While Jane would never have called herself an “activist,” she was “always doing something in that arena.” Her propensity to stand up for justice began at home, where her parents, though Republicans, rooted for the underdog, disliked extreme wealth, and believed in basic fairness. By the end of their lives, her parents’ politics had shifted so that they would have voted for Bernie Sanders for president. Jane’s mother would have loved Third Act too, having become an environmental and democracy activist after the kids were grown.

At college in Ohio Jane joined anti-war protests, often against a hostile community. And with no script or organization, she took it upon herself to knock on doors to talk about the war and the dangers of nuclear power. Jane’s efforts continued after college, in Nashville, where she got involved in Central America solidarity work and helped organize a statewide protest against Ronald Reagan’s slashing of social programs.

Jane’s passion for community empowerment really came into focus with her early job as a paralegal in a rural Legal Services office near Nashville, where she represented indigent clients in Social Security hearings. A woman came into the Legal Services office one day needing medical care but lacking insurance and resources. Jane told her about a little-known Congressional Act (Hill-Burton) that required medical centers who received aid under the Act to set aside funds for needy patients. Jane prepared the client to advocate for herself to obtain that assistance and will never forget how “lit up” the client was when she returned to report her success.

This ignited Jane’s belief in the value of self-advocacy. She convinced her Legal Service program to create a permanent staff position for community legal education, and then got the job. A rich memory for Jane is the group of older Black women, tenant leaders at the Nashville housing projects, who came in asking for legal education lunches in the projects’ community rooms: “we’ll bring the food; you bring the lawyers.” Over home-cooked traditional Southern fare, tenants learned about their rights and responsibilities. This was community legal education at its best—on the clients’ terms.

Jane married, moved to Massachusetts, gave birth to her son, and continued to work as a paralegal, but after five years returned to Nashville and began to work again with ideas of self advocacy and participatory democracy, now at Vanderbilt University and focused on youth civic engagement. Her role there was to broker the needs of the community to faculty and students who wanted field experiences—such as connecting a student doing a women’s studies project with the woman who led a hospital worker strike that led to the founding of a union local in Tennessee.

 After five years at Vanderbilt, Jane went to graduate school for her master’s degree in social work, and then spent  most of the rest of her career – 22 years – at a youth-centered non-profit, the Oasis Center. There she helped create, and operated, vehicles for adolescents to be engaged in the community through volunteering, leadership training and advocacy for causes they cared about.

Jane found Third Act while searching for a way to get involved in the climate movement. She had always been concerned about human impact on the environment. This concern grew as she learned about the climate crisis and contemplated the impact it would have on the world she would pass on to her own son.

She finds Third Act tremendously gratifying. It has opened up possibilities: she always loved to write, for example, but who knew she’d ever be writing for a blog? Third Act supports her need to have fun while doing the serious work. And Jane especially appreciates that Third Act “Backs up the Youths!” When we really listen to them, and let them exercise leadership their way, “we get to see a little of what the future is like.”

Jane’s identities, like her experiences, center on the collective: family and community. She is a mother and an excited new grandmother; she is a sister to four brothers; she is the family matriarch. She is also deeply involved with Al-Anon, a 12-step fellowship program for family and friends of people with addictions, which is relevant to her work with Third Act in helping her understand how power operates in a collective. She walks a Buddhist path.

Jane is also an artist. She has been drawing and creating her whole life, and while not professionally, it’s been a surprise and delight to have been getting commissions recently (examples of her work can be found on Instagram at @pointing_at_the_moon).  Her artistic skills come in handy for creating graphics for print materials and protests. Her experience leading expressive arts classes, where she learned how to encourage others to contribute their unique gifts to the world, also serves her at Third Act.

Looking ahead, Jane hopes to spend more time with her granddaughter and her brothers and their families, and later this year to visit the big redwoods at Sequoia National Park. She acknowledges that despite how dark the world looks now, she doesn’t know what’s going to happen and isn’t going to assume the worst. Systemic change happens over time. We don’t know the ultimate effect of our individual actions. All we can do is “make our offerings.” And “look for the helpers,” like Mr. Rogers. “That’s where I keep my gaze.”

Starting on April 1, I will be biking across America, starting from just west of San Diego (Ocean Beach) and taking 70 days to cycle to St Augustine Beach, Florida. [I’ll be joined by] my friend Becky—we’ve known each other for almost 30 years, and we have done a lot of bicycling adventures together. I’m 67 and she is 71, and we were like, You know, we’re not getting any younger, so if we’re gonna do this, we can do it soon. We’ve been planning this trip for probably about two and a half years.

What does your journey look like? How many stops will you have along the way? 

The plan is to average about 50 miles a day, and [every five to seven days] we will have a rest day—and we’ll just figure that out as we go. The farthest north we get on this route is Phoenix, Arizona, and our husbands are going to fly in and be with us for two full days of rest. And [again] when we reach Austin, Texas, as well as New Orleans. The final destination will be the Atlantic Ocean, but we don’t know the exact date—[probably] about June 6 or June 7. I’ve always wanted to do this, and felt like, now’s the right time—you’re at a certain age, you’ve been talking with your best friend about it for so long.

I’ve always wanted to do this, and felt like, now’s the right time—you’re at a certain age, you’ve been talking with your best friend about it for so long.

What inspired you to embark on this adventure?

I did some of my first long distance cycling when I was 18, with a church youth group, and I fell in love with it—I met people that were biking across the country back then, in the 70s. And I knew I wanted to do it someday. So it’s been in my heart and my soul and my mind for a long time.

Tell us about the fundraising component. 

Becky told me that she had been involved with her local Habitat for Humanity for about 40 years, and wanted to do [the ride] as a fundraiser for Habitat. And she said, You should think of something to do it for, as a fundraiser. I have three precious grandchildren, ages 10, 8, and 5, and over time, like many of us, I’ve become more and more aware of issues around climate change. A couple of years ago, my oldest grandchild looked at me and said, “Grammy, I want to do adventures with you.” And I said to her, “You do not have to ask me twice.” That’s when I knew I needed to up my game.

A couple of years ago, my oldest grandchild looked at me and said, “Grammy, I want to do adventures with you.” And I said to her, “You do not have to ask me twice.” That’s when I knew I needed to up my game.

I grew up in a family that was all about environmental stewardship, giving back, and taking care of the earth, so that’s how it all came together. I decided I wanted to raise funds for climate action organizations. I learned about a nonprofit called Climate Ride, which is based in Missoula, Montana; [they plan] bicycle trips that raise funds for climate-related nonprofit organizations. Becky and I did a ride with them in Joshua Tree National Park, and met the [Executive Director]. I asked if I could partner with them, and she said yes and told me I could choose the organizations to fundraise for. So I started identifying nonprofits that I wanted to raise money for, and I found out about Third Act. I’d read some of Bill McKibben’s books, but I hadn’t heard about Third Act, and when I learned of it, I was like, Oh my gosh, this is perfect for me. I’m over 65! 

How much money are you trying to raise? 

Becky told me that when she decided to raise money for Habitat, she wanted a big goal—half a million dollars. And I was like, Well, you’ve thrown down the gauntlet, you know? And then I thought, this is what I’m going to do, too, because climate change is a big problem. It’s going to take more than a half-million dollars to solve it, but this is what I can do to do my part. 

It’s going to take more than a half-million dollars to solve [climate change], but this is what I can do to do my part. 

How can Third Act support you along your journey? 

Telling [my] story and inviting other Third Actors from across the country to share the story with others—and, of course, to give if they can. I’m not going to turn down any really big donors, of course, but look, if 10,000 people give 50 bucks, all the money is there. 

I think the other thing people can do is follow me on Facebook. I’m hoping to post some short videos as I meet people and get into conversations with them along the way.

Any final reflections before you hit the road?

People have told me that even if they’re never going to do this, it inspires them to become active and take care of themselves, and also to be generous. And those are all things that are values of mine. And I think when we do that, good things can really happen. That’s my experience in life: you start out with a small group of people and then it just grows from there.

Dan is the Founder and Executive Director of SolaVida, a grassroots non-profit founded in 2013. His work spans policy/program campaign design and management, organization launch and management, finance, and strategy for-profit and non-profit organizations.

Money is what moves the world. And if we each do our little part with money, that’s what’s going to move the major banks and major corporations. I feel really good about what we’ve done.

What motivated you to move your money?

I got very interested in the divestment movement about a decade ago. I have a finance background, and I’m also aware of the work that was done around South Africa, to use divestment as a way to pressure the South African government to end apartheid. The company I worked for back then allowed us to shift our funds away from South Africa. We saw what happened, and how big of an influence it had. All of these pieces came together in my mind as something powerful that I could do, both at a personal level and in these bigger collectives. 

I began to look into moving my money and trying to understand how I would go about doing it. Around that time, I started to talk to the folks at As You Sow who were developing the tool, Fossil Free Funds, that tells you if various funds have fossil fuel investments. 

For my wife and I, it’s mainly our retirement funds. So I began to use that tool and to see where I could put our money. I began to work out how to make my own fossil fuel free portfolio. It’s been 99% fossil fuel free for a decade now. I later sought out a wonderful investment advisor who thinks that way, and has helped us manage our money. 

While most people won’t dive in at the level I will because I’m kind of geeky and am also very interested in the stock market, they can find others who can help them. 

What advice would you give to a Third Actor looking to move their money?

Get a financial advisor who shares your values and who knows about sustainability! I’ve had this conversation with a lot of people and the reaction every time is that it’s too complicated to know what to do on my own. 

But keep in mind your average financial advisor will either try to talk people out of this because it’s too complicated. They don’t understand or it’s not mainstream. So you have to do a little hunting to find investment advisors who specialize in these kinds of ideas. ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) is now a big thing.

There are a few directories that can help you find an advisor knowledgeable about sustainable investing, including: Green America’s Socially Responsible Financial Planners & Investment Consultants, First Affirmative’s directory, and Find a B-Corp.

And if they want to do it themselves?

If you don’t have a ton of money and you want to find a few funds, the Fossil Free Funds tool is very easy to very easy to use. And if a person wants to say, well, I’d like to invest some of the US stock market and some in bond funds, and they’re at the level of knowing how they want to segregate their investment profile, the tool can be used to find funds that fit. 

For a DIYer, that would be the place to start. 

Visit our collection of Responsible Finance resources on this topic.

How long did it take you to get to 99% fossil fuel free?

About a year. Once I knew what I wanted to do. It’s really a matter of you not wanting to move too much too fast, just because that’s not usually wise. 

Did you change both your credit cards and your bank accounts? 

Our bank accounts, completely, but not all the cards. It just takes time. It’s also tough to know who is sitting behind credit cards. Of the cards you can get, they can actually be branded as someone else but are issued by and underwritten by one of the dirty banks. For example, Chase could be sitting behind a supposedly clean card. 

Find answers to your questions on finding a better credit card and bank here, including tips for how to figure out if a card is “clean” or not, ways to avoid affecting your credit score, managing any credit card rewards, and more, on our FAQ page.

Have you found other ways to align your money with your values?

There can be a double benefit from the financial benefit offered by investing in improving the efficiency of your home. 

On divestor.org, a website I founded in 2013 to share this information, we have a section on what to do if you’ve got a block of money and a home. It might be smart to take your money and invest it in your home with more efficient windows, more efficient appliances, and so on. You’re doing the right thing with respect to the environment, but you’re also improving the value of your home because you’re adding more modern features, and driving down the cost of ownership of electric bills and things. 

My wife and I bought this home in 2015 and one of the first things we did was we put money into new appliances. We had the place weatherized, which was a smart financial decision and good for the environment too. There can be a double benefit from the financial benefit offered by investing in improving the efficiency of your home. 

If you’re going to be in your home for a long time, it’s a great place to invest your money because you know, when you turn around and sell the house, it’s going to be worth more. If you think about it holistically, your real estate is an investment too. 

Did anything surprise you about the process? Were there any challenges? 

The biggest challenge is that if you’re in a 401K or a 403B retirement plan, you may have limited options and none of them may offer fossil-fuel-free options. There are a growing number of new retirement plans that are better. You can also advocate for and ask your employer to request that the plans offer better choices. 

But even within your existing retirement plans, there are ways to approach this. Typically you are given an option to invest in large, medium, or small companies. If you take the funds that are medium to small, you’re effectively divesting because all the large oil companies like Exxon and Chevron are some of the biggest companies in the world. So if you’re given a midrange fund or small fund, by definition those companies aren’t part of the world that they invest in. 

We all have these options in 401(k) plans and 403Bs. Most people don’t even realize they’re there. They may not be perfect, but it’s a way to stay away from the “fossil fuel majors.”

Learn more with Third Act’s resources and webinar recording on retirement plans.

It’s interesting to hear how many different ways there are to move your money. A decade later, how does it feel to be effectively fossil fuel free? 

Money is what moves the world. And if we each do our little part with money, that’s what’s going to move the major banks and major corporations. I feel really good about what we’ve done. My wife and I feel good about it because we know that it is the right thing to do. It’s where the pressure point is, and in our own way, we can help. 

Third Act is wonderful and I love being a part of it because you meet people, elders in this case, who are committed and trying to do something good in the world. That’s what brings me hope and joy now.  These are big problems. We can do our part individually and can do even more when we act together, collectively. 

Every time I get on a Third Act call, I meet other people who are trying, who are committed, who are doing what they can. It is a joy to see the impact it’s having!

Please note: Third Act is a non-profit educational, organizing, and advocacy organization. We are not investment advisors and are legally prohibited from providing investment or financial advice. The information Third Act provides is for educational purposes.

Third Act does not offer advisory or brokerage services, nor does it recommend or advise investors to buy or sell particular stocks, securities or other investments. Financial choices are your personal decisions.

I treasure the collectives I was a part of because we really accomplished a lot. We changed the lives of millions of people in this country and that was because we worked collectively.

He grew up in northern Kentucky, one of five children in a conservative German Catholic family. He attended all-Catholic schools, including a Jesuit high school and college. “Everyone worked hard, did well, had no complaints, and was happy with America,” says Bob. “I lived in a bubble.” 

Bob went to graduate school first at the University of Chicago and then to the University of Wisconsin. While at Wisconsin, he became the founding president of the Teaching Assistants Association, the first in the country. The Organizing Director of 1199, the National Union of Hospital and Health Care employees, recruited Bob to be an organizer. “I went overnight from a comfortable, all-white world into the world of low paid workers, a majority of whom are Black and Latino. I was 26 at the time. I learned what this country really is like for the vast majority of workers and their families.” After the reform movement won the Teamsters election in 1992, Bob became Assistant to Teamsters President Ron Carey and the Teamsters Organizing Director.

Like many Third Actors, Bob participated in the great movements that extended democracy in America and made progress in organizing unions, civil and women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, and peace. Looking back on his second act, Bob says “I treasure the collectives I was a part of because we really accomplished a lot. We changed the lives of millions of people in this country and that was because we worked collectively; that’s one of the things I treasure about the Third Act.” 

Bob learned about the Third Act after years of work with the progressive movement built by Bernie Sanders. He read Naomi Klein’s book, This Changes Everything, which, as he says, “changed everything for me.”  He learned about  the urgency of the climate crisis and how little he knew about it. “I wanted to know how I could learn and where I could do something about it,” says Bob. “Someone mentioned the Third Act and Bill McKibben to me. I didn’t even know who Bill was—that’s how little I  knew.” 

