Public policy and the room where it happens.
Packing for an overnight at the state capitol. No one likes conflict, but with the smack of a fist and a million particles of brilliant light. However, tonight, I'm taking the punches. The letter from the house and senate chairs of the agriculture committees is a direct threat to the governor's water agenda, a blunt whack to the nose. I haven't been home for dinner in days, and I can't remember what it feels like to help my boys into their pajamas.
Anna Farro Henderson:I'm tired and mad and for a moment frozen in place. It's Friday, well past the bid may sunset. My life has been reduced to a countdown to the end of the twenty eighteen legislative session, Sunday at midnight. Firm in my commitment to leave politics and write, I'm seeing the last legislative session of the administration through. I jump up and look into the hallway of quarter sawn oak doors.
Anna Farro Henderson:Realizing I'm barefoot, I grab heels from my bottom desk drawer. The door cracks open. Tenzin's long black hair and heart shaped face. She pulls me in. When we look back, won't it be obvious this was another Flint?
Anna Farro Henderson:I say. We shouldn't negotiate. She winds her arms into the thin wool of her white shawl. I smile, relieved that at least she and I won't be battling each other. Tanton grew up as a Tibetan refugee in India where her well ran dry in summer.
Anna Farro Henderson:I don't have to convince her that safe drinking water is a choice we make over and over. When she immigrated during high school, I was finishing college. I admire her political instincts, and though she is younger, she mentors me. In our jobs advising the governor, our peers are our best mentors. We can't trust the motives of anyone else.
Anna Farro Henderson:Their constituents don't believe drinking fertilizer can kill babies? I ask. While the governor's signature buffer law protects lakes and rivers, it doesn't prevent contamination of the groundwater we drink. It isn't about that, Tenzin shakes her head. I notice the big circles under her eyes.
Anna Farro Henderson:I wonder if I look as worn out as she does, maybe worse. That was an excerpt from my book, Core Samples, a climate scientist's experiments in politics and motherhood. Confrontation, negotiations, and gut bunches are all part of political offices, but we will get back to that after I introduce myself and the experts I'm in conversation with today. In today's podcast, we're gonna focus on how one gets their voice heard in politics. I'll be speaking with policy experts doctor Roberta Downing and Tenzin Dulcar.
Anna Farro Henderson:We will talk about our experiences working inside political offices, and then we will talk about our experiences working outside political offices. We'll get into issues around work life balance, all of us are raising children, and we will end with concrete advice for how to get your voice heard. This is my first book and I'm really excited. I'll be doing a book tour traveling around the country to bookstores, universities, and even a spice shop. More locally, I have a grant to do a book tour of rural Minnesota with a community book writing project at local libraries.
Anna Farro Henderson:I wrote core samples in part in the hopes of bringing science and politics together and making them more accessible. The institutions of science and politics literally belong to us all, but it doesn't always feel like they do. I'm hoping this podcast episode will make your state capital and our national capital feel more approachable. My background is in earth sciences. I got my PhD in 02/2010 reconstructing periods of climate warming in the geologic record.
Anna Farro Henderson:During a postdoctoral fellowship, I decided to leave academics. I first served as an advisor to senator Al Franken in DC. Then I returned to Minnesota where I led the state's second climate plan before serving as a water advisor to governor Mark Dayton, where I oversaw implementation of the state's buffer law, a new regulation on farmers to protect water. I was always a writer, but I didn't start publishing my literary work until I left academics. My urgency to write only increased when I became a mother.
Anna Farro Henderson:At that time, I used the pen name E. A. Farrow. I'm now publishing under my name, Anna Henderson, though I've hung on to the Farrow as a middle name. So next, I wanna introduce the policy experts who are here with me today.
Anna Farro Henderson:So you might have heard reference to Tenson Dolcar in the excerpt at the start of this podcast. She and I served as advisors together for Minnesota governor Dayton. She was the rail director and covered transportation, agriculture, and rural issues, which meant our work overlapped a lot. Even when it was stressful working at the Capitol, I always found Dulcar grounded and clairvoyant, as in a really great leader. She also serves as a council member on the Metropolitan Council, which is the regional governing agency at Minnesota.
Anna Farro Henderson:Dulkar served as a climate advisor to the city of Minneapolis through a Natural Resource Defense Council partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies American Cities Climate Challenge. Dulkar holds a master's degree in social work from the University of Minnesota and a bachelor's degree in international studies from the University of St. Thomas. Next, I want to introduce Doctor. Roberta Downey.
Anna Farro Henderson:While Roberta is not a character in core samples, she and I had similar paths to policy. We both started as academic researchers and left that work to go to Congress. While my background is in Earth Science, Roberta's is in social psychology. But we both made our way to Capitol Hill through a fellowship from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Roberta served as a US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions under Senator Edward m Kennedy.
Anna Farro Henderson:She is now a principal and founder at Harper Downing, a Minnesota based government affairs firm specializing in public policy, congressional appropriations, and strategic engagement for businesses, nonprofits, and universities. Since leaving her academic position at John Hopkins, she has worked for the Federal Reserve Bank, the state of Minnesota, for DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, and senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio. So I wanted to start out today's conversation with a question for both of you about how none of us started in politics, And I'd love for you to share a little bit about why you left the path you are on to go work in a political office.
Roberta Downing:So this is so interesting, Anna. Like you, I also left academics during a postdoctoral fellowship. For me, the key reason why was while I really appreciate all the work that's done in academia, the education of future generations, and the ability to make an impact on individuals' lives, I also felt frustrated by the pace in which you could make a difference. I would publish a paper and I would often think, how many people will even have access to this writing? How many people will ever even read it?
