Not everyone coming back to Evanston for a family visit takes time out to go to a City Council meeting. But Jack Hanson is on a mission.
The organization he co-founded, Run on Climate, supports climate champions across the country who are working at the municipal level to cut carbon emissions and strengthen resilience. Evanston is one of eight leadership communities the organization works with to identify and share model policies. In a public comment at the Administration and Public Works Committee meeting last week, Hanson said his organization is available to them as a source of support.
“This is the fight of our life,” he said. “The work that you all do has a huge impact not only here in Evanston, but also by influencing policy across the U.S.”
A commitment with Evanston roots
Hanson was visiting from his home in Vermont, where he has lived for the past 12 years. But his passionate commitment to climate action began right here in Evanston, where he grew up and where his parents still live.
As he tells it, he was in elementary school when he came across a book with an illustration of the greenhouse effect that explained the planet-warming consequences of fossil fuel emissions.
“I still remember today, looking at that image and thinking, this was serious,” he says. That awareness deepened when his middle school class watched Al Gore’s 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth.
But it was a November 2010 issue of The Onion that brought his commitment into focus. That’s right, the satirical newspaper The Onion. His AP English class was studying satire, and an article was offered as an example. The headline: “Report: Global Warming Issue From 2 Or 3 Years Ago May Still Be Problem.”
“The popular mid-2000s issue that raised awareness of the fact that the Earth’s continuous rise in temperature will have catastrophic ecological effects has apparently not been resolved and may still be a problem,” the article read.
“It just felt so spot on,” Hanson says, laughing. “And that’s when I realized, I can’t ignore this.”
During his last year at ETHS, Hanson’s senior studies project focused on environmental direct action. He started going to meetings of Citizens’ Greener Evanston (now Climate Action Evanston) and interned at the Ecology Center. His friend Daniel Goering, also from the ETHS class of 2012, introduced him to a different form of direct action during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in Chicago. And at the annual Earth Day celebration that April, Hanson set up displays about “green living,” which caught the attention of The Daily Northwestern.
By the time he arrived in Burlington that fall to attend the University of Vermont, Hanson was ready to focus his studies, and his organizing work, on environmental issues. Over the next few years, he pushed for the university to divest from fossil fuels, advocated for environmental policies at the state level, and worked on political campaigns, including Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential primary bid. After graduation, he went on to work at a series of environmental organizations, including the Vermont Public Interest Research Group and Sustainable Transportation Vermont.
An organizer at heart
And then he decided to run for the Burlington City Council.That’s how Bernie Sanders got his start in city government, winning his first election as Burlington mayor in 1981 by just 10 votes.
“And now he’s one of the most powerful people in the world, and he is influencing the trajectory of federal policy enormously.”
Hanson won his own first election in 2019 by a bigger margin, beating the incumbent with 60% of the vote. By the time of the next municipal election, two years later, he was running unopposed, and he and fellow organizers were able to tip the balance of power in the partisan city council so six out of 12 seats were held by members of the Progressive Party.
“That was a game-changer,” he says. People who had been disengaged got involved, and they saw “dramatic results, not just on climate, but on a number of issues.”
His organizing skills continued to serve him once he was in office.
“Every policy I would introduce, I would also email and phone call dozens of people who I knew cared about climate to turn them out to these meetings to speak in favor and help get it passed,” he says. “I’m an organizer at heart. I think that’s key to all this work, community organizing.”
One of the first issues he worked on as a councillor was redesign of a street that ran through his district. Adding bike lanes would mean reducing on-street parking.
“We just knocked on all the doors in that neighborhood and called people that we had met throughout the campaign,” he says. “Now I bike on that street all the time, and I think about what it was versus what it is.“
Working on the leading edge of change
Hanson’s experience as an elected public official made him acutely aware of the stresses of working on the front lines of local climate action. That led to the idea of Run on Climate, the organization he went on to co-found as he finished out his second term.
Serving in local public office often means holding down another job to make ends meet and brings with it significant emotional strain. You are making decisions your neighbors may disagree with, and some of the decisions are life and death, as they were during the early months of the COVID pandemic, when he was in office, he says. Working on the leading edge of change also makes you more of a target.
