What a night—and what a reminder of the power of connection and community.
More than 700 supporters came together to share conversations and get inspiration from each other and our speakers on stage. Connection is all the more needed in these times.
I wanted to share the closing message from Climate Solutions board member and emcee Aina Abiodun at our fundraising dinner last night. She shared these powerful words of Viktor Frankl, from Man’s Search for Meaning:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
It might not always seem like we have the power to choose our response, faced with the recent onslaught of federal rollbacks and attacks on our movement, the severity of those attacks, and the climate consequences. Our keynote speaker Jigar Shah, who until January led the clean energy loans program at the Department of Energy, reminded us:
“The work we are doing right now is how we get to the scale” of the changes we need.
“Am I sad about what’s happened at the federal government? Of course I am,” he said. “We worked so hard. We inherited a train wreck, after the first four years of Trump. We had to hire thousands of people; we were up to $10 billion a month of loans going out the door, it was amazing... Now a lot of that stuff isn’t being led by the federal government anymore... we passed the baton to all of you.”
So how do we grasp that baton and scale up?
One way is to support Climate Solutions’ work. We are just about to hit our goal! Can you chip in a little today to get us all the way there?
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Before he closed his keynote, Jigar Shah reminded us that “right now is not the time to get sad, or despondent!”
So I’ll end this note with the words from our Deputy Director Savitha Reddy Pathi, who also reminded us that we won’t back down:
“As I reflect about our event theme: ‘power in our hands, climate leadership in challenging times,’ and look around the room, together we’re bigger than the sum of who’s here tonight. When we do this work together, exponential change can happen, and there’s nothing we can’t accomplish. We can unite for bold action on climate and create our own hope. When we do this work together, exponential change can happen, and there’s nothing we can’t accomplish.”