Roberta Downing:Versus when you're working in public policy, you can make a change that could affect millions of people. I really wanted to put my energy and passion towards making as big of a change as I could. I started my career working in the AIDS community in the early 1990s when the pandemic was very different then and people were dying in large numbers still. I really saw how federal policies were impacting individuals with very serious health conditions and saw how the interventions that we were doing at a community level weren't enough, that there needed to be more large scale change. Seeing how policy was written, learning about it was really, really important for understanding how I can make as big an impact as possible in my work.
Anna Farro Henderson:So just a follow-up question, like, did you find policy work exciting?
Roberta Downing:Oh, it's wildly exciting. I listened to the news differently. I understood what was happening at the federal level in our country. I understood it differently. You had the leaders of the country in meetings with you, you know, with the senator and got to talk to them directly and got to see them as real people.
Roberta Downing:I found it exciting and intellectually engaging and really loved it.
Anna Farro Henderson:Thank you. Zulkhard.
Tenzin Dolkar:So I think I'm the perfect model for when we say you can stop from not knowing something to really being brilliant at something. That's been my sort of journey and interest in public policy. And this is your typical immigrant story. Like, you come into a country, and we, as siblings, all immigrated together. And what that meant is you really had to figure out the context of where you're living.
Tenzin Dolkar:Like, what does that society look like? What does the rules of engagement look like? How do you succeed? How do you assimilate into the country? What that meant is really early on, I realized and recognized the value of government and the value of policymaking.
Tenzin Dolkar:Because everything from what type of services individuals were getting to what type of communities people were living to, what type of school you went to, and how the school was funded, everything was designed around policy. Very early on, I had the fortune of working with the League of Women Voters of Saint Paul, participated in their leadership program, really stayed active in it, and that taught me both at the same time organizing skill as well as learning the differences in how government function to what policy creation look like. And then further back, there were a couple of different things that really kind of pulled me towards policy making versus the work that I was doing on the ground working in homeless shelter or working in domestic violence shelters. I was working with individuals and families and trying to make a difference one at a time, but very soon, you run into situations where the systems are the barrier and even the countless of them. Like, I would think about design about how intake process work from somebody to go from homeless shelter to a more transitional unit to rental housing.
Tenzin Dolkar:We would take women to get order for protection, which were, again, designed in the law. Somebody influenced the policy. So very soon, when you're trying to influence individuals' behavior and you are trying to take care of family and children and making sure they were doing well, that they had services from the government, that they can succeed, you very soon start adding up the systems that you're running against. And so very soon, I had this feeling, like, I wanted to make a difference. And, yes, it feels really good when you're making difference one person at a time, one family at a time, one woman at a time.
Tenzin Dolkar:Unless you're redesigning the system, it was pretty much like banging against the wall. Like, you would hit your head over and over again expecting a different result. So that was, like, one thing where I wanted to make a difference. I knew the system wasn't an issue. The second thing I would say that really came through for me is the idea of and I held this, and I still hold this to be true today is the people most impacted by the issues are usually the best people who can actually design the solutions.
Tenzin Dolkar:And that is not what I thought was happening in public policy arena. So I would work in the shelters, and I would go at association meetings or a coalition of batterman would hold public policy meeting, and we would talk about housing issue. We would talk about all these different services and changes that we wanted to see in policy arena, but we didn't have visibility into whether or not those policy designs that we were recommending as practitioners on the ground could actually be implemented. And so that meant, again, like, there was a draw for me to then step outside of it and actually learn. And so doing all of those parallel things, being part of the league of women orders, organizing in communities, being driven by the idea that I wanted to make a difference, and then seeing the system as a whole and recognizing that the system didn't always talk to each other.
Tenzin Dolkar:People who are impacted didn't really design the systems really drove me into public policy, and I think that was my calling on why I wanted to be a legislative director and why I wanted to spend thousands and thousands of hours just trying to understand different laws and how they interacted and what I can do to change those law, but, again, going back to the communities that I was serving.
Anna Farro Henderson:Thank you both. This is really interesting to hear. And I just wanted to say that when I went into political work, I had grown up in Providence, Rhode Island. My dad is from Canada and he didn't vote in The US at the time. And we never talked about politics and in my public schools, we didn't learn about public policy or political procedure.
Anna Farro Henderson:And so even though I had a PhD in the physical sciences, when I got to Congress, I didn't really know how it worked at all. And I'd listened to the news, but I didn't understand. And I think that part of my motivation for writing the the book was to get the hopes that it seems really unnecessary that people not know and understand how our government works and wanting people to feel that it is accessible. And I think I just sort of taken for granted that I didn't know how it worked and I wasn't gonna know how it worked. One follow-up question.
Anna Farro Henderson:When you first went to social work school, Delcar, or when you were in your graduate program, Roberta, did you think you were gonna go into political work, or would that have surprised you if someone told you that?
Tenzin Dolkar:For me, it was totally a surprise. And to this day, I think I often tell the story. I remember taking a tour of the state capital, again, thanks to the League of Women in Order's leadership program. And I remember walking by cafeteria, and somebody said my brother-in-law is a lobbyist, and I had no clue what that term actually meant. And so the idea that nine years down the line that I would be working for the governor of Minnesota in that same exact building was completely just unheard of.
