- it's my great honor and pleasure to introduce our first keynote speaker today, trathen heckman, who is a personal hero of mine. building community resilience from the ground up is among the most urgent and important endeavors to navigate the great unraveling. in this time, we're all called upon to be leaders and leadership arises in community. that's exactly what the daily acts organization and its impassioned founder and director trathen heckman have been doing in california, sonoma county for over 20 years. their work as an exemplary model that needs to spread widely. like the redwood tree whose tiny seed

produces a towering tree, daily acts is about how the power of small, can grow into something really big. they started by ripping out water sucking lawns and planting food for us. yard by yard, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood. over time, daily acts began providing local communities with hands-on skill building workshops, sustainability education and tight social networks of connection and collective action. it led to formidable community mobilization that has now affected and created policies and new governance structures including the dedication of public lands to carbon draw down with a special focus on equity and the wellbeing of the most vulnerable. trathen also serves on boards and advisory boards, including our very good friends at transition us and the norcal resilience netrk. please join me in welcoming this force of nature,

my friend, trathen heckman. - good morning bioneers. it is ch a blessing to be here th you today. you know, this is the first time in probably 20 years that i haven't been sitting out there in those funky blue seats with y'all. it's so easy to get overtaken by the power of big these days. with so much there just soul crushing in this time that we could acally le sight of thenly power we have and that's the power of our small daily actions. but can small really make a big enough difference in this time? and so about 25 years ago as i was waking up to just the painful state of our people and our planet, i al started to me across these people who felt the hurt but they're somehow morelive and just tapped into a deeper source and they're regenerating farms and forests and gardens. and then i came to my first bioneers and i just got my heart and my min and my paradigm cracked open by being with thousands of y'all world changers.

but it was tragedy that actuallgot me to turn these references to reality when i suddenly lost my mother right after 9/11. and so out of having these good references and these painful experiences, i was inired to start daily acts around this idea that we could change the world in a garden and byeclaiming the power of our daily actions. it was sayg yes, tre's mu hurt in o lives, in our world, but there are bright spots all around us and what we nourish grows. so we start t with the sustainability tours and just exposing people to the smell and the touch and the taste and the voice and the face of this better world bei born. and this led us too skill building workshops like with greywater. we installed the first permitted household greywater system in our community. anthen did fe in a day,nd 13 and o cities on the way to heing influence the california state greywater policy.

so nexwe partned with the citof petaluma to plant a garden. d at that me, war conservation best practice for municipalities was you rip out the soil and about a thousand years of top soil with it and you take it to the landfill where it becomes more greenhouse gases emissions. instead of doing that we said why don't we plant a food forest? and the city was lik what's a food forest? so i start to explain, how was this edible ecosystem that savedater, but it also harvested the rain and built soil and sequestered carbon a grew food and did a bunch of other beneficial things. but that time, the head of the partment s pretty dubious cause he was mainly focused on saving water. and then you know, but we did get the go ahead and he rolls out to the project and he's got his kid in hiarm and he just has this kind of funny look on his face and he's probably thinking it's 80 degrees out, these people are muddy and sweating and laughing and having a really good time,

while saving the city a bunch water and a bunch of money and doing a bunch of other good things. so this quickly led to the opportunity to plant anoer public food foresin another city. and to start working on these civic incentivprograms to spread these landscapes through the communities. wiin a coue months, 350.org had s first da of global climate tion. and so daily acts and a couple partners help mobilize hundreds of volunteers and we literally transformed city hall landscape in day. moving mntains of mulch and saving a mlion gallons ofater, $60,00in installion costs, comnity gardebeds, chilean guavas, kiwis, some bioswales and we were all amazed by the power of this. but the problems keep on bigging and biggering so we're like, what if we didn't just plant one garden a day? what if we planted 350 gardens in a day and we use ts as a ance to call attention to the climate crisis and community solutions

