The CCEC Forum fills me with pride and hope. Here’s why.

From 1998 to 2016, I helped local governments and non-profit groups advocate before the California Public Utilities Commission for a stronger role for local governments in the design and delivery of energy efficiency programs (among other things). In 2007 we formed the Local Government Sustainable Energy Coalition (LGSEC) to provide a voice for local governments at the CPUC. One of LGSEC’s key achievements, which I helped lead, was the creation in 2012 of the regional energy networks (RENs). Seeing RENs expand from the first two, BayREN and SoCalREN, to now having RENS across the state serving 94% of the population, is personally gratifying.

Today the RENs organize and lead CCEC. This year over 500 people attended! When I’m at CCEC, I am a proud mama. It’s very rewarding to see people I worked with and mentored early in their careers now leading the work. Having an opportunity to meet the next generation of leaders is great!

This year, two of those up-and-coming leaders, my Contra Costa County colleagues Emily Groth and Nicole Shimizu, communications expert Michael Shank, and I facilitated a workshop on Talk Like a Human. Our goal was to help our peers build the muscle to tell better stories about their work and engage across their communities, beyond the usual participants. Our collective work to make our planet cleaner and healthier will only be successful if large numbers of people join us. To do that, we need to use language and tell stories that are understandable to average folks. We were thrilled that nearly 100 people joined us and we hope you are talking like a human all the time.

I was honored to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at this year’s CCEC Forum. In my remarks accepting the award, I advised the group that we, the sustainability folks, need to take risks if we are going to succeed. And it can be hard to take risks when you work for a bureaucracy. “They hired us,” I told the group, “to be the risk takers and the change agents.” We also cannot do the work alone. It takes a team. Conferences like CCEC are where we can build our networks and refuel ourselves.

Thank you, CCEC, for the recognition, and for providing a place where we can gather to learn from and about one another and our communities, and come together to make all our communities and our state cleaner and healthier for everyone.