Tenzin Dolkar:And I think that's the one thing that I would say is, you know, we use interchangeably, you know, the idea of policy design with politics. And sometimes they are two different things. You can do policy design without ever touching the politics. But I think the three of us, and I think we all can speak to it, is we all found ourselves both with the policy design side of things as well as managing the politics of policy making, which I'm really curious how the two of you experienced that.
Roberta Downing:There's one thing kind of a hard lesson that I've learned through the years working in public policy is that even the best ideas and what I might see as the right thing to do may take twenty or fifty years or may never happen. And lots of times, that's because the politics stand in the way. And that's frustrating, but the thing that you learn if you really wanna get things done is to listen to people who disagree with you and to find compromise and find where you can work together. In my experience, there were individual bills that I worked on that became law, and a lot of it was from building relationships with people across the aisle. We differed on a lot of things, but we were able to find this one issue where there was agreement about what needed to happen.
Roberta Downing:If you want to actually make change in anything with public policy, you're not doing any favors for yourself to demonize people who disagree with you. It's much more productive to find a way to work together. It may not be the dream policy solution, but you can make incremental changes along the way. That's my perspective. A lot of people don't like the idea of making incremental changes.
Roberta Downing:But the way that I look at it is you can do nothing or you can have incremental change over time. And lots of times, having those trusted relationships with people who have a different perspective is how you can make multiple incremental changes that can lead up to larger change over time. For some of us, a change that needs to happen may look obvious, but you have to bring people along.
Tenzin Dolkar:Roberta, I think you'd point to a really good thing, which is so much of politics in relational work. And I think we have forgotten I mean, as we have become more partisan and more divided as a country, I think we have forgotten that as a lesson. And I think so much of what you wanna try to do as you are trying to pass bills, executive orders, policy positions, all of it depends on relational work, having relationship with the other person as well as trying to get the other person to understand where you're coming from. And I am curious for the two of you, Anna, your book references this. Given both of you have doctorate degree in in your respective field, psychology and geology, how much of policymaking did you feel like had to do with the content and the substance of the work versus the stories?
Tenzin Dolkar:And, Anna, your book alluded to this a lot. I'm curious. How did that come across when you were doing your policy work?
Anna Farro Henderson:So when I was working for senator Franken in the senate, one of the really big bills we were working on was at the time, it was called Jaheem Portman, but it was an energy efficiency bill. So it was focused on addressing climate change through this win win of more efficient use of energy that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And the goal was very much about lowering utility bills that individuals and companies pay for electricity and reducing emissions. That being said, everything had to be carried by a story and understood by a story. And as people came to lobby us, they could send a fact sheet or have like glossy pamphlets, but it really came down to both.
Anna Farro Henderson:So sometimes people would try to just tell a story, then I would need to ask questions. So I stayed focused on the content because I think partly with my science background, like I always wanted to know but just telling somebody science facts wasn't enough to make the story. So there are problems that are very real. And generally, I found that people recognize the problems. When I worked on water policy in Minnesota, people from the far end of the other political spectrum would tell me that they had run on water policy, like they ran on clean water.
Anna Farro Henderson:So we all wanted clean water, but then how we get there and what that means and, like, what is the process or, like, what are the rules or the philosophy of how society works were really different. But then it also is people and personalities and relationships. So it's a lot harder to get something passed if the person proposing it doesn't get along with other people or hasn't worked with them on their pieces. In this transition from not being in politics and not knowing about it to going in politics, one of the things that I find well, I found shocking at the time is I had really simplistic ideas about climate action, and I understood how important it was, but like I didn't understand why we weren't doing it. And then working in politics, it became clear very quickly that the things that felt non negotiable that I thought we had to do to reduce emissions were really complicated.
Anna Farro Henderson:And there were a lot of people and communities and aspects of all our daily lives that were at stake. And so the process was gonna have to be iterative. It sounds really simple, but it was very shocking. And on the other side, now when I look at social media, I didn't really look at social media that much then, but it's so much bigger now. And people assert positions and they kind of other anybody who doesn't agree with their position.
Anna Farro Henderson:And I find that a little bit shocking. Coming from politics, the way you get things done is working with people on the other side of the aisle. And even when Dulkar and I were in the governor's office, the House and Senate for Minnesota were controlled by the other political party. I spent the majority of my time talking to folks who were actually in the other political party because they were running the House and Senate.
Roberta Downing:I wanted to jump in about your question, Dholkar, in that I think the most effective way of influencing policy is both using data or research as well as the story, the story that humanizes things. I think that people often don't recognize how important stories are to pushing an issue along. There are people that came to meet with me when I worked in the Senate that I still remember. I remember them vividly. I remember what their story was.
Roberta Downing:And this is more than a decade later. There was a woman who had a gigantic tumor growing out of her head, and she had been dropped from her insurance company because she participated in a clinical trial to try to save her life, and this was before the Affordable Care Act. You can't do that now. We introduced a bill to make it so that insurance companies could not do that, and that was incorporated into the Affordable Care Act when it passed. But I can remember her, and I remember other constituents and people and exactly what their stories were.
Roberta Downing:Seeing them, seeing their struggle in person, hearing their story, combined with the data was the most powerful combination.
Tenzin Dolkar:Anna and I experienced this working on water policy issue. I think there was one really old law that forbids a farmer from suing another farmer. And I'm not going to recall the law correctly, but there was a runoff. And it was wording of, like, one to two, three words that people wanted to change it. There's a nonprofit called Land Stewardship, and they brought their farmers.