He started and serves as a coordinator for Third Act Union, He also serves on the steering committee of Third Act Maryland.  Bob is active in the Non-Violent Direct Action Network, a multi-state Third Act group which grew out of connections a number of Third Actors made while participating in the 3/21/23 Day of Action and in non-violent actions in 2024, particularly for Summer of Heat.

He is grateful that the Third Act has provided him with an arena to engage in the climate struggle. Because it’s only in the last several years he has learned what science tells us about the urgency of the climate crisis, he appreciates how the Third Act reaches out to other seniors who may not yet fully appreciate why and how “we have no time to waste.” 

 “That’s our mission at Third Act,” Bob says, “and I feel proud to work on that mission.”

Scientist to Environmentalist

Dan grew up in a tight-knit Dutch farming community in northwest Indiana. As a kid he was fascinated by the U. S. space program and science in general. “If anyone had asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I would have said I wanted to be an astronaut,” says Dan. Science fiction was pretty much all he read. His interest in science led him to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry. However, Dan eventually spent his career in computer science, and now also sees himself as someone with an engineering mind. “I like to fix things, to solve problems.” 

When Dan and his wife, Peggy, started raising their three children, one problem that began to interest Dan was consumerism. In addition to supporting their family, they were running a small software development business, which got Dan thinking about the economics of consumption, sustainability, and the possibilities of voluntary simplicity

“My thinking migrated from voluntary simplicity to sustainability, and from sustainability to climate, and eventually to energy,” says Dan.
”As a scientist, energy was something that I could get my hands around because I understood a little bit more about energy and how that fit into the whole scheme. And I felt that energy was something we could do something about and particularly fossil fuels.” In 2012 Dan read Bill McKibben’s Rolling Stone article “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” which laid out the case for divestment from fossil fuels and launched 350.org’s divestment movement. 

Becoming an Activist

Dan didn’t start out seeing himself as an activist. “I was a scientist. I was objective. I was disconnected from all that messy people business,” he says. But when he retired, McKibben’s Rolling Stone article was still on his mind so he and a friend went to Washington DC in February 2013 for the Forward on Climate rally on the Capitol Mall. It was a very cold day and by late afternoon all they cared about was getting warm. They ducked into a church where an event was being held to present various ways to carry the work forward. Dan found his way to a session on divestment. “We sat in this big circle and they went around the circle as is so often done, introducing ourselves, and it was what university are you associated with or what faith group or other group that might consider divestment. Going around the room, there were Methodists and there was a Unitarian and there was the whole gamut. And I said I was Presbyterian. And all of a sudden the conversation stopped and they said, we don’t have a Presbyterian.”

I was a scientist. I was objective. I was disconnected from all that messy people business

So Dan returned home and worked with others to bring a proposal to the next General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA to divest from fossil fuels. ”It was the classic thing,” says Dan. “I didn’t step back fast enough when they said, well, who’s gonna lead us? So I ended up being the moderator of the volunteer group that brought that whole issue to the church.” Eight years and several failed attempts later, the church voted to divest its holdings in Exxon, Chevron, Marathon, Valero and Phillips 66. 

Earlier, in 2011 Dan was taking his son to Vanderbilt University in Nashville when he saw a poster that said Bill McKibben was coming there to speak. Dan found an email address for Bill and invited him to speak in Oak Ridge. To his surprise McKibben responded right away, saying he was too busy right then but to contact him again. A year later Dan tried again and got a similar reply. Finally, in late 2012 Dan saw that Bill was going to be speaking at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, not far from Oak Ridge and reached out to Bill with another invitation. This time Bill said he’d come if Dan could get a big enough crowd. “When I asked how big is big enough, Bill just said ‘You’ll know.’ We turned out about a thousand people when Bill came to Oak Ridge,” says Dan. 

The Beginning of Third Act

Dan became involved in Third Act when it was still an idea in Bill McKibben’s head. In late 2021, Bill announced he was stepping back from his weekly New Yorker column to organize older Americans. “In that final column Bill asked anyone interested to get in touch, so I did. A few weeks later Anna Goldstein called me, we talked for about 45 minutes and I’ve been involved in Third Act ever since.” In early December, Dan joined a call with about 20 other people to figure out what this Third Act thing should look like. Dan and Pat Almonrode, another early volunteer, had both organized faith groups for climate in the past so they proposed the idea of a faith based affinity group. Working with B. Fulkerson they defined what a working group would look like and in January 2022 launched Third Act Faith. 

Leadership Journey

The first time Dan saw himself as a leader was when he was asked to join his church’s leadership team. “I had no clue what I was doing but three years later I’d survived it,“ says Dan. Later he became involved with Living Waters for the World, a church affiliated non-profit that trains US teams to assist communities with water treatment systems in Central America and Africa. As part of that project he got involved in a teaching role which allowed him to make connections across the national church community. 

Dan is modest about his entry into leadership, saying that Oak Ridge, home to the Oak Ridge National Laboratories, “has a lot of introverted scientists” so he didn’t have to show much leadership capacity to stand out. He recalled his terror at the undergraduate speech class that was required for graduation and how that terror only gradually eased when he had to make scientific presentations in graduate school. The Living Waters project with his church gave him an opportunity to lead on an issue of moral and ethical significance on a national level and contributed to his feeling of confidence as a leader. 

If I think that something could push the cause forward, I’m willing to do it, but I guess I would classify myself more as an instigator than a leader, more as somebody who can twist arms and get other people excited about something and ready to make things happen.

After learning the ropes in helping to establish the Faith Working Group, Dan was eager to see a Tennessee group, too. “But I was smarter this time,” says Dan. He was facilitating an adult Sunday school class, based on Katherine Hayhoe’s idea of the importance of talking about climate change. So he challenged a member of that class to organize Tennessee’s only 3.21.23 bank protest, which led to the start of Third Act Tennessee. The Tennessee working group launched in late 2023. Dan recently stepped down as one of its Co-Facilitators and continues to manage technology for the group. 

Looking back on his leadership journey, Dan says, “If I think that something could push the cause forward, I’m willing to do it, but I guess I would classify myself more as an instigator than a leader, more as somebody who can twist arms and get other people excited about something and ready to make things happen.”

In any case, Dan retains his scientist’s love of the objective and the measurable. As for hope, Dan finds it not in wishing for something but in figuring out what will make a positive difference and then going and doing it. And getting other people to do it, too. 

We invite you to “share your screen” with Peggy and Alma while they chat about everything from problem-solving technology to delights (and surprises) of having Zoom friends.

Sharing Letters on Zoom

Their coaching began with Zoom. Alma talks about how she put the platform’s share screen feature into use right before delivering a letter to the governor’s office.

Taking the Lead at 81

“At the age of 81, I learn by trial,” says Alma. She practices, instead of simply listening or following. And when she’s had enough tech for the day, they pause and continue next time.

Microsoft Tyrant

Like all of us, Peggy and Alma have experienced their fair share of tech issues. Once, Microsoft Edge insisted on being the default file storage and they couldn’t find any Google files. After some investigation, they figured it out. “The word is tyrant,” Alma says. “Microsoft Tyrant was there and I couldn’t get past it.”

Coaching Model

On why Third Actors can and should increase their digital literacy, Peggy gets to the heart of it: “We can help [Alma] achieve what she wants to be doing, which is not fooling around with technology but working to democratize energy in Connecticut.” It’s a means to the end: protecting our climate and democracy.

Zoom Friends

They each live on opposite coasts, and similar to many geographically-distant Third Actors, have developed a friendship through Zoom. Along the way, they’ve both found several benefits to this arrangement—such as the comfort of wearing whatever you’d like at home.

Alma now says she would like to get her entire team involved in coaching (and in fact, she’s already had several requests). At the end of their conversation for this blog, they thought over whether they had anything more to say. After a moment, Peggy told Alma, “I’m free this Friday. Should we schedule a session?”

Here’s How You Can Sign Up for Coaching with Third Act

All members of Third Act working groups are invited to request a coaching session for any and all skills.

• For Zoom coaching, please use this form.
• For Google coaching, please use this form.

For any questions, contact Lani (lani@thirdact.org).

Here is my experience from last Wednesday, after both the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire had broken out.

I was given about 10 minutes to evacuate from the Sunset Fire in Runyon Canyon—less than a mile from my house. Thanks to the quick efforts of the LAFD, I was able to return home the next morning. I am very lucky; many, many others in Los Angeles cannot say the same. Nearly 200,000 people have been evacuated from their homes, and many do not know if their homes will still be standing when the evacuation order ends. There is ash falling from the sky, and many of us are scared to go outside for fear of what we might be inhaling. I am a third-generation Angeleno, and it breaks my heart to see my city go up in such violent, fast-moving flames. At the same time, I am moved by the residents working together and collaboratively to keep as many people safe, housed, and fed as possible.

Climate change, and the climate events that come with it, is not happening tomorrow. It is happening now, very obviously in the populous city of Los Angeles. Without action, it will come for all of us. Without divestment from fossil fuels, investment in clean energy, a commitment to Indigenous land stewardship, and community solidarity, it will be in your backyard as quickly as it has come to mine.

Shannon, a Third Actor, shares some thoughts on experiencing the most recent fires as well as the 2018 Woosley fire:

This tragic round of fires has many Angelenos, like myself, reliving emotionally the losses of the 2018 Woolsey fire, feeling heartbroken for those now in pain similar to and worse than what we experienced.

In the aftermath of my family’s loss, I felt compelled to speak up about the climate crisis. I made a call for change to a packed city council meeting, which led to an article in a local paper. I raised funds for the UCLA Center for Climate Science through a bike tour of the California coast. Now, six moves and as many years later, my permanent—all electric, solar-powered—home may be ready to occupy soon.

All I could think of after Woolsey was the opportunity to change, to rebuild better and more sustainably. The devastation of the most recent blazes opens yet another inroad for us to mitigate the climate crisis by rebuilding intentionally. Every lost structure to be reconstructed–and reimagined–presents a huge opportunity for our environment, for our county, for our families, for the clean energy revolution.

We Angelenos are visionaries with outsized imaginations. If anyone can do it, we can. We can build a sustainable LA. We can rise stronger than ever before. We can turn the call for hope and renewal into something tangible for generations to come. Now is the time to seize opportunity within tragedy and transform the way our beautiful region runs, the way it is built, the priorities it sets.

I am preaching to the choir. Third Actors are some of the most engaged, intelligent, thoughtful climate organizers out there. Thank you for committing your time and energy to this fight. Below, you will find some resources we have compiled from the community. If you are a Southern California-based Third Actor, I hope you are somewhere safe. My heart is with you. This city is as great as the people in it, and you are magnificent.

Resources for those wishing to donate time, money, space, or supplies:

• Volunteering and item donations: 
  • Mutual Aid LA has an excellent, thorough guide of donation needs and volunteer opportunities throughout the city.
  • L.A. Works can connect you with non-profit organizations to volunteer with.
• Donations:
  • Many displaced families have their own personal fundraisers set up; here are a few directories that include some of these
    • Directory of GoFundMe fundraisers to support displaced Black families of Altadena
    • Directory of GoFundMe fundraisers to support displaced Latine families of Altadena
    • Directory of GoFundMe fundraisers to support displaced Filipino families
    • GoFundMe’s landing page for all wildfire-related fundraisers
  • California Community Foundation’s Wildlife Recovery Fund
  • Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation
  • The Pasadena Humane Society, which is boarding displaced pets and suppling those in need with pet food and medical care
  • The National Day Laborer Organizing Network, which is supporting the Pasadena Community Job Center
  • California Domestic Workers Coalition, which is collecting donations for day laborers and domestic workers who have lost their homes or their jobs—or both—due to the fires
  • Third Actor Jeff shares: “Many faith communities have disaster and emergency response funds. My Christian denominations (the United Church of Christ and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) each have funds for emergency response and have issued appeals to specifically respond to the fires. One of the reasons I especially like giving through my church is that the church response is there for the long haul and pays attention for ways to help that the government and big agencies ignore or miss. People will fall through the cracks and the church can help them. The recovery will take years and the church isn’t going away. Even for the local congregations that have lost their buildings, they will still be there offering grassroots , neighborhood assistance. Plus, typically, the overhead for the fundraising is already paid for, so I know that 100% of my giving will help people.”

Resources for those displaced and in need of clothing, food, federal funds, or other items:

• FEMA Assistance: Apply for FEMA assistance here.
• Food/water/masks/other items: Mutual Aid LA has an excellent, thorough guide with locations offering N95 masks, food, water, and more.
• Insurance: LAist has an excellent guide to get you started on insurance claims.
• Childcare: The YMCAs across the greater Los Angeles area are offering childcare as well as temporary shelter, showers, basic amenities, and mental health support.
• Vital records: If you have been directly impacted by the fires, you can request property and vital records (i.e., birth, death, marriage) free of charge by calling 800-201-8999 or emailing recorder@rrcc.lacounty.gov
• Housing: 
  • Hotel listings with availability and discount information and for those who have been evacuated
  • 211LA has partnered with Airbnb to offer free temporary housing to some people; you can apply here.

Matt grew up in a Catholic family in Stowe, Ohio, one of four children. He knew from an early age that he was gay. “I took a lot of bullying as a result,” says Matt, “but I eventually found other people on the fringe who were also bullied and they became my social group.” A gap year Matt took after high school turned into 5 years that he spent living and working near his hometown. When he was ready to go to college he chose Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, an institution non-traditional enough to suit his needs as an “older” student with a creative and rebellious nature. He graduated with a BFA in Painting and Art History.   

In his second act, Matt moved to San Francisco and reinvented himself several times, pursuing careers that included museum curator, lithographer, handyman, bike mechanic, bicycle parking valet and beekeeper. Eventually, he found his way into teaching middle schoolers, mostly math and science. After 22 years, he told his principal he needed a change and wanted to bring “Shop” back into middle school.  Under the rubric of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), he got the go ahead to put together a program. “Parents and kids loved it and with help from an angel donor we bought a room full of tools, 3-D printers and other technology.” Several students Matt has stayed in touch with went on to earn engineering degrees. Others pursued experiences with set design in high school with the ambition of making it a career. 

Matt has always been politically oriented and active to one degree or another. At the height of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco he volunteered in a buyer’s club for AIDS patients as well as in ACT-UP.  An avid cyclist, he was involved with Critical Mass and the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition as well as other advocacy groups. Growing up in northeastern Ohio he was aware that every year activists held a candlelight vigil on the Kent State hill where the National Guard shootings took place. Matt was living in Kent in May 1977 when the university provost announced that a huge sports center would be built on the iconic site.  Several of the students injured were still living in the area. They rallied people to take over the administration building and to create a tent city on the site of the shootings.  

“I heard about it and wanted to join,” says Matt. In contrast to his high school experience as an outsider, being a part of the tent city gave him a feeling of being useful and needed. “I joined against my parents’ wishes,” says Matt, “but they eventually visited, took a tour with one of the survivors, and were very supportive after that.  Mom is still a dyed in the wool Republican but they respected me for being active and standing up for what I believed in.” Matt and his fellow protesters were eventually dragged off, put into buses, and processed. The tent city was the longest nonviolent civil disobedience action in U. S. history at the time. 

