Larry Kraft 32:35
Yeah, one thing I would say is to folks that are considering it is it's very rewarding. If it's something that you can do to run a campaign where climate is a key component. And sometimes you'll get the folks that say, well, there's more than that, or they will question whether you can actually run a campaign on that. And I think if you commit to it, it connects to so much else. As I like to say, if we don't get climate, right, it impacts every other issue makes it worse and worse. Plus, it's just a tremendous opportunity to do things differently. And to get so many of these other co-benefits. I think it's very possible to do and I love the fact that they're provide this peer support group as well for folks to be able to really commit to it.
Abby Finis 33:26
We talked about it as climate, but I think environmental justice is right there hand in hand.
Larry Kraft 33:32
Absolutely.
Abby Finis 33:33
The pollution that that comes from facilities that also generate greenhouse gas emissions and the health concerns there. And so if you're considering running, look into this program, reach out to folks and decide what your platform is. Just grab the bull by the horns as they say and jump into the fight and continue to push for for climate action.
Larry Kraft 33:57
Love it.
Abby Finis 34:00
We hope you enjoyed this episode of City Climate Corner. If you like what you're hearing, make sure to subscribe and give us a review. If you're able, become a monthly supporter through Patreon. As always, you can find more information on this topic and resources from each episode's guests on our webpage cityclimatecorner.com. If you have an idea for the show, send us an email at cityclimatecorner@gmail.com or find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
Larry Kraft 34:24
City Climate Corner is produced by Abby Finis, and me Larry Kraft. Edited by me. Our production assistant is Maggie Morin. Music by…
Abby Finis 34:32
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.
Larry Kraft 34:35
Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.