Tenzin Dolkar:And I remember people bringing pictures and stories and then showing pictures pictures of, you know, when it rains heavily, the runoff. That was happening from one farm to the next farm. And then I also remember somebody telling the story about manure that was running off from one field to the other and what that impacted in terms of family life and living situation. And I think that was one of the most effective story in preventing the change that individuals were seeking at that point. And it was so simple in terms of changes it was making, but only if you understood the meaning of the law.
Tenzin Dolkar:Like, you understood the impact. But, again, you had to be paying attention to that policy. Like, you had to know. And if you weren't a policy expert or if you were an expert on that issue, like, you would not have known. But the stories was the one that made the difference in repealing the law.
Anna Farro Henderson:Images are really powerful because I remember also in water protection laws with this requirement for buffers of perennial vegetation between agriculture, row crops, and public waterways, It was a really visible solution. It wasn't necessarily the most impactful thing we could have done, but it was visible. And one of the big arguments for it was an image of runoff coming into the Mississippi River. In the book core samples, there's an essay I write about being lobbied and I wrote it in the form of like a running dialogue through my head because I wanted to give to share that with the reader of what is this person thinking about. But at the end of that, I end the essay by saying putting numbers into story form that is ammunition in politics.
Anna Farro Henderson:So just echoing what both of you have been saying. I wanna just give listeners a little bit of context. We've all been in this like the room where it happens, serving as advisors to elected officials and meeting with so many people that have issues that are so important to them. And just to help people kind of understand that work that we did, I was wondering if one of you would kick off with talking about why is it that when folks, they have a concern and they're going to an elected official's office, why are they talking to an advisor instead of the elected official themselves?
Roberta Downing:So it's interesting. Sometimes people find that off putting. Why am I meeting with the staffer instead of the member of Congress themselves or the senator themselves? And I think people, often don't understand how extraordinarily busy that elected officials are. So, for example, if you're a member of congress or senator, you're flying back and forth to your district, your state every single week.
Roberta Downing:And you might have hearings that go on until 02:30 in the morning. The schedules can be very, very grueling, and there's not enough time in the day for them to take all of these meetings. And so they have trusted staff who take the meetings and who do a lot of the legislative work. And oftentimes, it's just as good to meet with the staff as it is to meet with the member because the staff is gonna be the one that does the work. One thing that I would advocate is the importance of having long term relationships with the congressional staff and the member too, but especially the staff so that they know who you are.
Roberta Downing:They know what your expertise is. If an issue policy issue comes up related to the work you do, they'll reach out to you and ask you, can you review this bill that we wanna introduce and give us feedback on it? Or, oh, there's gonna be this hearing. You'd be a great witness. Those long term relationships with the staff is, a really good way to have your voice heard.
Anna Farro Henderson:So when we took meetings with folks who had concerns, and then we would communicate back to our elected officials. And I know it works differently in every elected official's office, but maybe, Dolfkar, do you wanna say something about how you communicated with the governor or what that looked like?
Tenzin Dolkar:Yeah. As the policy staff, your job is to become the expert on the topic that you're advising on, whether it's, like, one topic area or multitude of topic areas. And it is also your job to keep the pulse on what is happening and what the stakeholders are saying and what the trends are, what do the public wants. You'll read through or skim through thousands and thousands of letters and phone calls that come through the office. So you get a general sense of where the public stands.
Tenzin Dolkar:And so by the time you approach your principal, in our case, it was the governor in Roberta and your previous case, it would have been the senator. You pretty much are coming to the table and advising the governor and saying, here's the position that I think you should take, and here are the reasons why. And it could have been a 10 page memo that you have written or people have written to you that you have compiled, but your job is to make it as succinct as possible with the data, with the story, and say, here's the position I want you to take. And if that person says and why and then objects or takes contrary position, then you can have a counterpoint for every one of them. And you can say, I've looked at every point of angles.
Tenzin Dolkar:I've looked at how this could go 10 different ways, and this is the best course of action. I think that's the level of confidence we need to have as a staff. I was very fortunate with governor Mark Dayton in the sense that he was a policy wonk. If there was a policy wonk in politics, he was it. He read everything.
Tenzin Dolkar:He understood. He cared about things very deeply, and he wanted to really dig in deep. And so our combination of how we communicated were in forms of emails, memos that went to him, and then we would do hour longs meeting with him where we debated our policy, and we would present information to the governor. For each issue, you may have less than five minutes because you're running through so many issues. You're effectively running the state agencies, the government, and then caring about all the different issues that come up throughout the day, including any emergency that were coming up.
Tenzin Dolkar:So more often than not, you only had about five minutes per topic, whatever you're talking, and you just had to make sure you were succinct and you had clarity and that you had a point of position. And then you didn't catch the governor by surprise by not letting him any information that he needed to know. So regardless of whether that was something coming out of a different group, something who would have spoken against the position he was taking, or a position that, you know, should have been a better one, but we're not approaching because of x, y, and z reason. I think that was the approach we took.
Anna Farro Henderson:So just to kind of reiterate, we were taking lots of meetings with different folks and that information was getting boiled down and shared in some form text or memo or verbal communication to the elected officials. When I worked for Senator Franken, we sent him home with this giant binder every night, so it was like written memos. He would sometimes call people in the middle of the night because the time that he was getting home from like all the different meetings and events he went to might be like midnight or a time when I I had two little kids like being asleep. It was really exciting to work for somebody who's so engaged, but then also intimidating. But any memo I had sent, I would have by me in bed in case I got called so that I'd be able to answer questions.