Matt got his passion for politics from his parents even if his views were mainly in opposition to theirs.  “All my parents’ friends were Democrats and they would get together for every election, drink cocktails, watch the returns roll in, cackle, scream, smoke cigarettes,” says Matt.  “Despite their political differences they were friends and hung out together.”

Matt is in the process of re-fashioning his third act after several significant losses during the last two years. A serious back injury caused him to take early retirement from teaching.  Several months later his husband retired and they prepared for a life of adventures abroad.  However, within a year of his retirement Matt’s husband died suddenly, followed by the couple’s two elderly dogs.  

As Matt began picking up the pieces of his life, a friend from his days at Antioch told him about Third Act.  He attended a meeting and got on a committee. “I saw their newsletter and realized I could re-format it—-actually by using an app one of my sixth-graders taught me how to use during the pandemic,” says Matt with a smile. When the Bay Area working group rolled out its website, Matt took on the job of keeping it updated and coordinating the communications team. “We want as many volunteers as possible so we have reporters for all our campaigns. They bring me the content and I format it and post it.” 

With regard to activism, Matt has always felt that “the least I can do is be a body out there and be counted. That’s always been my stance whenever I’ve participated in a demonstration,” says Matt. “I’m not going to be a speaker, I’m not going to try to create anything other than to add my presence.”  Matt’s Third Act work takes up a fair amount of his week but he’s looking for more volunteer work, perhaps helping refugees. In any case, he intends to keep adding his presence. Long term, Matt finds hope in what he sees in his Gen Z nieces and nephews and their potential to do better than their elders. 

In a panic, I then went to 2 other international delivery places and finally DHL said that their envelope should arrive by Tuesday morning. So it cost $150 and a quite a bit of effort to be able to cast my vote, but it’s a small price to pay for the privilege of voting in this election.”

Ria Stewart
Mexico City

“Here in western NC a lot of people’s lives have been upended by Hurricane Helene, so another elder friend and I wanted to make sure people without homes and cars could still vote. So for three days my car turned into a VOTER TAXI – we showed up at the downtown bus transfer station and approached people to ask if they had voted. If not, we offered to take them to a nearby early voting site and then on to wherever they were planning to go on the bus.

Over the three days we took 12 people to vote, most of whom I’m pretty sure would not have voted had we not come along. One old fellow voted for the first time! We helped one lady who had recently become “unhoused” for the first time in her life resolve her provisional ballot, another fellow get out to his appointment with FEMA which was beyond the bus line.

Here’s Jonathon, unhoused, struggling with MS, but one of the sharpest most delightful human beings you’d ever want to meet!”

Debbie Genz
Ashville, North Carolina

“Three generations went to the early voting location together, me, my daughter and granddaughter. It was my granddaughter’s 2nd vote, but first for a President.”

Jane Kahan
St Paul, Minnesota

“Exhausted by so many months of angry rants, fearmongering, and vindictiveness from Trump and MAGA Republicans, many of us sensed a subtle change in the national mood, an air of expectancy, after the Democratic convention.

Our next president wore a contagious smile, not a sinister scowl. She promised opportunity for all, not recrimination and discrimination. Rather than abandoning our allies and courting dictators, she aspires to a renewed spirit of international cooperation to peacefully achieve global prosperity. Discerning Americans have been perplexed and frustrated that so many reasonable friends and neighbors have accepted the absurd, false realities concocted by Trump and Vance, and they find it frightening that virtually every Republican member of Congress is unfazed by Trump’s treasonous, criminal and immoral behavior. So they rejoiced in Harris’s fact-based policies of inclusion and her enlightened vision for the future.

Desperate to tune out the constant drumbeat of ridicule and hostility, millions of people welcomed her message of hope, joy, and a brighter tomorrow.”

Dick Wildermann
Seabrook Island, South Carolina

“Third Actor, Jon Gorham, organized 58 volunteers who wrote 6,500 get-out-the-vote postcards to Democrats in Pennsylvania, and 2,500 postcards for Jahana Hayes, Connecticut’s three-term Congresswoman. Jon and his group also made and distributed over 2,000 nesting, origami boxes for Johanna Hayes, who has used these boxes to thank her staff, energize volunteers, and motivate first-time voters.”

Jon Gorham
Woodbridge, Connecticut

“While canvassing in a Merced CA neighborhood for Adam Gray (D) in the CD 13 race, I couldn’t catch these voters. Or maybe they were canvassing. Still, we knocked on hundreds of doors, and got to meet Adam.”

Nancy Tierney
Pacifica, California

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One of the blessings of growing older is that—if you’re fortunate—you’re also growing less judgmental. With any luck you’ve come to understand that the world can be hard, and so to have some affection for your fellow travelers through it. Which is another way of saying: it was sweet to spend a sunny Tuesday morning in a not-so-good section of Philadelphia, knocking doors to turn out the vote.

I’d gotten to town the night before, coming from Atlanta, where we’d had a wonderful night with the local TA group (and where I’d gotten to spend a memorable afternoon at the Civil Rights Museum, reflecting on our colleague Heather Booth and on older voters in general. You can read my report for the New Yorker here).

Anyway, the visit to Philadelphia began with a big rally at the Arch Street Meeting House in the center of the city. We heard from a dynamic young pastor and city councilor named Nicolas O’Rourke, and from two young women studying at St. Joseph’s, and then I rambled for a while about the stakes of this election—a knife’s edge chance between electing a dangerous authoritarian or choosing our first woman president. The main job was just to psych people up for the real work, which at this late stage is nothing but turn-out.

And so we gathered, fifty or so gray-haired activists, in Clark Park in West Philly the next morning. We stood around a statue of Charles Dickens as we took our marching orders—each team of two had an app called Minivan that gave us our catalog of doors. The morning’s canvass had been organized by the non-partisan Environmental Voters Project, which has a big list of ‘low-propensity’ voters who can be counted on to pull the right lever if they make it to the polls. And so we set off.

Mike Tidwell, the veteran leader of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, and I set off through the streets of West Philadelphia. It was morning, so not surprisingly most people weren’t home—the usual routine was to ring the doorbell, wait for a minute, and then print the person’s name on the literature encouraging them to be a “good voter” (apparently, testing shows this kind of ‘social pressure’ actually works) and hang them from the doorknob.

About halfway through, a young woman on our list answered the door. I explained that we just wanted to make sure that she knew how to get to her polling place, at which point she said that was going to be a problem. She pointed to her right foot, where her sock covered a bulge—it was, she explained, an ankle monitor, and she wasn’t actually allowed to go out to the polls because she was awaiting trial.

Now, I imagine that at some point in my younger years, I might have thought: this person could be a criminal, should I be helping her vote? But I’ve lived long enough and attentively enough to understand that just because a young black woman has fallen afoul of our criminal justice system, it doesn’t mean an enormous amount. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in jail (for crimes I’ve been happy to admit) and in the process met a fair number of people who, it struck me, were guilty mainly of being born in the wrong place. I haven’t suspended judgment entirely—I don’t like crime, and I wouldn’t vote for a presidential candidate who had managed to acquire multiple felony convictions. But I sensed that this young woman probably did not have a crack legal team at her command, and anyway she wasn’t running for president—she just wanted to vote for president. So I helped her figure out how to approach the Secretary of State’s office. I hope it works, and not just because it will help Harris—because voting is good. (One thing I deeply admire about older Americans is that for all the opportunities we’ve had to develop real cynicism, we continue to vote.)

A few blocks later we came to one of our addresses and there was actually someone sitting on the porch. “We’re looking for Janis Merton,” I said (though I’ve changed the name.)

“Oh,” he said. “That name is deceased. I wish you would take it off your list.”

Now, for the first two-thirds of my life, I would assume that he meant Janis had died, and I would have offered my condolences and moved on. If I’d somehow understood that this was a person born a woman who had become a man I wouldn’t have known what to say; raised to be polite, I probably wouldn’t have said a thing, but I might have thought: ick.

But again I’ve been lucky. I’ve had the chance to get to know a fair number of people who’ve transitioned from one gender to another, and in every case it’s been a blessing. The idea that we live in a moment when people are able to connect with something deep inside them, and instead of feeling shame and sadness do something about it—that’s a joy. And one of the ugliest parts of this fall’s campaign is the degree to which the GOP has decided to stigmatize and target those people. The cruelty of the radio ads and the tv spots can take your breath away. As Tim Walz would say, none of your damned business—but to the degree it’s of the public interest, it’s awfully nice that you can love who you want, including yourself. I’m pretty sure this guy was never going back, and more power to him.

We finished up our day’s list and returned our clipboards, and then I got on the plane to Phoenix. Again we had a wonderful evening program, thanks to the folks at Third Act Arizona—among other things it featured Candice Fortin, the organizing director at my old stomping ground 350.org. And Rebecca Solnit was there to headline things, thank heaven, since I was getting a little weary. Some native dancers set the mood; a trio of young people brought it home. We ended by telling everyone to show up the next day to canvass, and a lot of them did.

This time the proceedings were organized by Seed the Vote and by La Lucha—the phone app took us across the sprawling Phoenix metro area to the suburb of Avondale, which has almost tripled in population in the first fifth of this century. It’s mostly Hispanic, a pretty solidly middle-class community—we were in a subdivision filled with twisting roads and not-quite-identical houses, each with a gravel front yard (Phoenix has successfully kicked the lawn habit, though there was one unfortunate experiment with astroturf). It was a fairly perfect rendition of the America that’s coming by mid-century, where white people are no longer a majority—the thing that may subliminally drive the MAGA rage. And yet it was so…normal. Pickups, a few of them jacked-up. Fancy doorbells (Ring vs Vivint, with a few SimpliSafe—you notice these things when you’re doorknocking).

The sun beat down—when we’d left the car it had insisted the outside temperature was 100, and it felt like that. The trees weren’t big enough yet to provide much shade, and I was inordinately grateful when the phone app sent us to the shadier side of the street. People were mostly missing—it was midday—and so, conspicuously, were solar panels. If this were California or Texas (or Vermont) you would have found them on many houses, but so far the Arizona utilities have roundly resisted any real efforts to take advantage of the fact that they are the sunniest city in the country, with the sun shining down 88.5 percent of the time. One would think that the record-smashing summer they’ve just endured—at one point 21 straight days set new daily temperature records, a streak with no equal in this country—might have convinced them. But no. We desperately need four more years for the IRA to roll out, and really step up to the task of changing out the 140 million homes in this country, and we desperately need the great advocacy at Public Utility Commissions that so many Third Actors are now engaged in.

It was good to be outside walking the streets, even in the heat, in part because it meant there was no chance to worry about the polls, and all the other craziness. (While we were out there news came that the police had arrested the gun nut who shot up the local Democratic headquarters, and also the nut nut who set a mailbox on fire last night perhaps to burn up some ballots). Politics used to be kind of fun, but not since 2016—everything seems desperate, especially this gut-wrenchingly close election. But while it’s happening, there’s the chance for everyone to take part: to get out and knock doors, and in the process be reminded what kind of tenuous, noble, important lives our fellow Americans are living. To remind ourselves that one goal of all of this to make those lives a little easier.

Reno the next night was like coming home–Third Act’s first big electoral effort had come here in the fall of 2022, when we played a real role in helping save the Senate by picking up Nevada’s seat. Our great national organizer B Fulkerson is also the great local organizer here, and so we had a truly beautiful evening at a packed Unitarian church, which featured Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar. Rebecca spoke with great wisdom, reminding us how much of the arc of change we’d seen in our lives, and that this was our chance to move it on.

As a huge passel of canvassers–from Third Act groups in Nevada, Oregon, and California, and our wonderful Bay Area friends from 1000 Grandmothers–set off the next morning, I told them I’d talked to my wife back home the night before and that she’d reported our 7-month-old grandson had learned to give High Fives this week. So I told them what I’ll tell you: if you find yourself weary as this week goes on, just imagine a chubby-cheeked little Vermont boy slapping you on the hand, in thanks for being out there protecting his future. That’s what it’s about!

Sterling Bobbitt fell in love with the natural world at a young age. “As a kid my mother was desperate to have me do some kind of after school activity—band, chorus or whatever,” says Sterling Bobbitt of Third Act Connecticut. “But all I wanted to do was get back home and play in the woods behind our house.”

Sterling was lucky enough to grow up in Mansfield, CT, where his family’s home sat on the edge of a large forested watershed district. His adventures in the woods motivated him to earn a bachelor’s degree in forestry from West Virginia University. After graduation he landed a job with the National Park Service in its Resource Management Division at Grand Canyon. His assignment was to survey backcountry hikers at the Park about all the aircraft buzzing overhead. In the process of interviewing subjects, he logged 300 miles hiking in the canyon, as well as a rafting trip on the Colorado River. “That was a good gig,” says Sterling. Another fortuitous assignment took him to a training event at Lake Mead where he met a Park Service employee who would later become his wife and with whom he’d move to San Francisco.

Sterling’s career eventually shifted to Information Technology, mainly focused on learning systems for federal employees. This work required that he spend a lot of time in Washington, D.C. but he still managed to find time to be outdoors, often with his two sons. Both boys were Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts and Sterling was actively involved in scouting activities with them, including camping in northern New Mexico and canoeing in the Boundary Waters. His lifelong experience cross country skiing and winter camping allowed him to train adult scout leaders in Winter Survival Skills in the High Sierras. Family vacations were spent snorkeling in the Hawaiian islands.

Sterling’s first activist experience was in defense of the earth, marching with friends on what he thinks was the very first Earth Day in 1970. A summer internship with the National Parks and Conservation Association in Washington D.C opened his eyes to the politics of environmental activism and the role activist groups can play in defining options for government action.

In his second act, Sterling spent six years as volunteer webmaster for Citizens for a Better Environment (now Communities for a Better Environment). When he learned of Greta Thunberg’s Skolstrejk för Klimatet (School Strike for Climate), he began standing on a public corner weekly with signage identifying him as striking for climate and wearing the old gas mask he wore to Earth Day as a teenager. During this time, he also started his weekly Strike for Climate in California and has continued it in Storrs, Connecticut, where he now lives with his wife and younger son.

Sterling first learned of Third Act when he heard Jane Fonda talk about it on a news show. “Third Act fit my demographic and my desire to volunteer and it has been a real blessing,” he says. He initially joined Third Act California but is now active with Third Act Connecticut.  During the year he’s been back in Connecticut he’s written 100 postcards to voters, canvassed for the Harris campaign, and joined several protests, including 2024 Summer of Heat actions in New York City and one in Hartford, CT aimed at curtailing public utilities’ use of fossil fuels during hours of peak demand.

Sterling makes his considerable I.T. skills available to the climate movement by volunteering to support Third Act web editors in Third Act Working Groups around the country. As a member of the Third Act Digital Communications team he provides one on one coaching, writes help articles, and assists with devising solutions for the various I.T. dilemmas that arise in the growing Third Act network.  

On the Digi-Comms team Sterling is known not only for his I.T. expertise but also for his gentle good humor and relaxed vibe, always appearing in Zoom meetings reclining in one of his prized Mayan hammocks.  Sterling discovered colorful, woven Mayan hammocks when he was a teenager and admits to being “obsessed with them.” To occupy himself during the pandemic he even wrote an ebook about them. “If I have a sweet spot in life,” says Sterling, “it’s in a hammock down by the river that runs behind my house.”

