Two Richmond women are recruiting people to join a local group to lobby policymakers at all levels of government to fight climate change.
Jeanee Reichert and Cathy Yan are co-leaders of the newly established Richmond chapter of the Citizen Climate Lobby.
Reichert said, as a grandmother of two girls, she is motivated to work on climate issues, especially after her eight-year-old granddaughter started asking about climate change.
Reichert said there's a need to focus on the fact that “what we’re experiencing locally is a global issue."
The impact of climate change hit home for Reichert's family this year when they organized a camping trip early in the summer season, hoping to avoid wildfire season.
They thought they were in the clear, but, as it turned out, their May 15 trip had to be cancelled because the wildfire season started early.
Non-confrontational lobbying builds relationships
Yan noted “lobbying” has a complex and mixed connotation, but the idea is to influence policymakers in a non-confrontational way.
Citizen Climate Lobby is non-partisan, Yan explained, and its mandate is to build relationships between volunteers and policymakers.
“It can feel a little bit like yelling into a void when you’re part of an organization that’s more about community mobilization without the policymaker relationship piece," Yan said.
The Citizen Climate Lobby gives participants tools to advocate for policy change, Reichert explained, but lobbying in a way that sees "everyone as an ally."
“A lot of organizations aren’t linked to (lobbying) in their mandate,” Yan said. This is a gap that Citizen Climate Lobby is trying to fill.
Yan and Reichert would like to train and motivate other Richmond residents to speak up on climate change issues.
But people often feel intimidated by politicians and therefore speaking to them can seem daunting.
Having approached many politicians on climate issues, Reichert noted that “(policymakers) are people, who want to hear what we have to say.”
Both Reichert and Yan are focused on the local chapter as both live in Richmond.
Yan started out volunteering with the Invasive Council of B.C. three years ago.
“The more I learned, the more questions I had,” she said, adding this motivated her to start advocacy work at a policy level.
Yan noted there was a lot of education in elementary school about climate action, such as, recycling, turning off the lights and reducing water use.
“(But) none of us were given the language and tools to connect it to fossil fuels,” she said.
The first order of business for the Richmond chapter of Citizen Climate Lobby is to grow the local group and find out what other environmental groups exist in Richmond.
Reichert and Yan were trying to find environmental groups in Richmond. It wasn’t until they sat down with their MLA that they found out about several groups – such as sustainable farm groups, high school groups and even the city’s own environmental plans.
But there doesn’t seem to be a common central entity to bring them together – Reichert and Yan would like to bring them together under the Citizen Climate Lobby umbrella, including any Chinese language environmentally focused groups.
For anyone interested in joining CCL, they can contact Yan and Reichert at [email protected].
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