On Personal Passions Driving Climate Work + Jack Hanson Show Notes
I talk about it a lot. The personal joy that lies underneath a person's climate leadership - and could well feel fully separate from it - is the key. There tends to be an interesting story about how the community you bike, play music, do sports, or knit with may not even know you work in climate.
Therein lies the gold I like to shake out. Those personal values and joy can never feel inauthentic or scripted. Hearing how much someone loves their thing draws you to them, and you get to know them as a human, and then you realize this interesting human is ALSO someone leading climate progress in powerful ways. I am always hooked.
When I talked with Janelle Kellman, it was her ultra running and palpable love for meeting new people over a slice of pizza in backyards across California. In my most recent conversation with Jack Hanson of Run On Climate, it was his passion for making music and the community he has built around that, first in Burlington, VT, and now in the Chicago area.
This gets to something I always notice: how everyone I've interviewed does the "lean in" thing, whether by Zoom or in person, when the conversation swings to a personal joy. In my Living Change podcast (which ran in 2023) interviews - like with Alex Fisch (at the time on city council and before that Mayor of Culver City) it was when we got to how he started riding his kids to school on an ebike a few days a week. Eyes light up, tone shifts, and I find myself interrupting left and right (I'm working on not doing this so much!), because I can't help but interject my "yays" and other expressions of joy. As I go back to edit a conversation, it's always: well I thought this was about this or that policy or their leadership in whatever it is, but now I see it was this OTHER thing that holds the key to my guest's appetite for impact.
Jack Hanson is a huge example of this, so please do listen to this episode. Show notes are below to get you rolling. Especially if you have found playing or listening to live music a JOY in your own life, you will love this conversation and the dot-connecting to local climate policy progress.
And, let this be your call to action, too. BE MORE VISIBLE (literally and figuratively) about this under-mentioned thing you do or the way you live that really sparks joy. We WANT to hear about your garden, because that connects you to your environmental activism! We want to hear about how you bike for local transportation, because that so clearly underlies policy decisions you make, etc!
What is it for you? Talk more about that thing, and even if you hardly ever connect it with your climate or sustainability work. The joyful human you is where all of progress and community engagement begins.
About This Episode
Jack Hanson co-founded Run on Climate, an organization that gets climate champions elected to local office and then supports them once they're in. At 24, he ran for the Burlington, Vermont, City Council because the candidate he was managing dropped out and no one else would do it. He won, got reelected without opposition, and helped flip four seats in two years. Then he built an organization so others could replicate what he'd done — not as a career move, but because the model worked and the need was everywhere.
Joy as infrastructure
Jack makes a distinction early in the conversation that I come back to again and again: joy isn't about making things easy. A lot of organizing is hard, unglamorous, and not fun. But to bring people into a movement at scale — to get them to show up, knock doors, stay in it — you have to make it feel like something worth being part of.
The Burlington origin story
Jack was 24, working as a campaign manager for someone else, when that candidate dropped out weeks before the election. He stepped up because he didn't want to see an incumbent run unopposed. He knocked every door in the district twice. His campaign managers were University of Vermont students. He won with 60% of the vote. Two years later he ran again — unopposed.
The ripple effect theory of change
Run on Climate isn't trying to elect climate champions everywhere. It's deliberately working in cities that are already relatively strong on climate — because those are the places most likely to take a leading-edge step, and that then creates a model other cities copy.
What music has to do with it
Jack talks about how climate work isn't his passion — music is. He plays piano in a funk band in Chicago on weekends. He called climate work something he feels compelled to do because the stakes are existential.
"Music is what gives me the most joy. It's my favorite thing to do. Climate work is more — I feel the need to work on it because it's so important. But music is just pure bliss."
Name and Fame it Forward: Sue Anderbois, Providence City Council
Jack calls out Sue Anderbois, a Providence, Rhode Island, city councilor (now running for Lt Governor of RI) who works full-time at the Nature Conservancy by day and does her council work on nights and weekends. She's passed policies decarbonizing city buildings including schools, advanced pedestrian and bike infrastructure, and more.
The Line That Says Everything
He was a 24-year-old who decided if no one else is going to run, I guess I will.
Links
runonclimate.org
linkedin.com/in/jack-hanson-b6106622b
walkingsofter.org — Jack Hanson profile
Sue Anderbois on LinkedIn
Name & Fame was created, and is hosted, and produced, by Andrea Learned. This episode was edited by Syd Gladu and Kristie Taiwo-Makanjoula. Theme music by Adam Captured. Art by Nancy Bolan.