Sterling is inspired and heartened by the huge potential he sees in Third Act. “There are millions of people over the age of 60—an army of people—who care deeply, have lots of life experience and have the potential to add huge intellect and drive to the environmental movement,” says Sterling. “We have a great big beautiful biome but if we don’t take care of it that’s not what we’ll be passing on to our children. I love my boys and I want to give them the healthiest planet possible.”

“I’m an attorney and a lot of my career I spent enforcing the law, getting people to follow the rules.” says Carolyn. “I’m mostly retired now and much more willing to publicly challenge authority and even break the rules.  I agree with Bill McKibben that we older folks need to be the ones putting ourselves on the line. I keep my Old and Bold button nearby to inspire me.”

Carolyn, a co-facilitator of Third Act Minnesota and chair of their Fossil Free Finance committee, has always considered herself an activist.  She grew up in Madison, Wisconsin where there were huge protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960’s.  When she was 9 years old her mother, fearing her son would be sent to fight, took Carolyn to the march for the Moratorium to End the War.  She recalls being aware of social and political issues from a young age, especially the civil rights movement. She was very influenced by a speaker who came to her third grade class to teach students about racism and stereotypes. At Carlton College and in law school at the University of California at Berkeley, she was involved in the anti-apartheid movement, advocating for divestment from South Africa, an early echo of her Third Act divestment work. 

When it came time to choose a career, Carolyn says, “public service was an easy choice.” She remembers being in a powerless situation as a young person and wishing someone with power could have helped her.  She was also influenced by her mother’s example, a homemaker who “was always thinking of others and how to help.”  Carolyn’s first job was in the office of the Minnesota Attorney General, going after folks who were defrauding the public. Throughout her career she held various public interest positions, including as a district attorney, a trainer of law enforcement officers for a battered women’s justice project, representing kids in foster care, and acting as Inspector General for fraud and abuse in Minnesota’s Aging and Adult Services programs.  “Working for a large corporation so I could earn a big salary was never a goal that motivated me,” says Carolyn. 

Climate activism became something that did motivate her. “When I learned about the climate crisis, my feeling was that it trumped everything. It impacts every living creature on earth and people are ignoring it,” says Carolyn. “I realized I need to shift to this.”  When Bill McKibben’s “Do the Math” tour came through Minneapolis, Carolyn signed up for 350.org Minnesota and helped fight a tar sands pipeline coming through Minnesota. Once she retired, she heard about Third Act and said “This is it. This is where I need to be.”  

Carolyn is buoyed by the results she sees being achieved through collective action in Third Act.   She keeps in mind that she has just a little piece of what needs to be done to address the climate crisis and that it’s impossible to know the impact her one little piece might have.  “Knowing I’m part of a larger movement gives me hope,” says Carolyn. “Being with others who are concerned feels so good, especially since we all came together right after the isolation of the COVID pandemic.” 

She tries to keep in mind the positive news, like the amazing and rapid transformation of energy systems around the world. “I like to start with what we can do about the climate crisis rather than starting with a focus on the crisis,” says Carolyn.  She makes sure to regularly do things that lift her spirits.  She volunteers weekly with kindergartners and first graders at a local school and also makes space in her life for a lifelong passion: dance. As a young person she did ballet and modern. In her second act, she did swing dance and some ballroom. There were times in her life when she didn’t dance but she always came back to it, wondering why she’d ever stopped. Now she regularly joins a unique group in Minneapolis that provides a DJ and a space for people of all ages, gender identities, income levels, and dance backgrounds to freely dance in whichever way they want. “It’s so freeing and a real source of joy for me,” says Carolyn. 

“I’ve always been a fairly optimist person and able to access the joy that life offers alongside the struggles,” says Carolyn.  “We need to find the joy in this work. Otherwise we won’t want to keep going.”

Read the latest in our In My Third Act series

• • Lawrence MacDonald on What Boomers Owe to Future Generations
  • Kathy Lindquist on Feeling Liberated in Retirement
  • Jeremy Kagan on the Artist’s Responsibility

As a Third Act staffperson in my own Third Act of life, I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with so many of our amazing Third Act volunteers and have admired and learned from so many of you about your “grandparent journey” and wonderful grandparenting tips (“be quietly indispensable,” “don’t give advice; just give your love and time,” “savor the smiles,” “do the dishes and laundry”).  

The experience of becoming a grandparent is making me reflect on time in new ways. How is it that I can remember so vividly the day my daughter was born (nearly 3 decades ago) and here she is now a mother herself?! In the early days of parenting, each day is long, but the years somehow fly by. 

And I’m now reflecting on future times differently. Will I be alive long enough to see my grandson graduate from high school or find true love? What will my grandson’s future be like with growing climate extremes, especially if we do not meet the climate pollution reduction targets that scientists have established?

As a scientist and climate advocate myself, I am very familiar with our global emissions targets and timetables, such as the urgent need to reduce global carbon emissions by 43% from 2019 levels by 2030 and to reach “net zero emissions” by 2050 if we are to maintain a livable planet and limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The year 2030 now feels very different when I can imagine my grandson being 6 years old. 

And I’m heartbroken to think about what the world may be like in 2050 when he is 26, that this sweet, innocent being will not come to know and love the natural world that I and his parents experienced: with fewer coral reefs, fewer fireflies, summers filled with wildfire smoke and heat waves, and less snow in winters. The year 2050 doesn’t sound so far off when I think about him. Of course I want to protect him and all of our children and keep them safe.

So, I’m taking to heart the sage wisdom of Third Act’s advisors like Akaya Windwood and Robin Wall Kimmerer about being a good ancestor and am channeling my grandmotherly love into re-doubling my efforts here at Third Act – in community and collaboration with thousands of other parents, grandparents, and grandfriends – to make the world as beautiful, healthy, livable, resilient, and communal as I can. We are doing something grand together here at Third Act: accelerating clean energy, stopping big banks from funding climate destruction, and electing climate and democracy champions. 

When my daughter was little, one of our favorite books was Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney, about a young woman whose father’s life principles were that one should explore the world and one must do something to “make the world more beautiful.” The fictional Miss Rumphius, inspired by the real-life “Lupine Lady,” Hilda Hamlin, spread lupine seeds along the Maine coast as she walked and hiked and did, indeed, make the world more beautiful. 

I want my legacy to my grandson to be that I loved him, learned with him, and organized and mobilized with all my heart to leave him a livable, still-beautiful planet so that he may chart his own path to “make the world more beautiful.” 

What do we owe those who come after us? What torch are we passing to future generations? Lawrence MacDonald’s third act is an eloquent reply to these questions. He is a co-facilitator of Third Act Virginia and DMV (DC, Maryland, & Virginia), and active in Third Act Faith and the Third Act NVDA (Non-Violent Direct Action) Network. In late 2023 he published a book, Am I Too Old to Save the Planet? A Boomer’s Guide to the Climate Crisis, which the Financial Times named one of the five best new books on climate change.

“I’ve long thought that those of us in the boomer generation have a unique responsibility to get in the fight for a livable planet,” says MacDonald.  “We knew about the consequences of burning fossil fuels decades ago and yet our generation supported U.S. policies that have been one step forward and two steps back, never really addressing the problem. In retirement, I’m trying to make up for that in my small way.”

I think it’s very important for us to show up for young people when they organize actions, and to be respectful, to listen.

MacDonald’s activism was shaped by being born midway in the boomer generation. The hippies and activists of the civil rights and anti-war movements, his older peers, inspired him.  Born in Chicago and raised in California by politically progressive parents, MacDonald says he “got a chip on my shoulder” towards the rich and powerful from his father’s working-class background and an appreciation for education and a desire to help people from his mother’s upbringing as the daughter of YMCA missionaries in China.

He majored in Chinese and Asian Studies at the University of Southern California at Santa Barbara. Then he spent 15 years living and working as a journalist in Asia, including 2 years in Beijing just as China was opening to the world. He also worked in the Philippines, Hong Kong and South Korea, reporting on social, economic and political crises. He later returned to the U.S. and held senior policy communications positions at the World Bank and two D.C.-based international think tanks.

“My experiences in Asia gave me a strong sense of the disproportionate costs and burdens the climate crisis imposes on the poor of the world,” says MacDonald. “Our country is the largest cumulative emitter and largest per capita emitter of greenhouse gasses in the world, so we bear a large share of the responsibility for remedying the situation.”  

MacDonald first participated in climate-related civil disobedience in August 2011, when he was one of more than 1,200 people arrested in front of the White House in a two-week campaign that Bill McKibben helped organize calling on President Obama to stop Keystone XL, a 2,030-mile-long oil pipeline from Alberta, Canada, to U.S. refineries on the Gulf Coast. (Almost a decade later, the project was finally canceled.) 

He has since participated in and helped to organize dozens of NVDA climate actions, including Third Act’s prominent role in this year’s Summer of Heat campaign in New York City,  in which scores of elders have been arrested for blocking the doors at Citibank, the largest funder of new coal, oil and gas projects.  

In addition to joining in elder-focused actions, MacDonald actively supports youth climate justice groups engaged in non-violent direct action. “I think it’s very important for us to show up for young people when they organize actions, and to be respectful, to listen,” says MacDonald.

Aside from a few very close friends of longstanding, the people in the climate movement are my closest friends. It’s rewarding to be connected with people who are also connected through shared values and a shared struggle.

“Support youth on their own terms, ask them what they need. Don’t assume you have answers, just be present.” Following Third Act’s 2023 Rocking Chair Rebellion in Washington DC, youth climate groups in and around the national capital began inviting Third Act DMV to organize elders in rocking chairs to show up for their actions. MacDonald and other TA DMV members keep brightly painted rocking chairs at home to respond to these requests.   

For MacDonald, religion is closely linked to the struggle for climate justice. His parents were skeptics but encouraged his participation in the Congregational Church. As an adult, he retained his parents’ skepticism but appreciated the church’s emphasis on social action. When he met the woman who is now his wife and was exposed to Judaism, he found a faith that suited him better and became a Jew. He now volunteers with Dayenu, a Jewish climate advocacy organization. He recently wrote an essay for Third Act Faith titled Faith-Based Advocacy as a Path to Power. 

As a boy, MacDonald spent a lot of time outdoors in California’s mountains, deserts and beaches, including on camping trips with his grandparents. He finds hope in the natural world that is left to us and in the camaraderie of the movement. Young climate activists and Third Act elders provide him with a friend group he believes is stronger and more meaningful than he would have had otherwise. 

“Aside from a few very close friends of longstanding, the people in the climate movement are my closest friends,” says MacDonald. “It’s rewarding to be connected with people who are also connected through shared values and a shared struggle.”

Read the latest in our In My Third Act series

• Kathy Lindquist on Feeling Liberated in Retirement
• Jeremy Kagan on the Artist’s Responsibility
• Liz Evans on Her Road to Climate Activism

I was on a lot of conference calls when I worked at Accenture. During these calls, I dug a pond in my front yard and then filled it. And now, around the pond are some of the very first flowers sold by Garden for Wildlife. 

Native plants are really good for the environment. They sequester carbon. Their roots go as far as 15 feet deep. When you pull up grass turf, it’s only this deep and then it’s solid dirt. So when it rains, the water doesn’t get absorbed; it runs down the grass and into the storm drains and up to the Chesapeake, which gets polluted. Montgomery County, where I live, has a program called Rainscape. It gives homeowners $7,500 to put in a native plant garden to help absorb runoff.

And every year, the plants come back. I don’t have to do anything. Nature doesn’t need a lot of help. A little nudge in the right direction. 

On growing native plants in cities

If you don’t have a gigantic garden, that’s fine. Get some big pots, put them on your balcony at your apartment. It still works. 

A friend of mine in Chicago got a loft in the city and he’s like, why would I put plants here? There’s nothing in the city. And I’m like, trust me on this one, I’ll even buy the plants for you. And then, if I’m right, you can pay me for that. So he put three plants in and got a planter little window box on his balcony a month later. He texted me, saying, dude, I have a monarch on my balcony. 

Wildlife knows where to go. The highline, right in New York City, was an abandoned railroad track. Now it’s a massive native garden and all kinds of species go there that haven’t been seen in the city in forever. They’re back. 

On how Ali got involved with Garden for Wildlife

I’ve actually been a supporter of the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) since 1994. I just found my old membership card and feel like this is a little bit of proof that we live in a simulation because too many things seem to be coming together to make this happen. 

The organization sent out an email to check out the book, Nature’s Best Hope, by advisor Doug Tallamy. And after reading the book, I realized I couldn’t find native plants anywhere. I spent three hours at Lowe’s Googling every single plant there only to find out that every single one was an invasive species. I had no idea. 

On creating a business model

The problem is that there are 100 million gardeners out there who don’t know about native plants and when they do learn about them, they can’t find them. I reached out to the head of innovation and marketing at NWF and said, it’s not enough to educate people because there are still too many people who don’t have access to it. 

The net result of our work with them was a business plan and e-commerce site built on this really cool database they already had. It contained every single native plant, free shrub, and flower at the zip code level in the US. We used that power in the system. We took that asset and created an ecommerce site. Our team at Accenture ended up building it for them using Salesforce and Shopify.

When people go to the site, it starts by asking for your zip code. Then it only shows you what’s native to where you live. You click buy, just like any other ecommerce business, and they show up on your doorstep. 

On getting college students to appreciate the tangible impact of gardens

Generation Z calls themselves Generation Dread because everything they hear is how bad the world is. Like, we have dumped plastic in the Pacific. We’ve put carbon in the atmosphere. We have polluted the rivers. We have created massive droughts from a combination of climate change and too many people living in the wrong places. We now have fires that are destroying towns. The list never ends, right? 

I totally get that. Of course I do. I grew up in the shadow of a nuclear weapon. So for me, it was a different awful, but it wasn’t as tangible as it is today. Because now you’re seeing it around you. That was just this kind of existential threat. 

For most of the issues I mentioned, you can’t see your impact. You can use a recyclable shopping bag, but you won’t see a difference in the Pacific Ocean. You can drive a Tesla, but you won’t see the climate changing because of your choice. You just know it’s the right thing to do. 

What the students really liked about this was you can just go and get a few native plants. Take one, stick it in your yard, and within a year, you’re guaranteed to see a difference. You will start to see things coming to your yard that weren’t there before. It’s easy to see your impact. 

On intergenerational action through gardening 

Gardening is a great way to create connections between generations, which goes back to why Garden for Wildlife works with Third Act. Grandparents gardening with grandkids or older parents gardening with their kids. 

Wild Vision is one of the things I think would be really good to find a way to get Third Act to work with college students to create the gardens. But then also help maintain them because the way to keep the creation between them, which is always good for lots of reasons. It creates that kind of ongoing gardening activity. 

On joy in gardening and climate activism

There’s a book called The Nature Fix that came out in 2017. Florence Williams went out and documented different research projects going on around the world that are putting the science behind what people have known anecdotally: the connection between exposure to nature and mental and physical wellness. They found that the Japanese tradition of forest bathing lowers blood pressure and cortisol. It doesn’t just lower it for a day or a month; it remains low. 

An experiment in Colorado last year played birdsong for some hikers, but not for others. And this showed a measure difference in their happiness levels. Birdsong is really good for you. There’s actually a Swedish word, Gökotta, that literally means waking up, going out, and listening to birdsong.

