To affect policy change a central pillar of our work has always been and continues to be political advocacy. However, lately we’re finding that our strategy of wanting to work with our elected officials, to get them to collaborate with us and other climate champions in the community to bring forward positive change via action, has been less fruitful than we hoped. Politicians will typically only agree to work together when there is an obvious benefit for them/their rep/their priorities and having to converse about/take charge on local climate action diplomatically has felt like we’ll never get to where we need to be. Another embedded issue is elected officials wanting to keep the extent of actions limited to being education-focused, etc. Whilst important, it’s certainly no way to treat a crisis (imagine if focus groups and panels were all that had been put together, again and again and again before things were actually decided for COVID).