Talking local leaders and climate influence with Alex Fisch
A few weeks after Culver City’s Alex Fisch and I had our fantastic conversation about his insights as a local leader for my Living Change podcast, we switched the microphones.
In his inaugural experience guest hosting the Bike Talk podcast, he guided a deep dive into my climate influence expertise and how it applies in political leadership (especially at the city level). Alex is himself a shining example of a strategic, socially engaged leader and makes excellent lived-experience points all along the way.
Worth note: We both emphasize Twitter here, but definitely see the same principles holding on LinkedIn. So, I bet this conversation could be a resource for many.
In this mid-February, 2023, episode, Alex and I talk about:
- Building social capital way in advance of needing to activate it.
- How leaders can get more visible by engaging in replies and “loving up” their peers or other good ideas.
- How *being seen* doing the livable community and climate action tool you are proposing (in this case – using transit, riding a bike or ebike for transportation and being on your own community’s streets) builds trust.
- How a hashtag really can build community and be leveraged for a specific political purpose ( example: #AB2097 re: parking mandates in the California 2022 affordable housing discussions ).
- How being active and accessible on social platforms can help build great media relationships.
And, we touch on so much more.
Here’s a quote:
“So social capital is like creating this love and sort of this warm vibe of helping each other out and supporting each other for no particular cause. You don’t have an agenda like: tomorrow I want to leverage this, this way. You just go, “you know what, we’re all in this together and we’re going to build social capital,” and Twitter is a wonderful tool for that and we can all participate and we can all build our individual little niche-y sector of influence by building that social capital engagement.”
Any city leader who wants to study up on better practices for engaging, contributing and building their climate-acting influence could learn a few things from this conversation.
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