When we first moved here, we had crows, doves, house finches, cardinals, and all the usuals. Now I go on my back porch and we have 15 different species of birds, some of which I’ve never seen in my life. It’s just like a symphony. It’s incredible. 

On the bringing home the eastern bluebird

Here’s a bird called the eastern Bluebird. It is beautiful. It’s a certain shade of blue I’ve never seen anywhere else. And then it’s got like a reddish rusty underside, almost like a robin. Then it’s brilliant blue on the outside. And that first year we put the native plants, I saw one. Then my daughter and I were like, we want to get more of these. 

So we built a birdhouse specific to Eastern Bluebirds because they don’t use perches. They actually use the claws like they grab you on the bark. So you cut grooves in the front of the birdhouse instead and they can grab that and then go in. We built eight of them. 

On the very first day, we had eight pairs of bluebirds move in one pair into each house that first day because they realized there was a food source here and that there was a place that they could raise their young. And now we have bluebirds every year. 

Third Act allows elders who’ve gained understanding of the wrongs they see to take action to address them. Kathy fills important roles not only with the Educators and  Massachusetts (MA) working group but also the Welcome Call Team. 

I’m not a joiner. I like to march to my own drum. But I got on some early Third Act calls and was astonished at the distinguished, accomplished people on the calls and the caliber of the conversations. 

Kathy grew up near a former mill town in New Hampshire, the youngest of seven. The local high schools were underfunded, and only a small percentage of students went on to college. However, a nearby boy’s boarding school wanted to go co-ed, and she earned a scholarship to become one of 11 girls in a school of 250. “It was challenging,” says Kathy, “but I learned a lot,” and questioning the disparity of the rules for male and female students was a small step toward activism.

Kathy’s political awareness was also fed by Vietnam, the “television war,” that came into America’s living rooms every night.  One of her brothers saw combat duty and came back with PTSD. 

Her early career was in publications management for consulting organizations related to training. As her family grew to three children, she transitioned to teaching English at the high school level. Teaching seminal texts of American literature, she discovered how little her students understood about their government. 

She received training from a national civics education group and began to offer her students project-based learning opportunities that engaged them in taking their own “disgruntlement” and using it to advocate for policy change.  “Never, ever be afraid to question,” she would tell her students.   

After retirement, Kathy sought ways to use her teaching experience to effect change.  “I’m not a joiner,” she says. “I like to march to my own drum. But I got on some early Third Act calls and was astonished at the distinguished, accomplished people on the calls and the caliber of the conversations.”  

Kathy appreciates Third Act’s focus on written advocacy. She writes Letters to the Editor to newspapers for a team Fred Hewett created that started in Massachusetts and now extends to key swing states. It’s an opportunity to learn and to be heard on crucial issues.

I noticed inequities, things that rubbed me the wrong way.  Looking back, I think my activism is like a seed pearl. The things I noticed that weren’t right were the grit, the irritants, that eventually turned me into an activist.

Kathy recently created a mobile voter registration toolkit which she’s happy to share with any Working Group in states that allow online voter registration. Though Third Act MA uses it at community colleges it can also be used anywhere for youth or community-focused voter registration. The kit includes a template for a Voter Registration QR code name tag lanyard for volunteers to wear and posters to use for event tables or on pedestal signs. 

Learning, planning and strategizing are activities Kathy has always enjoyed. She’s still doing these with Third Act, but in contrast to earlier times in her life, she now feels freer to fully engage in effecting change. As a teacher, while she’d encourage her students to act, she herself felt constrained. In retirement, she finally feels free to say what she wants and to take direct action.

“I feel liberated!” Kathy says. “Old and Bold!” 

In our monthly installment of In My Third Act, Jane Fleishman writes about her conversation with Jeremy Kagan, co-facilitator of Third Act Creatives and renowned filmmaker.

He may be of retirement age, but Jeremy Kagan says “I’m a working guy.”

This is an understatement considering what currently occupies Jeremy’s time: teaching as a tenured professor in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California (USC), leading the Change Making Media Center, directing a play on freedom of speech, pitching a TV series as well as a feature film, and preparing for the publication of a book of his drawings. He also manages to fit in acting as co-facilitator of the Third Act Creatives Working Group and contributing to Third Act’s future. 

Why are we here and what are we meant to do? As someone fortunate enough to be an artist, what is my responsibility?

When asked about his long career, mainly as a director of feature films and many of them political in nature, Jeremy speaks of his gratitude. You can read more about his work on The Near Death and Life of Jeremy Kagan, which also includes a story of his near-death experience. Politics and activism have always been a part of his life, beginning with childhood when he watched his father, a rabbi in New York, go south to march with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His father’s example and the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s launched Jeremy into activism. His involvement in environmental issues, however, came somewhat later when he attended a Bioneers conference and connected with innovative activists there, among them Third Act’s founder, Bill McKibben.

Teaching film at USC and directing the Change Making Media Center keeps Jeremy at the intersection of art and activism, where he is inspired by a belief that “facts inform, but stories transform.” His own and his father’s persistent questions guide him: why are we here and what are we meant to do? As someone fortunate enough to be an artist, what is my responsibility? 

In his third act, Jeremy understands activism somewhat differently than he did as a younger man. He has a greater appreciation for the power of so-called “small” actions to make a difference, just as a small rudder can cause a big ship to turn in the water. His film students often express discouragement at the enormity of the climate crisis and are reluctant to create art that addresses it. Jeremy reassures them they can start with the mundane realities in their own lives and build a powerful creative response from there. He tells them that while they can’t solve the problem, they can make small contributions to the solution of the problem. He has also come to believe that love, simple human connection, and kindness are fundamental to collective action. Third Act’s Working Principles, with their focus on relationships and values of the heart, are spot on for this moment in time. 

Even with so many pursuits, Jeremy still finds time to ride his bike and put on his wetsuit to enjoy the beautiful Pacific Ocean near his home in Los Angeles. “It’s important to reflect on what you love about the world,” he says. A certain enthusiasm he has encountered in the elders he has met in Third Act gives him hope for the future and affirms his essentially optimistic nature.

Like many elders, he has seen things change, and so he knows change is possible. 

To begin, we spoke to Liz Evans, formerly of Third Act Pennsylvania, and now part of Third Act Upstate NY. She is also one of our lead national volunteers, assisting the Digital Communications team.

She spent the early part of her career in research biology and in the early 2000s, switched to educational technology, a developing field at the time. Her years teaching new tools and technologies have been useful during her time at Third Act. We talked about all she has learned and observed as she moves deeper into climate activism, organizing, and growing a community that works to protect its planet.  

On the connections between education technology and Third Act

For over twenty years, I worked in higher education. My role was in learning management system support for the use of digital materials in courses or, as it later developed, online learning. I helped with the technology, but also, the development and training of faculty and students on using these new tools. There was a consortium of colleges sharing these systems and engaging in different kinds of collaborative learning programs. 

How can you create a structure that allows people to work well together? 

The challenge I faced earlier in my career which I’m also finding at Third Act is that you’re bringing a bunch of people together who have some common interests and tools, but also come from different places with different levels of engagement and capability. How can you create a structure that allows them to work well together? 

On taking the lead

When I joined the group, I had the digital communication skills to offer. And at the time, I thought of it as a support role rather than a leadership one. But as with any early organization, there is a need for people to wear different hats. I ended up taking the lead on a few events and eventually, became the co-liaison for Advanced Fossil Free Finance. Now I’m also a national volunteer and joining Upstate NY. 

You know, in the beginning, I didn’t even know the terminology. I was like, what exactly is a campaign? I’m used to thinking of it as a political campaign, but in the activism space, a campaign means a particular thing. I’m still curious about organizing. We have a group for organizing – what does it mean to organize people?

It was all really unfamiliar to me, but as time goes on, I learn more and more. 

On campaign strategies 

There are different points of leverage that you could think of trying to influence: elected officials, individual consumer behavior, demonstrations in the street, putting pressure on the banks, All of these are strategies the movement collectively has experimented with.

I remember Deborah Moore once said, people say: well, why are we working with the banks? They’ll never do what we want them to do. She replied: if it was easy to do, we would have already done it. 

We’re trying to do something really hard and it is frustrating because change is so slow and you don’t know what’s going to work until something does work. You do just have to try a mix of different strategies and efforts and then over time, you see some of them break through. 

On teaching elders to use new tools

People are used to working with certain tools or some things are simply outside their experience. If you’re trying to introduce something new, you have to provide a pathway to enter an area that may be really unfamiliar. It’s not that older folks are completely untechnical; you just can’t expect it to be automatic. 

A lot of people are used to working with Microsoft Word and you might tell them there are reasons a collaborative organization like Third Act would want to use Google Docs instead. You can give them all the advantages and offer the resources, but some people are just never going to want to do that. You must have the willingness to embrace the range in the desire to change, but also nudge people to see the advantages of using the recommended tools and reminding them that we can help them get there. 

You can have video tutorials, tip sheets, the whole works. But, sometimes, sitting down one-on-one with somebody and hearing their particular questions, is what does the trick.

That’s the fun of coaching to me: figuring out where somebody is stuck and how you can put things into terms that are going to unlock it for them. Then you start to see their motivation to want to figure out how to use this tool. 

On creating opportunities for well-defined, purposeful contributions

The big challenge is to develop enough meaningful activities that people can take on in different bite-sized levels. If you say, we have this thing that needs to be done and we’ll hand you a premade packet, people seem very willing and happy. But if you ask, could you be on this committee and help us organize? It’s too open ended and people feel uncertain if they would be a good fit for it or what it really is they’re being asked to do. There is a drop-off there. 

It’s really about figuring out work for volunteers that both contributes and meets different kinds of personalities and availability. 

On bringing something different in your third act

I now bring the time, but also the maturity to offer what I have and be open to thinking in a new way or trying to tackle such a thorny problem to which there is no easy answer. Being able to live with that and be patient and just keep trying things. That’s something that I can do now, at my age, that I was not very good at in my earlier acts. 

On asking yourself what you did for your grandchildren  

When you retire, you have this question of filling up your time. There are all the things you know you’ll engage in, like family and travel and hobbies. But there’s certainly a motivation we all share of contributing to something greater.  

Back to the classic phrase from Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth: “Future generations may well have occasion to ask themselves, ‘What were our parents thinking? Why didn’t they wake up when they had a chance?’”

Like it or not, we’re faced with this devastating collapse of our planet. And ours is the generation that has to say: this is how we stepped up when we knew we had to act.

Tyler Norman, writes on the histories of both events for the Just Transition Alliance:

“Spurred by the warnings of Silent Spring and 1969 catastrophes such as the Santa Barbara offshore oil spill and the Cuyahoga River catching fire, the young environmental movement organized a national day of campus teach-ins, mass demonstrations, and public school activities such as tree planting and beach cleanup.  An estimated 20 million people participated.

May Day was a signal of the beginning of the planting season, and therefore it is inherently ‘green.’ In the 1880’s it gained its ‘red’ aspect after May 1st was declared an international day of demonstration for all workers to demand respect and dignity, and it became firmly entrenched in the early labor movement as a commemoration of the Haymarket martyrs.”

Within these histories a shared path to justice has always existed, highlighted in the “Teamsters and Turtles” alliance of labor and climate advocacy. Spurred by a necessary acknowledgment that community issues like safe air and drinkable water align with the need for safety and dignity for workers, many of whom are on the frontline of our growing climate emergency, there is a growing discourse around these linked movements.

In discussing Earth Day to May Day 2024, the Western Massachusetts Labor/Climate Movement asks:

How can addressing the climate crisis move our workers’ movements forward, and vice versa? Can we prioritize a transition away from fossil fuels that improves working conditions and labor rights? Ensure that a “green transition” doesn’t happen on the backs on the working class and bust unions?

What does this mean for Third Act? Both May Day and the start of Older Americans Month coincide on May 1st every year. What is the impact of older generations and their contribution to the labor movement and environmental justice? What can we learn about how these efforts for justice and progress contribute to our shared quality of life, and what can we take from them as we look forward in the broader labor movement as one generation of leaders gives way to a new one?

We interviewed folks about the intersection of labor, climate, and collaboration between youth and elders. Here’s what they had to say.

Ben Manski, an Assistant Professor of Public Sociology at George Mason University, is a fourth-generation labor activist and took part in the first organized Earth Day to May Day events in 1995. 

We had about 1,000 people at the Capitol, and over 120 organizations signed on; importantly, the AFL CIO was part of that, the Sierra Club was part of that, and Wisconsin’s environmental decade was part of it. And it continued in Wisconsin for a good 9 to 10 years. 

So Earth Day to May Day came out of very broad movement alliances that were not just the environmental movement and labor, but also farmers and students and youth and communities and indigenous communities all coming together. And then in 2005 and 2006, you had the mass mobilizations and general strike of immigrant workers in the United States, particularly Mexican Americans, Chicanos, and many others out in the streets on May Day. 

For him, the intersection of labor and climate came from family members and mentors, such as late environmental leaders Richard Grossman and Judi Bari.

Judi was a carpenter and union member when she moved to Northern California and became involved with the Earth First movement. She was the most prominent organizer for Redwood Summer in 1990 during which tens of thousands of people went to Northern California to protect the redwoods. 

Richard was somebody who, by the 1970s, was working to build an alliance between unions and the environmental movement, what people now call blue/green alliances. These alliances were about working people at the front lines of environmental harm. The whole movement for occupational safety and health was tied into the broader environmental movement.

Kate Daligga, a Michigander, Third Actor, and long-time union member with the National Lawyers Guild and NewsGuild, echoed these thoughts in a more contemporary context.

I think raising what jobs are taking out of the workers is legitimate. They wind up all these fossil fuel-extracting industries polluting the areas where people work, and they are harmful to the workers’ families and the residents of those communities.

You know, sometimes it’s just dirty, awful, difficult stuff. And when that doesn’t get properly acknowledged and appreciated, the toll it takes, the risks people go through when others are not subject to those.

To feel confident and secure enough in expressing one’s beliefs and politics in a work environment takes courage. This is where veterans can play a huge role. Hunter Pagiuana, a staff representative with the Pacific Media Workers Guild, who in the labor movement as a journalist mentored by more seasoned reporters. He found guidance from older workers helped him grow further.  

My experience came from working at the newspaper in Omaha, where we formed a union, and that was my entry into the labor movement. Before that, I had no knowledge or experience of it. But we had two individuals. Their names were Tony Mulligan and Darren Carroll. You spend a lot of time talking about things. So, I learned a lot from their experiences in the labor movement for 40 years, particularly Tony Mulligan. His dad was a big labor organizer in Colorado. He would take his kids to the picket lines. 

People like Tony and Darren gave me a window into the past and then connected it to the present, which is what got me into this.

For Hunter and others rising in the labor movement, the ultimate goal is to find ways to bridge older workers’ knowledge and lessons, allowing for continued growth and progress.

You have people at both ends of the spectrum: people just now starting out and doing it for six months, and people who have been doing it for 40 years, and when it comes to organizing, especially, you know, that creates a challenge to some degree, because not necessarily like hostility toward organizing, just like a lack of basic common ground.