Anna Farro Henderson:So when you guys were being lobbied, like your experience of people coming in, we have some mythology around lobbyists, I think, and and what they're like. And I was kinda surprised because it my experience of who actually came in was really different than what I'd seen represented on television, which is that the spectrum of people who came to me were across the board in terms of age and lifestyle and appearance. But just wondering, like, how you found it? Like, who was coming to you and how did they interact with you, and what were different things that were effective for getting something across to you?
Tenzin Dolkar:So the minute you choose to act and go in front of your congressional offices or your elected officials or governors or other forms of elected officials, you're showing up because you're concerned about some something. You're impacted by something, and you want to see a change in the law. And you can either come to inform or engage, or you're coming because you haven't asked. But the other part is what is still very true is there is a professional group of lobbyists, legislative director, government relations director, individuals who hold a position and their entire work is driven by holding external relationships and maintaining relationships with different offices. And that means both the elected officials down to the aids or the secretaries or the individuals that work in the offices.
Tenzin Dolkar:I mean, that is their job. It's like figuring out who they are, what do they care about, and how can I make sure my issues are represented in that area, or how do I have a relationship in that community? So I think that's the second. You know, there is a professional group of lobbyists.
Roberta Downing:I would say my experience was similar. You had a array of people coming to our office. I think there's a difference between advocacy and lobbying. Some people come as advocates. Some people are paid lobbyists.
Roberta Downing:Lots of times people hear the word lobbyist, and they have a negative connotation of it. And I think that that's a misnomer because lobbyists are often very passionate about the issues they're working on and extremely informed. And, passionate about the issues they're working on and extremely informed and can be really helpful with providing information that you need and being accessible so that you can call and ask questions, when you need something answered quickly. One of the best things that you can do is be succinct in how you're speaking about an issue, saying upfront what your ask is, being really clear about that, and the very beginning, showing why this issue is important and what is the urgency behind it. If there's not urgency, then why would anyone wanna do something about it?
Roberta Downing:Oftentimes, what people struggle with the most is being succinct in describing their issue and not too technical and not using acronyms and talking about it as if you're on the bus with someone you've never met before. You don't know what their education level is and being able to talk about your issue so that it's crystal clear to them why the issue is important and why something needs to be done about it.
Anna Farro Henderson:Just a example of this, what gives something urgency because I felt like that was a thing people really struggled with. The essay that I wrote in the book about being lobbied, the people who are lobbying me, there's something they want, but it's almost like they feel like it's rude to state it to directly. So I'm not clear why they want it, and then it doesn't have to do with the state of Minnesota, and I'm working for a Minnesota representative. And that was something that would happen that people might come lobby us about a public lands issue in Utah, which might be important nationally to everybody, but is not primarily going to be an urgent issue for a Minnesota senator. But just some examples of what might make something urgent is if a bill is coming up where this issue would be in it like the farm bill is coming up.
Anna Farro Henderson:If constituents are impacted and if you have those stories. One of the big differences between state politics and federal politics was that at the federal politics when you have a hearing, the people who testify are negotiated between the leaders from the different parties who are leaders of that committee, and there aren't tons of people testifying. People can't just show up in DC and testify, whereas at the state level, anybody can testify. And so one of the things that advocacy groups do is they help bring people to the capital and support them, you know, show them where to go and when to show up to to tell their story at hearings, which I think makes those local politics a little bit more. We understand that urgency, and it and it's part of our community.
Anna Farro Henderson:But then also things that can make an issue urgent are economics or cultural reasons.
Tenzin Dolkar:So I'll tell you guys this story, and then I have a question related to it. So one of my early days of being a lobbyist as a legislative director was actually coaching community members to come and testify, and I was lobbying on Asian American issue, Asian Minnesota issue. There was a domestic violence bill that I wrote, like, 70% of what it was proposed. It was something that I was passionate about. I had researched it.
Tenzin Dolkar:I'd written about it for a really long time. And I had prepared all these amazing women who were survivors of domestic violence or sexual assault and coached them through testimony, and they gave some of the most powerful testimonies. And the question I have for the two of you is sometimes I think about timing. Right? Yes.
Tenzin Dolkar:I had amazing testimonies, and the bills didn't make it. This was when I was still green as a lobbyist, and I didn't fully understand the power of politics. And the timing just didn't match up, and I didn't have the political will of certain individuals who wanted to make it happen. And so the question for the two of you is, like, for anybody who's looking from outside, you can take any any number of issues. You can take climate change.
Tenzin Dolkar:You can take gun violence. And you think about organizing that happens on the ground, the number of people who show up, the public support that comes out, and it doesn't always translate into then law. I'm referencing the gap as timing and politics. For folks who are organizing at that level, what is the thing that they're experiencing as a gap from where they thought they may have succeeded in influencing to the reality that nothing is actually moving in terms of legislation?
Roberta Downing:At least in congress, it is hard to get legislation passed. The whole system is built for it to be hard. And so to engage in this work, it's really important to have patience and to know that you're not always gonna get what you want overnight. It's gonna take time and it's gonna take persistence and you have to keep at it. And this depends on, you know, there's so many different ways to influence policy.
Roberta Downing:It really depends on what you're working on. For the most part, a lot of larger legislation, it takes years to get to where where you want. And that's how it is, and it's hard. It's that's sometimes hard for people to grapple with.
Anna Farro Henderson:When I worked for governor Dayton, there was a bill that we pushed, which was not at all successful to require that well water be tested when a property was sold. So in Minnesota, maybe a quarter of people have private wells, and these are not regulated by the state. So the water was tested when the well was drilled. Oftentimes, people don't even realize that they're on well water and not on municipal water. And there are contaminants that can get into their groundwater, and those contaminants have no smell and no taste, and they can definitely impact their health or even cause diseases that are gonna be deadly.