to these really complicated interconnected issues. and honestly, we were afraid to even mention the goalas so big when we started t. and our city and agency partners were like, they were supportive of us but i think were pretty doubtful that we could achieve it. but the community rose to thchallenge and dozens of agencies and organizations and businesses came together and together in a single day, we plantednd revitalize628 gardens. and this was aonishing on aumber of fronts. first because it got the water department thinking about food and community engagement and it got the health department thinking about climate and water and the local economy. and all of us were thinking about the power of small when taken to scale. and so just for context, about this time, we were about a decade into daily acts and we were still mostly volunteer powered with twoo three staff. and this is because of the power of community and when small groups, think and act like a garden

and act as an ecosystem catalyst tongage a wi range of stakeholders towards a bigger goal. and so from here, we kept on doubling the goals ofhe challen and we started handing it out with other communities another grasoots groups srted using it. and within nine years, we had registered nearly 100,000 actions and projects and we were st astonished by the way the community step up in so many ways. it also abled groups like sustainable contra costa to launch the sustainability movement in their community. and so just to give you an example of one of these near 100,000 actions and projects, jim and nancy hale got inired to plant a garden as a part of the challenge because they heard one of our volunteers talking about how since she did this she met more neighbors in a year than in two decades of living in her house. anso they partnered with bioneers community member weaving earth and they transformed eir landsce and ncy is ser excited and she shed me these pictures

and that there's these teenage girls sitting on the community bench in front of the gaen and they're reaching back and they're grabbing some strawberries and getting a book from the free library, all the while cars are stopping in the street and they saved many tens of thousands of glons of water. but what was really astonishing, was when nancy says to me, and we're standing in a garden when she says it for suppting our supporters, and she says we met more neighbors in three months than in three decades of living in this house. we could heal our disconnection, and rapidly regenerate nature in community through the power of small together. and so the next year, was the height of the california drought. and we save more water in a few months through innovative collaborations than in years of running programs we helped train and lead a group of youth who transformed 30 lawns in 30 days. and en we partnered with a commerci real esta firm

on thienormous landscape transformation that saved a ton of water andoney. and had live music, and we had massage therapists so we could show that you uld affect epic change, while laughing and having fun and jiggling the booty a little too. and so from here, you know, the prompts keep on getting bigger and bigger and bigger as we all know, and so we, daily acts keeps on evolving our efforts from education, to collaborative action, to mobilizations, to then tapping into nature's most common pattern that bioneers know so well, nurturing community through networks. and so we started geing engaged in coalitions, and utilizing another systems change strategy of working at a range of scales. we were working from local to international with grassroots groups. and this led us to bringing the leadership institute in the daily acts which is another small local non-profit and they were having a hard time and so we couldn't lose leadership in our community, and we also needed a steward of the 500 person fellows network.

we didn't wanna lose that. we also launchedn environmental health network to support our vulnerable populations. and so just when it feels like our plates pretty full and we're kind of doing as much as we can, wife and i are sleeping in the middle of night we hear isoud knock on the door. we wake up and we turnn the light and lookt the ck door and we see our good friends hannah and chris and they're standing there with their cats in their arms. and so we opened the door and we find out that they, made out of their house just before the flames came. and then when we woke up the next morning we were just gutted by the hioric rap devastation that ripped through our communities as the north bay fires had started. and so things were really chaotic and confusing and jumped into action and we immediately started convening and connecting with dozens of organizations and businesses and agency partners. and within a couple of weeks, we'd helped launch three new initiatives.

the first one to protect our watersheds and another one to help bring community voice and eqty to the center of the recovery conversation. and a third one to flip the script onho has and distributes power and resources by launching a grassroots fund with a half a dozen partner organizations, that raised and distributed over $300,000 to undocumented workers, family farms and grassroots organizations. and, you know, so we moved from that to, it felt like in the time our communities are so disconnected and government often is very siloed and not prepared for such devastation. so we're kind of like a switchboard operator, yoknow, connecting between community members and agenci and deparents. and is eventuay gave way to being bk in the gden, where as a part of a collaboration, we created community informed scalable landscape templates that were used by over 40% of fire survivors who submitted plans.