These people devoted their lives to this. And eventually, they will move on because they can’t do this forever. How do we, the younger generation, carry on that torch and then download all their information and experiences so that we aren’t going blank? And it’s all just about, you know, keeping us all together, whether we’re 30 years old, 80 years old, or somewhere in between. We’re all workers. We’re all pushing the same way.

 

Kate, who works closely with Hunter in the labor movement, shared similar thoughts about the importance of working with future leaders and activists and how it powers older workers, like herself, in the third act of their lives.

I’m 66. I’m not the same as I was when I was 33. And that’s for good and ill.

But what’s really fun about doing this is not only the chance to associate with other older folks and to realize there’s still a lot of capacity and fun to be had, but it’s also really fun to do the intergenerational stuff. And I’ve learned so much from  working with younger folks that I’ve encountered in workplace situations and in union situations. And I’m hoping now through the climate activism, there’s just so much sparking that can be done in these ways.

So how do we move forward? The more workers of all ages can learn from each other, the more progress we will make toward a more sustainable and equal quality of life for all working people, their families, and their communities.

Happy May Day and Older Americans Month! Make sure to spend a moment appreciating the work of the generations of activists who have come before us. Let us continue to work together.

See you on the other side!

Bill McKibben, for Third Act

Flash forward to the present, and now I’m one of those Third Act staffers listening to and learning from hundreds of amazing volunteers each week. As the Network Campaigns Lead, I interact with our working groups every day, so I know that these volunteer-led groups are the heart and soul of Third Act.

Most working groups are geographically based, but some are nationwide affinity groups, based on passion or past professional experience. All of us believe that elder power can be harnessed to fundamentally transform our culture and our politics. Taking on the financial and political forces that threaten our climate and our democracy is a daunting task. But Third Actors are committed to  sustained, collective action to tip the balance of power away from fossil fuels and fascist tendencies and towards clean energy and a healthy democracy.

We embrace a relational model of organizing where we build trust and confidence in each other over time. Our tiny yet dedicated staff trains and organizes groups which then make it a priority to reach out and engage an ever-growing number of Third Actors, finding a place for everybody to make a difference. Volunteers research local issues, write postcards, and lobby decision makers. They attend outreach events, work with local media, register voters, and organize public protests with Third Act staff supporting them as needed.

All of this takes time, dedication, and a lot of resources! In addition to our thirty existing working groups, the Third Act staff is committed to establishing a vibrant group in every state as soon as possible. This is no time to think small! We know we have no time to waste.

Which brings up another Third Act working principle: “Be generous, but not to a fault.” We all want our generation to leave a legacy to be proud of, so we give generously of our time, talent, and treasure. In just two years, we have grown to 70,000 strong. But we need at least twice that number to meet the urgency of the challenges we face in 2024 and beyond! To meet that goal, we have set up a new fundraising campaign called the  No Time to Waste  fund, with a goal of raising $500,000 in 2023.

Third Act is the nation’s home for activists over sixty working to protect our climate and our democracy. Won’t you join me in supporting this urgent  No Time to Waste  campaign so we can start off strong in 2024?

Happy Holidays!

In Solidarity,
Melanie L. Griffin

It has been an exciting time for Third Actors in the “DMV’ region – our DC, Maryland, and Virginia Working Groups – as they once again pressured numerous big banks to end their entanglements with fossil fuels.

Recently, The Third Act DMV cohort took their Rocking Chair Rebellion to Citibank, Chase, and Wells Fargo to protest these large banks’ continued funding of fossil fuels and the damaging impact on our climate created by these misguided investments. These actions are especially critical in light of Wells Fargo’s significant financing of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, one of the most essential projects threatening our climate, a 330-mile fracked gas pipeline that runs through the heart of the Blue Ridge and Appalachian regions of Virginia and West Virginia.

“We are continuing to target the banks because it is a great and easy way to bring Third Actors and others together,” noted Lisa Finn, Co-Facilitator of Third Act Virginia Working Group. “Instead of meeting for coffee, we protest a bank and then have coffee or lunch. Each action brings new people together.”

Through these actions, including flyering and conversing with bank managers, Third Actors can communicate with the community about these fossil fuel issues in an engaging way. Indeed, these rallies and actions attract first-timers and experienced folks, and the DMV Working Groups are building a great community of action-takers. The next bank action is on December 20 in Baltimore!

Finn added, “We hope that by continuing to target the banks funding fossil fuel fight, the conversation stays in the news and might, just might make those CEOs think about our planet instead of money.“

Third Actors in New England are also taking a stand against banks banking badly on the issue of fossil fuels, as Third Actors from the New Hampshire Working Group are regularly at the front lines to challenge banks to clean up their act on climate, with weekly actions.

Deborah Mahar, Co-Facilitator of Third Act New Hampshire, shared, “During our weekly presence outside the Bank of America in Concord we enjoy the camaraderie of gathering together in solidarity.”

Third Actors experienced a tremendous moment when an employee of a nearby local bank that invests in local agriculture projects (i.e., NO FOSSIL FUELS!) came over to talk to NH Third Actors about the bank action.

Mahar added, “We’ve created enough of a stir that the bank’s armed guard has started to appear outside the bank whenever we are there. We’ve had cars honk in support and trucks pull up alongside to tell us how wrong we are. We’ve had a few people stop and take photos and ask questions. Being together in protest always renews and strengthens our passion and commitment to this cause.”

To join in on actions like these and more, please check out our Working Groups page. You can check out the New Hampshire, Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, DC Working Group pages, find other ones near you, and/or find an affinity group.

‘For more ways to get involved with the DMV activities, contact Lisa Finn at elizabethcf4@gmail.com and Deborah Mahar for Third Act NH thirdactnh@gmail.com.’

Stay tuned for more actions in the New Year. Happy Holidays and Happy New Year from everyone here at Third Act! See you in 2024!

Where the playing field was a tiny bit more level, you got it done! From Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia to Kentucky and New Jersey, the letters you wrote and the doors you knocked pay off with wins over the forces of election denial. People stood up for women’s rights, for climate action, for local representation and for a real democracy. But don’t take it from me; some Third Actors from across the nation sent us their experiences.

“Working as an election officer on Election Day was long hours (5 am–9 pm), but you really get an understanding just how safe our voting system is.” Lisa Finn

“I canvassed for local and regional candidates who support democracy and saving the planet (including our new State Delegate Amy Laufer, pictured on the right). Happy to report that everyone I worked for won! ” Donna Shaunesey

“I think our canvassing and help at the polls made a difference…the defeat of Dominion’s deadly, gas-powered Reliability Center is now within our reach.” Bill Muth

“I did work the Democratic tables at the polls this election day.  We had an impressive 43% turnout… much more than normal for a judicial and municipal election.” Tammis Dowling

“I am a poll worker and one big takeaway for me was the number of elderly voters who commented that there was too much at stake to stay home.” JoAnn Karsh

We know what the polls say about next year, and we also know that when we put in the effort we can win. But only if we put in the effort. So you’re allowed to bask a tiny bit this week–and then it’s back to writing letters, making calls, registering voters. Because it matters, and because no one can do it like we can. I’d say no rest for the weary, but in fact I feel energized. We’re ready to push on.

I’d gotten an email notice about the class a few weeks before, but because I hadn’t picked up a watercolor brush since I was a kid, many, many years ago, and even then displayed no skill, I didn’t plan to attend. The fire in Lāhainā changed my mind. I thought I’d join the class with my Zoom gallery screen off, and watch the others paint while I packed for a short trip traveling a few hours from my home in Saint Paul. 

When the class began, I changed my mind again and started my Zoom video screen, wanting to be part of this group, to make my face visible in the gallery, quietly. Fifty or so students, older and younger folks, many of them in Hawai`i, listened to the instructions, the teacher—or kumu in the Hawaiian language—telling us to make brush strokes starting with a dot, a circle, shade in the shapes, then draw some curved lines for petals.

After the class, I packed for the trip my husband and I would take the next day, driving to the small town of Grand Marais. Of course, the town isn’t as remote as Hawai`i, but it’s not an easy place to get to. A four-lane freeway stops two hours short of the harbor village. Canada is less than an hour up the shore. Lake Superior, the world’s largest freshwater lake, sometimes called an inland ocean, is on one side of town, and the Sawtooth mountains, remnants of long ago volcanic activity, on the other side. The flowers that grow in Grand Marais are rugged ones, dogbane, goldenrod, and the showy pink wildflower called fireweed that thrives in wildfire recovery areas. 

I travel with paper. I use it to note things down or for a morning’s writing practice. On my bookshelves at home I have a pile of abandoned, mostly empty, notebooks in which I may have written a few thoughts and then torn out those pages and saved them in files or thrown them out, the empty notebooks I then toss into the stack in one corner of a shelf. I packed one of those mostly blank notebooks to write in during this trip. 

As we started to settle into our short-term rental, while unpacking my suitcase, I pulled out the notebook, opened it, and noticed it had a few words written on the first couple pages. In the otherwise empty notebook, I’d written vocabulary my kumu had taught me. Puke Mo’omana’o —“book reflection” or “journal,”“Nani ku’u ola, “Beautiful My Life!” I had written. 

It’s been hard to think straight since the Lāhainā fire. The first morning of our vacation, as I put on my jacket for a walk across the town’s stony beach, and locked the door behind me, I thought, well, what if Grand Marais, in a flash, burned down? Could the emergency crews find me? Would the brave souls doing grim, essential, solemn work to identify bodies see the root canal or the dental implant in my jaw bones? These thoughts did go through my head, as I walked out the door. 

The August Lāhainā fire is now among the deadliest wildfires according to a list compiled by the National Fire Protection Association. On one day last June, the air quality where I live in Saint Paul, thick from Canadian wildfire smoke, was reported to be the worst in the United States.

There’ve been small fires in Grand Marais in recent years, four buildings burned down in two fires. Last spring, a casual eatery selling pizza, gyros, and frozen custard burned to the ground. Three years before that a more formal restaurant, and two gift stores on either side of it, burned. The pizza place has re-emerged this summer serving customers from a metal shipping container on a lot facing the main street’s sidewalk. The more formal restaurant now operates from a food truck on the land where its building had been. There are flower pots and picnic tables nearby. 

Another food truck, on the corner of the town’s only stop light, is run by a young woman who told me, when I stopped by there, that she used to live in Maui. I bought a cup of coffee from her along with a candle in a coconut shell she was selling, a sign near the food truck window said the business was giving 10 percent of its profits to the fire victims in Lahaina. 

I spend hours on most days walking back and forth from the cobblestone beach where I watch kids skip rocks, or take a walk to a book store, or to some place to grab a sandwich, or maybe I take a short hike in order to find a place to sit and write near the jagged rock formations at what’s known as Artist’s Point. 

A week after the Lāhainā fire, a whiff of smoke or a fragrance alive in my imagination, I decided to stop by the Ben Franklin store on the main street, strolling through the aisles displaying first aid kits, hiking boots, and souvenirs. In the middle of one aisle I found and bought what I was looking for—a watercolor kit, in it yellow, red, and blue paints nestled into a plastic tray along with tiny cups for water, pencils too, and a small pad of thick paper. I walked back to where we were staying. 

I want a heavier sweater and more coffee, I think, as I take a seat at the table by the window with a view of the lake. I pick up the brush from my kit, dip it in the water, and then the paint. I start with a dot on the paper, make a circle, shade it in, and then use my pencil to draw petals. Then I do that again, and again. Flowers for Lāhainā.

Washington DC protest Manchin's Dirty Deal (September 2022).

I understand that producing more oil is a bad idea. I know that region in Virginia is considered the most impoverished and disadvantaged in the state. So, I could sympathize with these people and their inability to stop this invasion onto their lands. Yet, I wasn’t especially distressed since I didn’t know them. It’s not a problem for my home.

Then I learned that women leaders from the Ojibwe and Ottawa tribes, among many others, had recently submitted an emergency request to President Biden. They asked him to decommission the Enbridge Line 5 oil pipeline which traverses Ojibwe territory. The Line 5 pipeline is 70 years old — 20 years past its engineered lifespan — and transports 22 million gallons of crude oil each day through Wisconsin, Michigan, and under the Straits of Mackinac.

The Ojibwe territory riverbanks are eroding at an ever-faster pace due to recent floods. The next rainfall event could cause a vertical break, wherein oil would gush from both sides of the outdated pipeline. An oil spill in the Great Lakes region would poison sacred wild rice beds, threaten Indigenous communities, and harm all people in the region who depend on the local fisheries for food and work. The Great Lakes contain one-fifth of the world’s freshwater and provides drinking water for 40 million people in North America.

Now — now the idea of climate justice was very personal to me.

Elders hold up signs of deceased friends to protest the MVP.

Among other ethnicities, I am Native American. My people, the Potawatomi, were originally one people with the Ojibwe and Ottawa.  As the story was passed down to me, it was in our Council of Three Fires, many centuries ago, that we committed to each other that we each would remain faithful to the others in supporting our way of life. That we would come to help the other tribes should it ever be needed. That pledge we made so long ago still burns in our hearts today. Now this issue was personal to me.

These lands around the Great Lakes were our lands too. Most of the Potawatomi were forcibly removed decades ago but Potawatomi officials have signed the letter asking for Biden’s protection of our ancestral lands.

This is also about racial justice. The pipeline traverses Ojibwe territory against their will. All tribes lost much of their power and resources when they signed treaties with the federal government. However, in exchange, we were all guaranteed sovereignty over the smaller territories our tribes now occupy. And that promise has not been kept.

Activists hold up signs/umbrellas that read "KABOOM!" in DC.

The Bad River Band (one of six Ojibwe bands), has been trying to get Enbridge to cease operating the pipelines crossing their land. In September 2022, a federal court found Enbridge had been trespassing on Bad River Band of Lake Superior lands since 2013, and profiting from Line 5 at the Tribe’s expense. Nothing more happened. Finally on June 16th, 2023, courts ruled that Enbridge had to remove the portion of the pipeline that crosses through tribal territory within three years.

But remember, this pipeline has already been there illegally for 10 years! It is immoral that these people must fight for justice in this issue  — to fight for control over their home lands.

This fight is about racial justice and climate justice, the right for all peoples to have self-determination and to live in a healthy environment. The Enbridge Line 5 pipeline has already spilled over 30 times, dumping more than a million gallons of oil. Yet they were allowed to continue operating on land in which they were trespassing.

Similarly, “Numerous studies have found that the Mountain Valley Pipeline would pose serious risks to endangered species and surrounding ecosystems. The 303-mile long pipeline and accompanying Southgate extension would cut across almost 1,146 streams, creeks, rivers, and wetlands. The MVP would transport over 2 billion cubic feet of fracked gas each day, crossing over steep mountain slopes that are susceptible to landslides and an increased risk of pipeline explosions.” (Evergreen Action) 

A court recently put some of the MVP construction on hold while they consider the environmental impacts and the fact that the exterior coating of the pipeline has been exposed to the elements far longer than is considered safe. The potential for explosions from weakened areas has been enhanced by the exposure. 

A gas pipeline further north in Virginia exploded into a long-lasting ball of fire a few weeks ago. In the Corrective Action Order, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) says the following: “The cause of the failure is currently unknown, but based on initial observations of the failed pipe, environmental cracking is the suspected cause of the Incident.” (Northern Virginia Daily)

News Headline of a gas line exploding in Strasburg, Virginia. 