Anna Farro Henderson:So we wanted to have a requirement that you have to test water at the point of sale of a property. And this felt like a really compelling story and a compelling idea. And we had a senator who, like, at the state level who was supporting it, and then they actually backed out because there's a lot of economic reasons that this is complicated with, like, the sales of property and how how that works. This is another complication in selling houses that could add expenses, and so there are reasons that people are not excited about it. And the way that I made sense of this is no one can see the pollution, no one can taste it, they don't even know they have these wells.
Anna Farro Henderson:It's like you need a shared narrative and I think sometimes that stories are like viruses and this is a virus that had like not spread. So there are some people that knew the story but there wasn't a way for it to pass from person to person and become an idea that was compelling and people were willing to deal with the hardships that would come with having this new requirement.
Tenzin Dolkar:And I like your reference to the narrative and storytelling. I mean, I think we keep going back to the storytelling. Like, yes, you need to have data and research. Policy is about socialization and, like, what is acceptable as a society. So you could very well have an issue like health care.
Tenzin Dolkar:It took so long for everybody to say enough is enough. We all like, the basic the most basic thing you can do is make sure sure everybody has access to affordable health care. And I think that socialization took time. And I think about the fact that so many of individuals, like, over thirty years worked on climate change, and people presented the data. People presented the science, and there was that question of why could we not move the policymaker, the decision maker?
Tenzin Dolkar:And I again, socialization. Like, it took the public conscious where everybody just understood it at the most basic level, like climate change impact is happening. People had to see it. Every farmers had to experience the different weather changes. Every city staff had to see it with the impact on public works, whether it was roads, sewage system, or homeowners had to experience it when there was a historic flooding for that level of consciousness to rise so that there is then created the political will.
Tenzin Dolkar:So I often think about narrative in that way. It's the level of consciousness we can raise.
Anna Farro Henderson:I'm curious. All of us are working outside political offices right now, and we have different types of roles. And so, Roberta, I'm wondering if you would share how you prepare for a meeting with an elected official and what you do in that meeting. So kind of being on the outside and trying to have that influence.
Roberta Downing:So one of the things that I found throughout my career is that I often end up being a translator and a facilitator. Particularly as a social scientist, I have worked a lot for years with people that speak in really complicated terms about things. And then when you're working in public policy, you wanna be really clear and succinct and talk in plain language. It's really, really key. And oftentimes, that can be the hardest thing for real in-depth experts to take a bird's eye view or to talk about their research or their company or whatever it is that they wanna talk about in terms that will be understandable to a nonexpert.
Roberta Downing:And so in preparing for a congressional meeting, that is often where I spend the most of my time. One, in helping with drafting talking points for a client, but also in developing, leave behind. So usually, that's a one pager or a series of one pager that describe the issue. The leave behind often has to go through multiple multiple revisions for the exact reason I just talked about to make it accessible in plain language so that literally anybody who picks it up can read it and understand it. Or the way that I often put it is you can hand it to a member of congress who's walking out reading it while they're walking down the hall, and they need to read the whole thing, understand it, why it's important, what the ask is before they get on the elevator to wherever they're going next.
Roberta Downing:And that is a really, really hard thing for people to do, but it's a really important thing to do. We all have different backgrounds. We all have different experience. We have different education on different topics, and so you can't ever assume knowledge. And assuming knowledge will make you less effective.
Anna Farro Henderson:That was great. That's really helpful, I think, to hear, to be being this translator and facilitator. I'm assuming that both when you worked in a political office and working outside political office, you're doing that translation? Because that certainly, for me, is something that, like, a role I'm serving kinda wherever I am, I think.
Roberta Downing:Yeah. It's it's really interesting. I have been working with people that work on issues that are completely different, that I have no background in. And so how they pitch their work to me, I kind of have my hat on as a congressional staffer as if they're coming to me and lobbying me. I think all of us that have been lobbied, you learn a skill for asking critical questions or often clarifying questions.
Anna Farro Henderson:Thank you. So you're not working as a lobbyist and you're not working in a political office, but you are working to help shape or influence public policy. There's kind of like a whole ecosystem out there, and there are paid lobbyists who are most directly working with elected officials, but then there's a lot of other people who are part of this ecosystem.
Tenzin Dolkar:So there is a difference between advocacy and lobbying. Lobbying, there's a legal term for it. In the state of Minnesota, there's a realistic definition for what lobbying is. And if you're nonprofit or if you're a for profit businesses, you have to register. You have to calculate the hours or the dollar amount you spend, and you have to report it every year.
Tenzin Dolkar:Federal definition is less stricter than Minnesota. In terms of the ecosystem of, like, who's organizing, in my experience, both having been in part of nonprofit and somebody who now works primarily with nonprofits in my professional career, what I will say is we take the public engagement, organizing, education, inform, educate, organize, and then advocate. So you really are engaging at informing the public, engaging with them, you know, having one to one interaction with everybody from every walks of life on the issues you care about, getting them educated on it. And then you're turning them around as advocates. And the most simple, easier way that I think about is the early days when there wasn't a policy around solar energy or allowing solar or renewable energy policy framework, more often than not, the first individuals who were sort of the brave citizens who went out and got solar when it was really expensive, they then turn around and became advocate for why solar was so great at reducing energy bill, why it was great for climate, and how it was actually a very, very durable and sustainable way of getting your energy sources.