and then on the one-year anniversary of the north bay fires, the intergovernmental panel on climate change drops its most alarming report t. this as this global youth climate movement rapidly emerges and trulshow the power of small. locally daily acts helped launch climate action petaluma, to work with our city and our commity touild the wl to priorize eqtable climate acon. and we did thiby woing with t city toecome the first one in our county to declared a climate emergency, anthen this rapidl spread through most of the othe cities in the county. and within six months we had worked with our city, to help create the first county climate action and policy commissio at the city scale. and it was the first time we had a public interview process for a commission there were a record number of applicants and importantly when the dust settled, it was led by a third women of color, including our vice chair, friend, ally

and black first nations climate justice organizer, lia of frederick. you know, and so it's so important that we come together in these powerful ways and it just felt like, oh my god are we finally reaching a tipping point in the climate crisis? and actually feeling a little hope and a joy and then 2020 hits and covid and the brutal taking of more black lives and more record devastation and fires and political division. but in dark times, community rises to the moment again and again and again. so we came together, daily acts and our partners and we handed out a thousand culturally relevant apartment frndly food rden kits to our latin acts community members. and daily acts and dozens of volunteers worked with our imate action commission in petaluma and created a bold draft climate emergency framework. and so this still has to go through our city counci

but we have a few climate champions on council including our vice mayor, who'a former daily acts staff and who has been tough our leadership institute and she's been through our permaculture design course. and as of last month, we have two new climate champions on city council including a member of climate action petaluma. and so i think we all know it's about really understanding the needs of this moment and the urgency of climate truth and understanding the needs of all of our community members especially those in the front lines but also understanding the needs of our elected officia and our agency staff because we have phenomenal people in every part of every system and we just have to get better at pulling our levers together, to really affect bigger change because like you all know, this is literally the biggest decade that humanity has faced. and so we come together, to nourish, to connect and to up-level. to turn these inspired bioneers moments

into stronger beer connected movements and ornizations. early next year daily acts is launching a funding campaign, to finish the book we're writing on these solutions. we couldet them in more hearts d hands as quickly as possible. and to also expand our leadership institu to partner with groups like bioneers to support and train more leaders, organizations, and communities. cause the vast majority of nonprofits are small and local and we need to help th be as trsformative as possible to partner widely and to really push for bolder climataction and policy. but it's more than that. we need a fundamental shift towards shared power. a seat at the table for community voice to inform and implement these policies. and to really see and value the power of small in a new way to unleash the power of community. many of you probably work for, volunteer with

or donate to local small nonprofits. and it's vital to know that they have a really big role in the transformation that's required because large social change happens through collaborive action and small nonprofits are essential for this. and so i have two calls to actiofor you all, is to take this bioneers moment and up-level into your potential and spread this infeious inspiration with others. and if you're inspired to do so, you could join us and help spread d support big ansformations through small solutions by going to daily acts website and staying in contact with us. in a dark and stormy world, we need good companions and a good compass. so these are the inedible dly actors i feel blessed to get to work with every day. as you'll notice most amazing women. and these are some of the many organizations

and coalitions that make everything we do possible. as for our compass, it starts with our heart because this is how we find the bright beacons to guide us. it's reclaiming the only pow we have that of our daily actions. and it's nurturing community because these are nature's operating instructions. and when we do these things consistently, wean build t resilience to stay awake and engaged, in the great work of remaking our liv and world through an infinite procession of itsbitsy small actions and efforts because the power of small is much bigger than you think. but we have to believe and we have to invest and we have to keep leaning in. daily acts exists in no small way in part to the incredible influence of this community of chae makers. so last thing i wanna say is, thank you all so much bioneers

for inspiring us to continue to steinto the moment. take heart, take part and take action.

us where for some people saving the planet as a matter of life or death. and i'm sorry she read on a strategy is great barrier reef with the tide is turning against rl killing start