Even among those committed to climate action, he says, “a lot of people are scared to move forward. But if you come in and say, ‘Hey, you know, actually, this has been implemented in tons of other places, and it’s been fine or it’s been great,’ it takes a lot of the heat out.”
“It’s very personal,” he says, especially in a smaller town like Burlington, which has a population of less than 45,000. “And it’s really exhausting work, especially when you care deeply and you feel really strongly that dramatic change is needed, and yet you’re not seeing that dramatic change.” These local leaders need support, he says.
A mutual support network
And that is why Hanson and his friends founded Run on Climate. Most climate organizations focus on national or state politics or specific issues like stopping pipelines, he says, not on local government.
“So after doing the work ourselves for a few years in Burlington, we wanted to help foster it in other communities, as well,” he says.
In early 2023, Hanson reached out to Evanston City Council Member Jonathan Nieuwsma, whom he knew from his high school involvement with Citizens’ Greener Evanston, and invited him to join the new organization’s Local Climate Policy Network. Now, Nieuwsma participates regularly in biweekly zoom meetings with other elected officials and city staff from cities across the country to hear from experts, seek advice and share good ideas.
“It’s a mutual support network,” Nieuwsma says.
Thinking globally, acting locally
“It’s hugely important what the federal government does,” Hanson says. “I’m really grateful that there’s a lot of climate organizations and individuals that are devoting themselves to that and to shifting the federal government. And I think the Inflation Reduction Act was a really big deal for the climate movement.” But Run on Climate maintains its focus on municipal government.
”If you actually focus your energy on your own community, you can make the biggest difference,” he says.
Nieuwsma echoes this thought: “It comes down to thinking globally but acting locally. Federal and state government are really, really important. We’re not going to get there without policy action at those levels. But since that’s not moving fast enough, there are things we can do and have to do at the local level, to address climate change, that are under our control and things that we can do now.”
Someone’s got to go first
Hanson plans to move back to the Chicago area from Vermont in the coming months as he continues to nurture the fledgling (and now mostly virtual) organization. It will be bringing on a full-time policy director in the fall.
“We’re gonna grow and expand next year,” he says, while deepening support for “leading edge cities” like Evanston that are already part of their network.
Their ultimate mission is to help cities end carbon pollution.
“Someone’s got to go first in that effort,” Hanson says. “I mean, we need to do this everywhere. This is the project of our lifetime. But someone’s got to lead the way. And someone’s got to be the first one to actually get there.”
“We want to help them get there, help them do it faster, more equitably,” he says, “and then spread that to as many cities as possible, and help as many cities as possible, get over that finish line and become pollution-free.”
The courage to try
What’s it going to take to get there? Hanson reflects: “I think we need more courage, we need more courage from everyone, myself included, to do what needs to be done.”
That includes elected officials, he says, which is where he focuses his work. “I try to push these electeds to be more courageous and do right by their community, acting on behalf of the collective and what we need.”
As for the rest of us, “There’s so many people that care deeply about climate and are very concerned about it and want change,” he says. “If you’re one of those people, and you’re reading this, you need to find courage to step up and do things that are not comfortable, because that’s the only way we’re gonna make the change.”
“If you care, and you want to see change, you have to get involved and be willing to push yourself a little bit. We’re here to support you, not only us, but everyone who’s really engaged in this work. We’re a community, and we’ll work with you, and we’ll help you. So whether it’s us, or a local group, just get connected and involved and let’s do this together.”
He pauses.
“I don’t want this to just seem like a burden, or just scary. The work is beautiful. And the movement is beautiful. And it’s so powerful and meaningful to be doing this work of trying to preserve a place for us and our kids and grandkids, whether you have kids or not … We’re fighting for our own well-being and survival as a species and other other species as well. So I think it is really powerful, really inspiring, really meaningful to be in this space in this work. So I invite people in.”
Funding for Run on Climate has come from grassroots donations and organizations like the Vermont Community Foundation and New England Grassroots Environmental Fund. Now there’s another chance to support their work. Goering, who first introduced Hanson to political organizing and who still lives in Evanston, will soon set out on a cross-country Bike Ride for Local Climate Action to support his old friend in his work.