Tenzin Dolkar:And that's one way of, like, how folks can turn around and be an advocate. And what nonprofit ecosystem does is they work in so many variety and different diverse sector, and they directly serve a very specific group group of people. So if you take some of the nonprofit organizations, they organize the rural community or they work for the benefit of economic growth in rural communities. And a core part of their work then is engaging the very community members that live in their neighborhoods and then turning them around as advocates and bringing them to the state legislature or to the governor's office or congressional offices and speaking on what they're experiencing and telling their lived experiences as stories. And I think that is where the nonprofit groups does really good job.
Tenzin Dolkar:Somebody who has started with the League of Women Voters, you know, I often think about this one woman, and she said she's a member of league, and she donates because she knows there are people who are organizing and who are advocating for issues that she cares about. And she doesn't, as a regular citizen, have to show up at the state legislature. And that's what I think about what nonprofit ecosystem does for our community and the civic infrastructure. When we think about professional lobbies from private sector, different industries, you have a group of nonprofit activists or advocates who are dedicated, who are passionate about the community they live in, passionate about the issues they work for, and are turning around and engaging in public policy design.
Anna Farro Henderson:So the NGO sector is helping serve a societal need of raising certain issues and and being able to put time in or follow the laws so that not all of us at home have to track everything happening at the legislature. I don't know if any of if either of you guys remember the exact number, but the number of bills introduced in a legislative session is like, thousands, and it's a lot to track. And, you know, you worked through the League of Women Voters, and that was a way to get tied into political organizing. And I wanted to take a moment to talk about other ways that voices could be heard. So if you own a business, you could hire a paid lobbyist, but just for regular people out there, you can call your elected officials office.
Anna Farro Henderson:When I was working for elected officials, they would ask for those call numbers and they would be reported to them. So it was really, really important how many people had called on an issue. You can write letters. You can send emails. Roberta wrote a book chapter about ways to get your voice heard in politics for researchers.
Anna Farro Henderson:And in there, she talked about that there are forms that you can follow. So NGOs are out there and they will put together a form with some of that content about bills that are out there that are relevant where there's an immediate urgency. So you can also testify at your city hearings or state hearings. You can meet with a staff person. And then this, like, not going it alone, but working with an organization, an NGO, or a volunteer group is a way to to get some support and also to make it social.
Roberta Downing:Yeah. Just to add to that, Anna, the first time I ever called my senator or member of congress, I was daunted. And this is before I had worked on Capitol Hill. I was nervous about who was gonna be on the other line. And what's funny is now I know it's an intern.
Roberta Downing:They're taking thousands of calls every day, and they're totally used to having people call and share their opinions. And I say that for people that are just getting started in this. You don't know what it's gonna be like, and it can be intimidating. But it's really important to recognize that this is for everybody. Our elected officials are elected to represent us.
Roberta Downing:And And so if they represent you, they need to hear from you. And that is your right. There's no reason not to be heard. When I worked for senator Brown, we would have staff meetings, and he would start every staff meeting with asking, you know, what are the top 10 things people are calling the office about? And he would get a report out.
Roberta Downing:Okay. What are the top 10 things people are writing letters about or emails about? And he would get a report out on that. People engage with Congress on everything you can think of. Like, there are cigar smoker advocacy groups.
Roberta Downing:There are heart disease advocacy groups. There's an advocacy group for just about any issue you can possibly think of. There is public policy written on virtually any topic that you can think of. There's usually always an infrastructure of people like what you talked about, Anna, that are already working on the issue and that you can engage in the beginning until you get comfortable doing some of this work by yourself. Don't be daunted.
Roberta Downing:Just do it. And the more you do it, the more comfortable you'll get doing it.
Anna Farro Henderson:So when I worked in Franken's office, there were a couple people who answered the phones. They were really young. They might have been interns or right out of college. Two of them later ran for office, and they're in really powerful positions now. Somebody might be really young.
Anna Farro Henderson:They might be new at this, but that doesn't mean the relationship isn't important or that they aren't really smart and headed somewhere. If you're the person answering phones in a political office, the power of hearing other people's voices and stories is really powerful, and it changes who you are. In both offices I worked in, I answered phones for a day during different crises, and it was a really incredible experience. There was a full spectrum of people who were calling and calling about different types of issues. I had this very kind of emotional feeling that we are all out there trying so hard to do different things and to actualize our ideas and express ourselves.
Anna Farro Henderson:It's really important that we have this government infrastructure to work together. So we've talked about that making political change, it's iterative, it can be slow, we need to have long term relationships because this is gonna take a while. And I'm just wondering about what are the successes along the way for people who are trying to get their voice heard and trying to make political change. And and I'm thinking about that for successes that could be from your perspective in lobbying, your perspective in political office, or your perspective working in the NGO field.
Tenzin Dolkar:I would say I mean, people spend hours, months, years designing campaigns, building a milestone on how they can measure success along the way. But the simplest way, I would say, is did you show up? I mean, that's the easy one. Right? Like, if you care about an issue, did you show up?
Tenzin Dolkar:Whether it is a phone call, email, letter, or going to a meeting, whether it's an affinity group or a forum that the elected officials were organizing. Like, did you show up? I think that's the first measure of success. Then the second part is, did you then engage on that topic? The third measure of success could be, was a bill introduced?
Tenzin Dolkar:There's a difference between legislation that you're trying to pass and lobbying and then the pal public policy design. Policy design sometimes don't always have to be with elected officials, state legislature, or the governor. It can be policy design at the state agencies or federal agencies where a simple rule or simple way of redoing intake process or redoing the application. And they again, those takes years, but the question is, was an act or an action taken after you had initiated something? Did the other person reciprocate and said, I'm gonna do something about it?