Despite this and other known issues with pipelines, opponents of the Mountain Valley Pipeline still have to fight their way through the courts and they may not ultimately win.

It can be hard for us to be equally concerned about issues to which we don’t have a personal connection. Until we’ve walked a mile in another’s moccasins, we don’t really understand. Yet it’s good to remember––we’re all downstream or downwind from communities that are struggling to survive injustice––environmental or racial. In the future, we could be too.

My research work brought me to the United States in 1987 for postdoctoral studies at Drexel University (Philadelphia, PA). My entire career was in the field of water treatment, our most precious resource.

In 2013, I became a US citizen and voted for the first time in 2016. The results sickened me to my stomach. In the years that followed, I became more and more appalled by the Trump administration.  I struggled mightily with his daily attacks on our democracy and our environment; for example, the countless EPA deregulations and the exit from the Paris Agreement.

In 2019, I left Corporate America with the intention of giving back and making a difference. I volunteered for the Biden Presidential Campaign in Philadelphia which turned out to be decisive in Joe Biden’s win.

I looked at several nonprofit organizations sharing my values related to the environment and democracy. None of them felt “right” until I attended a Third Act All-In Call in late 2021. When the call ended, I ran downstairs with a huge smile on my face and told my wife “I found the right fit.”  

I first voted, in 1968, when Frances Farenthold ran for Governor in Texas. She ran against Dolphe Briscoe and only lost by a narrow margin.  At the time, I was a student at North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas). We walked through neighborhoods, helping folks to register to vote and actually get to the polls to vote. I have never forgotten the day I knocked on the door of an elderly woman who said that she’d never voted, but that her husband always did that for her. This statement stunned me! Not only did I vote for the first time, but she did as well. We women haven’t had the franchise for long, and in these deplorable times it may not be available much longer. 

Susan | Denton, Texas

I was raised long ago in a multigenerational household that included my maternal grandfather, my parents, my twin brother and sister, and I living in a downstairs flat. My Aunt, Uncle, and 2 cousins lived upstairs. After dinner each evening, we would all get together for coffee and talk about the day. Politics were always up for discussion. It didn’t matter if it was a local, state or a federal election, the pros and cons of each candidate or policy was dissected and discussed. This taught me that elections—all elections—are important and that I needed to understand all that I could about the candidates and what they stood for. I remember how powerful I felt the first time that I stepped into a voting booth and pulled the handle that closed the curtain behind me. Seeing the ballot for the first time in the voting machine was a powerful moment. I pushed the metal levers on my choices, pulled the handle, and the curtain opened. I could hear my vote being counted. Since then, I have always had a keen interest in politics. Although, when I was 8 years old, I wrote to leaders of countries who were killing baby seals and strongly stated that this needed to stop. So, perhaps I was really much younger when I started to find my voice. I volunteered with a few campaigns over the years, and I marched against the Vietnam war, and for Civil Rights in the 60’s and 70’s. I remember Black and White doctor’s waiting rooms, where 2 separate doors led to the same room, but a wide aisle divided the people between two areas. Without fear, I dragged my chair to the middle of that wide aisle. You could hear a pin drop. No one approached me, no one said anything. But, they all looked at me. I was young and way too brave for my own good sometimes. These are some of the small pieces of my life that do indeed impact my vote. When my son was born, I took him into the voting booth with me for every election. When he got to vote for the first time, I was giggling and a bit emotional and so was he. I told the election worker that he was a voting virgin and that watching him vote for the first time made me proud. It also made me think of my family all around a huge, oval dark oak table laughing, loving and talking politics.

Linda | Poughkeepsie, NY

Pretty much every time I vote, I get teary eyed; when I get my “I voted” sticker, I am literally moved to tears by the privilege. But the election and vote that has meant the most to me was in 2008 when I voted for Barack Obama. We stood in line in Alexandria, VA, for almost 2 hours (unheard of at our precinct), and I felt surrounded by joy. It was joyful to imagine ending the Bush / Cheney presidency of torture. Joyful to be voting for a young black man that had moved me to truly hope that America could actually rise to our promise for equal opportunity for all. I am a white woman who knows I have lived with tremendous privilege. But no privilege has mattered more to me than the day I stood with millions on the Capitol’s West Front Mall watching President Obama deliver his inauguration speech.

Elizabeth | Alexandria, VA & Washington DC

My first presidential election was in 1980. I was a poll worker for my first election. I was paid $50. I was the youngest poll worker that day, and I continued to be a poll worker for local elections for several years after. I no longer have to go to the polls because I live in Washington, but my kids remember going to the polls with me to vote. Now they are adults, making sure that their kids see them fill out their ballots and discuss voting. My 5 year old was so happy to have a new president that he danced on the dining room table! It normally wouldn’t be allowed, but this time we couldn’t bring ourselves to curtail his enthusiasm. I hope he is always excited about voting.

Sally | Oak Harbor, Washington

19 year old Sergeant Shoup (left) and Reserve Officer Shoup (right)

I was in an Army hospital in 1968 after returning from Vietnam and voted for Hubert Humphrey for President. I was only 19, but as a resident of Alaska, I could legally vote. I remember that an Army nurse helped me vote from my hospital bed, and I was so proud to have been able to cast my ballot. This is one of the many reasons we Democrats and Independents have to fight so hard to protect this precious right for all voters in our country.  A right that the Republican-run states and members of the Congress are trying so hard to take away from us! This is a party whose policies are so unpopular with the majority of the country that they must literally cheat to win elections.

Rick | Concord,  MA

For a number of years, I had used a wheelchair. There were two times the “wheelchair” access to the voting location was so difficult to find and navigate that it actually blocked my ability to cast a ballot. Barriers to voting go beyond manipulating districts to weaken voting access to people of color. Even today, I am not able to stand in line for hours if that would be my only way to cast my vote. I’m blessed to live and vote in Oregon where ‘kitchen table’ voting is the standard. Mail-in ballots need to be an option for all voters in our country.

PEG | Salem & Boring, Oregon

The first time I heard about voting was when I was 5 years old, I thought my parents said boating—or rather that we were going boating! But it made a big impression on me. It was an important event. Several decades later, I still feel that every time I vote, it is an important event. The most important of all was in 2016.

Julie | Oregon

I am 65 years old and have voted in every election since I became eligible to vote. Back in the 70’s and 80’s, the positions of the main party candidates didn’t always seem too different. I voted, but I didn’t always feel strongly about my choice. That has changed in recent years as I have seen the extremes to which Republicans are willing to go to win elections and stop the passage of laws they oppose. In my life, the vote that meant the most to me was in 2020. I voted for Joe Biden AND against Donald Trump. I also voted for Julie Oliver for Congress. The personal significance was that, for the first time in my life, I donated to both Biden and Oliver’s campaigns (and others) and worked numerous hours in support. I feel strongly that our country needs to up our game in the matters of social equity, climate change, health care, and more. The first step will always be to elect good leaders, and protecting voting rights is key to that. I want to contribute to bettering the performance of our elected officials and the behavior of our citizens, starting with me.

Todd | Lakeway, Texas

I did not vote in 1964. I was working with CORE, a sponsored voter education project in Gadsden County Florida. There was resistance against Black people registering to vote that led to arrests, beatings, kidnappings, and even drive-by shootings. Despite the intimidation, hundreds, and then thousands, of folks registered. One lady, Miss Pearl, explained she was between 108 and 113 years old. She had been born enslaved. She registered to vote and voted in the November election, proudly declaring Johnson was “her man”. Today, I am not sure she would be able to register and vote under the proposed changes to voting access by Republicans. I have voted in every election and primary since 1967. If I ever feel reluctant to vote I remember Miss Pearl, and I am energized. Only in the last election, at 78,  did I take advantage of mail-in ballots. I enjoy the thrill of standing in line with other voters on Election Day.

Stuart | Gadsden County Florida

I voted for Jimmy Carter in my first Presidential election. Little did I know that, as a young kid fresh out of college, I would shortly join his administration to work for disarmament! I also worked for Obama! Two amazing Presidents.

Beth | New York

In 2020, my son was in college at NYU. As a politics major, he cared deeply about the outcome of the election, and so he requested an absentee ballot from Georgia. As the deadline for submitting ballots approached, he had not received one — so I called the county. The woman I spoke with told me it was “probably too late” for him to receive it and return it via USPS regular mail. She said that was okay because “as a college student, he’s probably got other things on his mind… like exams.” When I asked if she could send a replacement ballot, she said he might not be able to tell the original from the replacement — and might, therefore, submit the wrong one. When I asked if he could FedEx it back if he received it in time, she said the county wouldn’t accept a FedEx’d ballot. I asked if the only option was to fly him home and she laughed, incredulous that we would consider the expense. I was outraged that she was so profoundly unhelpful and so casually dismissive of my son’s right to make his voice heard. A day later, my son called to say his ballot had finally arrived — at 4pm, the day before ballots were due at the county elections office. I told him to find the nearest USPS office and send the ballot overnight; I would cover the cost. As it turned out, the nearest USPS office offering that service and open past 4pm was 25+ minutes across town. He’d have to take a train, then navigate through a totally unfamiliar part of New York. I told my son to hurry — that I would cover any cost he needed to incur to get to the USPS office, overnight his ballot, and get back to campus. He was uneasy about traveling so far from familiar territory on his own after dark in NYC, but he did it. I tracked him on “Find Friends” in case he got lost. He prevailed (at a significant expense). The county received his ballot, and his vote counted, but it should never have been this hard to vote. What if we hadn’t had the resources for me to say, “do whatever it takes and spend whatever it costs”? I decided to start working as a county poll worker, to do anything I could to improve voter services from the inside. I used to watch Rachel Maddow and think “Why doesn’t somebody do something?!” Then, I realized, “I am somebody.” I have progressed from poll worker to poll manager, worked advance voting, the Senate runoff, and the GA 2020 recount, field tested a plan to expand absentee ballot drop-offs (after the GA Legislature voted to remove drop boxes), and been offered new county-wide opportunities to: 1) oversee expansion of the library drop-off program, and 2) revamp poll worker training. I say YES to every opportunity I get to serve my fellow voters, and I am happy to support this effort any way I can.

Susan | Georgia

Vickie’s daughter, Rachel, voting for the first time in 2012.

It was not the first time that I voted that mattered the most to me. I’m 68 and I’ve voted in every election except 1986, where I was in the hospital early giving birth to my first child. The most meaningful time I voted was in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected president. I was thrilled that this good-hearted, brilliant African-American man was running for president (I’m white). I believed that people in the US were learning better and would do better, so much so that I registered voters and canvassed for the first time in my life. I was watching the results on TV and literally cried when he was declared the winner. I went to DC and stood in the crowd for his inauguration—on maybe the coldest day I’ve ever stood outside—with my 18 year old daughter (who was later treated for hypothermia). But our hearts were warm with the camaraderie of all those happy people, of all races, who believed that hope and real change were on the way for the country.

Vickie | Durham, NC

Fifty years ago, I cast my first vote in Wayzata, MN on November 2, 1972 for George McGovern in a booth next to my mother. That afternoon, I flew to Sioux Falls SD with my father and step-mother, Joyce. Joyce was McGovern’s campaign manager in his hometown, so I got to stand at the foot of the stage, front row, looking up at the brave man I had just cast my first vote for. A man who took on Richard Nixon and lost so disastrously. I was thrilled to at last be part of our great democratic process, even if I was on the losing side. Back then, at age 18, I knew I had to keep on fighting for a peaceful and just America. The loss did not dampen my spirits; instead it made me realize that creating a country for all of us meant I had to work at building my dream every day. I have remained a politically active and engaged citizen ever since. I walked the halls of Congress for many years as a human rights advocate. Now I make phone calls to people all over the country to get out the vote and support voting rights organizations with my dollars. For the first time in my life, I now wonder if I have made a difference, and if there is hope for my grandchildren to grow up in a participatory democracy as I did. All I can do is keep going—keep voting. I am 68 now, and 50 years have gone by since I cheered for a man who stood up to the anti-democratic impulses of that time. I think about him whenever I feel it doesn’t matter. I still have hope. 

Susan | Sioux Falls, SD

I first voted in 1960 at age 18. I voted for Jack Kennedy, which was kind of radical because my parents—my whole family—had been Republican forever. When I saw my boyfriend that night, I told him who I had voted for and he replied, with a very stern expression on his face, that I had canceled out his and to not do it again. That was the first lesson in gender inequality that really stuck with me. I’m still flabbergasted when I think about it.

Linda | Winnetka, Illinois

I cut school to register to vote, which may have been my first act of civil disobedience. Our town hall was down the block from my high school and voters could register there. It was my eighteenth birthday, and I wanted a say in what was going on in this country. 2 years earlier, the 26th amendment to the Constitution had lowered the voting age to 18 years old, in recognition that people that age were fighting (and dying) in Vietnam, working, paying taxes, and participating in our democracy in every way, except by voting. I was angry about a pointless war and a range of social justice issues. I had hoped we could move in a positive direction (the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Clean Water Act of 1972, and Clean Air Act of 1970 had fueled that optimism). My mother had suggested to me that progress is not linear; it works more like a pendulum swinging back and forth. Today, that still appears to be the case. Civil rights, environmental rights, wage equity and more seem to have swung backwards in recent years, urged by divisive social media and histrionic commentary that masquerades as news. Now more than ever we need to awaken from apathetic despair and fight back, through voting and activism. The sure hands of social justice need to swing that pendulum back!

Nancy | Boontown, New Jersey

Coming of age in the 1960’s, I marched against the Vietnam War and for Civil Rights. I resented being a criminal because I enjoyed a joint with friends. We used to say, “You can’t trust anyone over 30” because we young people were the driving energy behind progressive views. But by the late 1970’s, I looked out at my students and thought, “I can’t trust anyone UNDER 30!” Youth’s world view had shifted; society became more interested in individual material success, instead of in one’s community or country’s welfare. My generation and my country lost their bearings. But bright lights of reason and humanity appeared amidst the dark skies of apathy and greed, and they spread. Until one day I could gleefully exclaim, “I lived long enough to vote for the legalization of marijuana and for a Black president!” The optimistic road is long and bumpy . . . but it’s the one worth taking.

Sharon | Southern California

I am 72 years old and a lifelong Democrat. I was a poll watcher and voted for the first time when I was 18 years old. As a young person, I watched the Civil Rights Movement on TV, and witnessed the African-American community struggle for the right to vote. They sacrificed blood and tears for that right, and now it’s being suppressed. My last vote in the general election was the vote of a lifetime, and despite the unfair obstacles put in our way, my husband and I were able to cast our votes with a drop-in ballot. Biden won but we’re still in very precarious times because of Trump and the right wing GOP that has their boot on our necks. Climate change, income inequality, racism, and the loss of democracy in this country, and throughout the world, leaves us wide open for right wing governments to soar. We need to open our eyes to what the future holds for us, if we do not hang onto this sacred right to vote.

Providence | North Carolina

But I have to admit, it has been hard for me to talk to other older people about being trans/nonbinary. The language and terms are somewhat new and always evolving, which is daunting for us oldsters. I keep handy and share resources to help people understand the basics of trans/nonbinary identity and how to support your queer/trans/nonbinary loved ones.

