So for those of you that don’t know, salmon are, for lack of better words, a miraculous creature. Their existence is defined by overcoming long odds and their success is defined by numbers over generations. So they’re born in a river. They swim out into the ocean. They spend five or six years in the ocean getting fat. And then something clicks in their collective brain. Nobody knows really what it is yet. They turn back home. And throughout their entire life and certainly on their way home, they’re dodging marine wildlife, they’re dodging commercial fishing nets. If they make it back to the rivers from which they came, they’re dodging sportsmen trying to catch them for fun or for food. They’re dodging subsistence nets of Alaska native peoples trying to fill their smoke houses for the winter. They’re dodging bears. They’re dodging eagles. If they make it through that gauntlet, then they go back not only to the river they were born, but the very spot they were born. Their bodies change shape. Their bodies change colors. They spawn. They die. Their bodies feed the next generation. Repeat. Now for Alaskans, salmon are much more than fish. They are histories and language and security of native people. They are tens of thousands of jobs, billions of dollar a year of economic activity. They’re what we fill our freezers with. They’re what we feed our children with. Now you have to understand Alaska. It is a red state for lack of better words. We are owned and driven by resource development corporations. ConocoPhillips, BP, Exxon, and other mining companies as well. But salmon have the potential to unite Alaskans across the divides of their interests, commercial fishermen, sportsmen, Alaska natives, those that often fight and sometimes squabble over who gets the fish. But when our fish are threatened, there’s a unique opportunity to collaborate together across those cultural and even political lines. Now salmon face a variety of threats. From a global perspective, there’s climate change, changing ocean conditions, and this scary thing called ocean acidification. And the thing that we know from history and looking at the Pacific Northwest is we have to protect their freshwater habitats. If you don’t protect that home, they are not resilient to all of those other global threats that are much harder to control. Unfortunately, Alaska loves to build big things. Coal mines, golden copper mines, large hydro development projects. These are the things that I work day in and day out with communities to protect. Now over the past two decades, one project in particular, let’s see if I can make this work right there, in Southwest Alaska, Bristol Bay is the largest sockeye salmon fishery on the planet. This 62 million sockeye returned to Bristol Bay. You can’t even wrap your head around that number. Pebble is not a mine for pebbles, it’s a mine for copper and gold. It would be one of the largest of its kind ever built. Plan for the headwaters of that fishery. And we have at times united that coalition of people in defense of this place. But actually, can I go back? I don’t know. All right. But as we’ve worked to protect places like Bristol Bay, we’re also fighting other fights. We’re fighting against coal mines and dams. And over the course of the past two decades, as we’ve done our organizing work, we’ve often got locked in silos. This is my project I’m fighting. These are my supporters’ action takers and volunteers. These are my funders. That led to inefficient work if you’re trying to build power statewide for salmon conservation. We were also just bad at organizing. So we’d talk to people at events. They’d fill out a postcard. And you might have followed up with them, but we might as well have been putting it in the trash. And so when we wanted to try and wield our power, we’d spend all this time trying to throw up a rally. This is in 2010. And it’s a sad-looking picture because it was a sad rally. Because we didn’t have power. We couldn’t call on people to turn out. Now over the course of the past eight to 10 years in particular, we had funders that started to encourage collaboration, breaking down those silos, risk-taking. We had longevity of trust, as was talked about earlier. We had people that had been working together for a long time and started to break down those silos and share data, share information. We started to learn about Alaskans around the state and what salmon meant to them and how we could motivate them. And so last year, when we needed to throw a rally at the drop of a hat, we could turn out hundreds of people because all of a sudden our lists had grown from a couple thousand people to well over 150,000. Now in California, that might not be a lot of people. But in Alaska, we’ve only got 750,000 people in the state. So we started to learn that we were gaining the potential for power. We started to see victories come around. We stopped a large hydro-development project from being built on one of the largest undamned rivers in the nation. We stopped terrible statewide legislation that would have given more power to the resource industry. We almost neared protections for Bristol Bay, Alaska, under Obama’s EPA. Then 2016 happened. Everything came unraveled. And like many of you, we sat in a room and we said to ourselves, we can hold on for dear life and hope shit’s not fucking terrible in 2020 or we can do something about it. And so we decided to try and change the game at the state level and test how much power we had. So we decided to run a ballot measure. And so this ballot measure was bold. It was proactive. It was pretty wonky, too. But the goal of it was to change the rules for permitting projects at the state level, put Alaskans in the driver’s seat and give us a say in how our resources are protected or not protected, level the playing field between us and Conoco Phillips. But we also knew we were picking a fight with the world’s largest resource development corporations. Now we were optimistic about our ground game. Everything we had achieved in the recent years told us that we had the potential to move Alaskans. We knew that they would rally for individual projects. But the question was, can we ignite them around a big issue? And so we were mildly optimistic about our fundraising opportunities. We got outspent by a lot, 10 to 1. For us as nonprofits raising money for these sorts of things, it’s hard. For Conoco Phillips, this is couch cushion change. They raised $13 million. We had $1.5 million. We still felt good about our opportunities and even into the final days. In the end, they used that money to do two things. One, convince Alaskans that the status quo was just good enough. Don’t vote for drastic change. And when Amornus Farias sends, they convinced Alaskans that outside environmentalists fueled by Soros’ dark money was going to destroy their lives. I wish we had Soros’ money. We didn’t. But we were hardly alone in these fights. In the last election, there were seven ballot measures across Western states that sought to protect water, air, habitat, communities, children. Oil and resource development corporations spent nearly $120 million to defeat them, and they won in every one of those things. But when I look at what we did in Alaska, I have hope for moving forward. We knocked 400,000 doors. We talked to tens of thousands of Alaskans. By the way, we have amazing canvassers. It is phenomenal. It is on their shoulders that we do this work. 103,000 Alaskans voted for this initiative. Again, might not seem like a lot, but that’s more than voted Senator Lisa Murkowski into office in 2010. That’s the potential for power. Just last week, there was a hearing for an appointee to the Department of Environmental Conservation at the state level. This guy’s like a mini Scott Pruitt. He’s terrible. In 24 hours, we turned out nearly 1,000 comments to the hearing in Juneau, Alaska, our capital. That made people say, oh, those salmon people, they’re not stopping. We might lose occasionally, and we might get knocked down, but like salmon, salmon keep swimming. If they’re still swimming, they keep going. They keep trying to get over that waterfall the first, second, or third time. We might not have made it over that waterfall the first time, but at least we didn’t get eaten by that bear over there. We keep swimming. We keep moving ahead. For salmon, their power, their generational longevity comes from numbers and healthy habitat. For us, our healthy habitat are our people. It is our numbers. We keep organizing, and we keep thinking about that long-term game, engaging our communities, building voters, or supporters, action takers, volunteers, and even voters. That’s how you play the game. I just have to call out to Susanna earlier, this is a long-term game. My question for you is, we all get caught in our moments, but what are you doing to think about the long game, and how are you building power in your communities so that they are resilient to the myriad of threats that get thrown our way?