As my friend and mentor George Goehl wrote recently, while we organizers must meet people where they’re at, we also need to remember that it’s a starting point, not an end. While we must never shame anyone for inadvertently saying the wrong thing or using incorrect pronouns, if my six-year-old grandson gets it, why can’t we Boomers?

And though I am far more comfortable expressing myself and embracing a nonbinary, queer identity today (thanks to the young ’uns), my gender journey is still very much in progress. Until just a few years ago, my thinking about gender and sexuality was centered on being gay and male.

In 1988, just after coming out, I mustered enough courage to go to my first Pride event. It took place in an obscure park along the Truckee River just a stone’s throw from where I’ve been living for more than 60 years.

When I say I mustered courage, let me set the scene for you: local officials and townspeople were getting news coverage for successfully chasing out the Reno Gay Rodeo. A county sheriff even threatened to arrest anyone attending the Gay Rodeo for “being a homosexual” and violating Nevada’s sodomy law. Wondering why they had to greenlight another gay pride event at all, the (democratic) mayor said, “the council and I have never condoned the gay pride festival or that lifestyle, but the law says there must be tolerance.”

Whether straight or gay, fitting into maleness was the dominant priority my whole life. Growing up camping, hunting, fishing, spending summers on our family’s working cattle ranch, drinking Coors from age 13––it came easy.

B with their brother and father. Smoke Creek Desert, 1982.

When I was seven, as my dad was leaving for his first ‘tour’ of Vietnam, he got down on one knee to look me straight in the eye. He said “Bobby, you’re the man of the house.” I had no idea what he meant and although we were close, we never had a conversation about it again.

Jake, Dad, Cathay, and B. Ft. Leonard Wood, MO, 1965.

I was ridiculed quite a bit in sixth grade as a “fem,” mostly for wearing my favorite embroidered flowery shirts; because I was so bad at sports (dyslexia); and because I sang in the Sierra Boys Choir. I joined Pop Warner football in 7th grade, and still hear the refrain, “Fulkerson, you pussy!” for not hitting hard enough.

B as an Eagle Scout (1976) & for Pop Warner Football (1972).

Later on, my mom got me some dumbbells and while I kicked ass as a Freshman offensive guard and defensive tackle, I remember being relieved when a knee injury took me out for the season and I could focus on theater instead.

I was also active in the Boy Scouts, where Lord Baden Powell’s legacy of masculinity-as-morality only grew stronger. Thanks to my parents and scout leaders who cared, I made it to Eagle in a relatively short time, hoping to be “the best little boy in the world,” (to steal a phrase from a book by Andrew Tobias of the same title.)Whether it was acting straight or “being a man,” my aim was to be the person others wanted me to be. To my everlasting shame, I learned to join in the laughter at the effeminate boys and the “ugly” girls. Much like later on, as a liberated gay man, I’d snicker when people used “they/them,” pronouns, asking if there were more than one and saying as that, as an English major, such pronouns made no grammatical sense. Turns out I was wrong about that, too.

At George Washington University, I joined a southern fraternity and became immensely popular as a whisky-drinking, Laxalt/Reagan loving “Nevahda Bob,” conforming with ease to rigid, straight, western manliness. When I shook hands with someone in the Capitol on my first week as an intern with Senator Paul Laxalt, I’ll never forget him complimenting my “working man’s hands.” I didn’t tell him my callouses were from working out, not working.

Staff of Senator Paul Laxalt, with Sen. Strom Thurman and Ronald Reagan, 1979. B is to the right in the back row by the Nevada flag.

I gave up trying to be straight and shot out of the closet after a long drive home from Idaho on October 11, 1987, coincidentally the same day as the March on Washington. It was either steer the truck into the Owyhee River canyon, or tell my friends and family the truth I’d been running from.

My friend and Third Act advisor Rebeca Solnit, whom our founder Bill McKibben calls “the greatest essayist writing today in the English language,” has written her whole career about her hope and change coming from the margins:

“One of the joys of being a tortoise is watching the slow journey of ideas from the margins to the center, seeing what is invisible, then deemed impossible, become widely accepted.”

Over the pandemic––nearly three decades since I’d first come out––I was forced to retreat inward to my own tortoise shell. I took long walks along our gorgeous Truckee River, reflecting daily on my own existential existence along with that of all of humanity. I realized I was living in someone else’s imagination, a stifling binary framework in which I only had two gender choices: be a man or be a woman.

I remembered the words of my Rockwood sister adrienne maree brown:  “I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s capability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free.”

I consumed all the media I could find about gender analysis, from Alok Vaid-Melon (nephew of my dear friend and mentor, the late Urvashi Vaid, my first teacher on queer organizing and intersectionality), and listening to new podcasts like Gender Reveal. I discovered Jewish trans icon Ezra Furman and devoured her lyrics and music, holding on to her life-saving wisdom that I can learn to trust myself so much that I am willing/able to assert independence from the entire unsatisfactory framework I’ve inherited.

I started seeing a gender coach and joined a trans support group. I slowly came out as trans/nonbinary to my coworkers, my family, and close friends.

As Third Actors, we come to this work with a life’s worth of experience; we see through the long lens of our personal and collective evolution.

The right is using trans issues as a central organizing theme to build power, divide America, and destroy democracy, by once again instilling fear that gays/trans are hurting our children just as Anita Bryant did on her Orange Juice crusade 50 years ago.

We’re living in a paradigm, not of our own making, that we bolster by our participation. Trans and nonbinary people have been gaslit into believing our experience is not real by the political debates over whether we deserve access to healthcare, bathrooms, sports teams, affirming queer education, or personal preferred pronouns, and we are losing our minds trying to combat the misinformation that puts our community in harm’s way. When we trust the prompts that come from our deepest selves, more than what is being fed by a machine whose sole purpose is to stay in power,  it becomes easier to see other truths: that we are all just human beings trying to laugh, love, and become ourselves whilst trying to mitigate the amount of pain, suffering, and heartache experienced on this burning world.

Whether that is because of late governmental intervention during the AIDS epidemic, rampant homophobia and transphobia, the lack of resources and protected spaces/communities for queer and trans people, or something else, many of us don’t make it to our third act. Today, 40% of all homeless youth are LGBTQIA+ and 45% of trans and nonbinary youth have considered suicide in the last year. So when we talk about pride, it is important to note that the first pride was a riot, not a parade, that birthed the Queer Liberation Movement.

Thanks to a growing community, some survive and question what we can do if we come together to create a safer world, despite what is going around us. We build new muscles of wonder, resistance and possibility. After all, those who automatically fit into society do not have to care whether it works for others or not. But it’d be so much easier if they did, and helped find ways to support a solution.

Yesterday on my ritual morning walk, I counted four pride flags, trans and nonbinary inclusive, in my Reno neighborhood––ok, one of them was ours, but still!

Thirty five years ago, the possibility of outward, visible, community love for queers was simply not in my field of imagination. I didn’t dare to dream that I’d ever meet and marry the man I loved, be with him for 16 years, and become gay grandparents together. And I’m also pretty sure nobody was thinking 30 years ago that in 2023, Nevada would be the first state in the US to protect both marriage equality and trans/nonbinary rights in our state constitution.

B and their partner Mike. Carson River, 2019.

At Third Act, our motto is No Time to Waste. As one of our precious members from Texas said, “we just want to go out right.” Working here for two years this August has given me entirely new perspectives on organizing and on life itself. We’re creating a new pond as our Lead Advisor, Akaya Windwood likes to say, “where the waters are healing”.

I hope you’ll jump in.

We handed out flyers encouraging people to move their money from Wells Fargo. My wife, Sandra, said to me, “Jim, this seems a little hypocritical since we still have our money in Wells Fargo.”

Okay, right. We had to move our money! We discovered that others shared our desire and, like us, just hadn’t gotten around to doing it. We started a “cohort” program of people who wanted to act together to move their money from climate-bad banks.

We developed a weekly Move-Your-Money Zoom session that provided people with the information they needed to get a new credit card and/or checking account. We found that it became an immediate community in which we all enjoyed doing something together that wasn’t so much fun alone. [In 2023, we have re-launched this cohort series, sign-up here.]

The cohort provided support to each of us, and people made commitments, such as, “by next week I will have done _______.” These public commitments made it much more likely that we followed through on them.

Of course, this came back to bite me. One morning I was working to figure out how to get into my checking account so I could change my paycheck direct-deposit away from Wells Fargo. I was confronted with two security questions: 1) Where did you meet your spouse? 2) Who was your favorite teacher? I confidently typed 1) St. Paul, MN and 2) Polly Ames.

I was told that I could not access my account because those were incorrect answers!

This is the point at which I normally would have said, “I don’t have time for this now. I’ll come back to it later.” And likely would not have returned to it. But I kept at it for 45 more minutes until I got it squared away.

Why did I keep at it? Because our cohort was meeting at noon and I had told people last week that I would have this done by today. Everyone cheered my persistence, which felt great!

We developed tools to help make the change: an assessment of services desired from a new bank; a sheet with links to find climate-friendly credit unions and banks; a tracking sheet of actions; sample letters to the CEOs of the four worst climate-bad banks (Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo and Bank of America), and to the local branch manager.

But perhaps the most valuable thing we offered was a supportive group of people to do this with.

Our personal results were great. We began using a checking account at the Stanford Federal Credit Union (SFCU), which we had access to from my time as a Stanford business student, and which we had previously ignored. We also took out checking and money market accounts at Self Help Federal Credit Union, which we liked because it is so invested in empowering marginalized communities. We now have our regular checking and savings with Self Help and we keep the funds we intend to donate in our Stanford account. We also do our banking for THIS! Is What We Did with SFCU and again, have had good results. We’ve had no problems with ATM access since many credit unions have connected ATMs and we had one right outside the grocery store where we usually shop.

We had our Visa credit card with Chase for 40 or more years. Fortunately, Stanford Federal Credit union also had a Visa credit card, which we got. We switched from getting frequent flier miles to getting cash-back because we don’t intend to fly much any more, since air travel is such a large contributor to climate change. We also don’t intend to make any big purchases (like a home mortgage) in the near future, so we weren‘t concerned if our credit rating took a temporary hit. Nonetheless, our credit rating remained very high.

We’ve had good service and no glitches from our new accounts or new credit card. And we feel so much “cleaner,” in a profound sense, to not be supporting the banks that finance the fossil fuel industry that is destroying humanity’s future on this planet.

The mission of THIS! Is What We Did is to help grow an intergenerational movement strong enough to break the power of the fossil fuel industry and stimulate the effective, drastic action needed to spur climate justice and give future generations a chance for a decent life through:

1. a powerful educational experience
2. a welcoming community
3. easy-access on-ramps to effective action

We found that supposedly easy access actions (like moving your money) can involve multiple steps, and how great it was to do them with a supportive community.

I remember the feeling of satisfaction Sandra and I got from taking this action. It felt so great (and still does)! One person who moved her money posted a photo of herself cutting up her bank card with the caption, “I feel so much integrity after moving my money.” It feels good to align our money with our values!

Last spring, Bill McKibben and THIRD ACT asked people to wait to drop their climate-bad banks until we could do it together to have maximal impact. So, now is the time – as we lead-up to the 3.21.23 National Day of Action to Stop Dirty Banks – to get out of climate-bad banks all together. This is the most effective way we can have collective impact, but for many people, the transition from old to new accounts takes time, energy and support. Third Act and THIS! have many resources to help you find better banks and credit cards (see below).

THIS! is here to help you prepare for the big moment where you’ll get to cut up those credit and debit cards. We stand ready to provide a step-by-step process to support people looking to move their money. Feel free to get in touch and sign-up for a cohort. Third Act and THIS! look forward to sharing many more happy “bank switching” stories…..

A quick note: The volunteers and staff at THIS! and Third Act are not financial advisors and we are legally prohibited from giving financial advice. All resources and discussions are for educational purposes only; all financial decisions are your own. You also will not be asked to share your financial situation with others in the cohort.

About the author:

Jim Thompson (he, him) (Jim “AT” ThisIsWhatWeDid.org )

Jim is the founder of THIS! Is What We Did. 

THIS! helps people move their money from climate-bad banks (especially Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo & Bank of America) financing the destruction of the planet’s ability to support humanity. THIS! provides training in Effective Climate Conversations and supports people who are committed to helping grow a large and diverse movement. 

Jim founded Positive Coaching Alliance, a national movement to transform youth sports. He co-founded Recovery Café San José, a healing community for individuals traumatized by homelessness, mental illness and drug abuse. He has written nine books including Positive Coaching and Elevating Your Game.   

Jim received an MBA from Stanford where he was Director of the Public Management Program, named as the nation’s top non-profit business management program. 

Jim is an Ashoka Fellow. He has taught coaching, leadership, and sport & spiritually in Stanford University’s Continuing Studies Program and teaches an online spiritual poetry class.

Move Your Money

Responsible Finance Webinar #2: Better Banks & Credit Cards

Banking on our Future Pledge

How to Switch to Better Banks & Credit Cards: FAQs

Norman lear on voting rights

He’s one of the inspirations for Third Act’s work on voting rights: read this remarkable essay, which begins with his account of flying bomber missions in World War II and depending on the African American flyers of the Tuskegee Airmen to keep him alive.

Norman will turn 100 later this year, which will be one heck of a celebration. In the meantime, he recorded this video to help us launch Third Act–if anyone knows about how to cast people, it’s him. And in this case it’s you he’s casting, for important supporting–even starring–roles in making change.

Key moments from Norman’s video:

Hi, I’m Norman Lear, and I guess you can say I’m in my third act. But as I think about that, I realize I’m 99, it surprises me to say. I’ll be 100 on my next birthday. And that feels like the fifth act. It certainly felt like it would be if I thought about turning 60 as a third act — this would be a fifth or sixth act. Whatever it is — it’s delicious and delightful, and I want it to continue.

And when I say I want it to continue, I’m thinking about my kids and my grandkids. I want America, including its climate (and my planet, including its climate) to include those voting rights that are so precious and that are threatened today. We’ve got to preserve the climate. And we’ve got to preserve the democracy that has loved us and cared for us for so long. Bless you all, and America.

Katie and the Future Coalition

She’s also helped organize the Future Coalition, which organized walkouts from high schools so that students could get to the polls to vote. Now the Futures Coalition is taking action against the banks that lend trillions to the fossil fuel industry, an effort we’re proud to help support. Here she is–and this might be a good video to share around!

Hello! My name is Katie Eder, and I’m a youth climate organizer with Future Coalition. This year, in 2021, Future Coalition has joined together with other youth climate justice groups to go after banks for their role in funding and enabling the climate crisis.

We’re making it very clear, drawing a bold line. In order to avoid the worst impacts of the climate catastrophe we have to see an end to fossil fuels once and for all. And in order to see an end to the fossil fuel industry, we have to stop the flow of money that’s continuing to propel it forward. That’s why our movement is targeting banks.

Banks continue to finance, loan to, and invest in the fossil fuel industry which is allowing it not just to continue, but to grow. That must end.

Young people are going to be disproportionately impacted by the climate crisis – we know that. That’s why our generation has risen up in the way that we have. But we cannot build and sustain this movement alone. We need everyone of every generation to join us in our fight for a fossil free future. That’s why we hope that you make us and our movement part of your Third Act, and join us in bending the curve of climate change.”