Tenzin Dolkar:And then if you are truly committed to making sure a law is passed and you have the bandwidth to dedicate more time towards it, then, yes, there are very strict schedule at the state level, state legislature follows. And that's the worst thing true for congressional offices where there's a deadline in their timeline, and you can follow them. But the flip side of that is organizing people. We're talking about having your voices heard in public policy making. There's the inside game and there's the outside game.
Tenzin Dolkar:And so the word more often than not on this podcast talking about the inside game, but on the outside game, you can measure success by whether or not you're engaging the public. And if what you care about is the discourse within the public arena. And I think that's a different way of measuring success. I am curious if somebody who was listening to the podcast is looking for a lobbyist, what would be the key skills you would look to make sure that your lobbyist has it?
Roberta Downing:Well, I think you want somebody who's gonna be passionate about your issue, who you know, it's not just kind of a job in taking home a paycheck, but that they're going to really bring their experience and also their creativity to your issue so that they are creating a multi pronged strategy for you, but also thinking about all the other various ways that they can advance your issue with elected officials or federal or state agencies?
Anna Farro Henderson:That's a great question. Switching topics, I do wanna acknowledge that all of us are raising families, live in households, and are balancing that with our work. You know, for anybody out there listening who has any kind of family responsibilities, caring for older parents or children or other family members, that doesn't mean that you're not able to be part of the political process. And I made the decision in writing core samples to include intimate personal experiences in the book with the hope that sharing that full spectrum of the human experience would really humanize science research and humanize the political process and in that way make them relatable and feel more approachable. And I was just wondering if each of you might be willing to just share something about what it means to be balancing that or what value you think it brings to political work to actually, you know, be balancing that with family responsibilities.
Tenzin Dolkar:So I think depending on what level of government you work in, I think the work could get easier. But I think, and I know this to be true for myself, when I was working as legislative director and then working for governor, legislative session was my busiest time. And May, particularly May and certain deadlines, it was the norm to work till midnight or so. And I don't think I could have done that work without a strong family support. And in your book, you reference your husband, Dan.
Tenzin Dolkar:You reference not seeing your kids at times, not being able to put them in beds. And I think May was a particular time where all of us just stayed at the state capitol, and I know the book goes into it, in more details on what that looked like. And the governor stayed up till two to 3AM. His doors were open. You could call him at 5AM.
Tenzin Dolkar:And that meant all of us worked. The legislators worked really hard, and I knew there were a lot of women legislators who were young mothers at that time who were taking care of their kids and still doing this. You know, it's a time and a period when there's a calling and you do it. Would I do it again? Probably not.
Tenzin Dolkar:But, you know, it's doable with the support of your family, and I think that matters the most.
Roberta Downing:I agree with what you're saying. I mean, one thing that I'm always really cognizant of is public servants are making often incredible sacrifices by doing their jobs. One thing, I really appreciated in the book, Anna, was all of your honesty around those kinds of sacrifices because they're often invisible to the people that you're working with. I often think there's only twenty four hours a day, and where are you putting those hours? I mean, I have a very supportive family, very supportive husband.
Roberta Downing:I had it about as good as I could have had it. And each one of my jobs, people have always said, oh, this is a very family friendly place to work. And if you need to leave early because you have to pick up your kids from day care or you have a sick kid, it's fine. Don't worry about it. But you still feel a pressure if you do have to leave or if you're not in the office someday because your child is sick.
Roberta Downing:When I worked on Capitol Hill, nobody else in the office, there was only one other person, two people, I think, in the whole office that were married. Nobody had kids. Or the ones that had kids, their kids were already grown in in college. If you had to leave early, you felt guilty and bad about it. And other jobs that I worked in that were not on Capitol Hill, To make things family friendly, we would have conference calls at ten or sometimes 10:30 at night.
Roberta Downing:And by then, you're totally exhausted, and it's really hard to have substantive conversations that late in the day. I've worked a lot of jobs where I woke up 6AM, got on the computer, worked for an hour, then the kids wake up, get them ready, you go to work, you come home, you have dinner with your family, and then you're back at your computer again until 11:30 at night or midnight. A lot of jobs, I think, are family friendly. I just don't know now, reflecting on all those different jobs, I kind of questioned, was it really family friendly? Because I was really exhausted all the time.
Anna Farro Henderson:Family friendly, but maybe not family sustaining.
Tenzin Dolkar:Not a family sustaining. Anna, your last book, sort of, is the goodbye book and sort of wrapping up the chapter. You do talk about the decision not to seek employment again. Like, we all knew the governor term was ending, and I think most of us had a choice of, like, staying into the next administration. I remember I had the choice of staying into the rail director role.
Tenzin Dolkar:We had conversation because your office was different than my office, but you were very clear. Like, you were leaving the job, and you were going to take time off, and you were going to write a book. And I imagine that decision wasn't easy. Would you mind going into sort of, like, what led to you deciding this is it? Like, you were taking step away from the center of politics, the center of power, the center of your ability to influence a number of issues that you care about and really leaving your professional identity, which is so much of, like, 90% of our identity at our age.
Tenzin Dolkar:What did that feel like?
Anna Farro Henderson:I think the identity part was, like, the scariest. You know? It's like, oh my god. Who am I? What am I doing?
Anna Farro Henderson:COVID has really changed things because it felt at first like, wow, everyone else is going to an office and I'm not. But I also had this very strong clarity that I wanted to be writing, and I had been writing short pieces and publishing them and doing that while also raising kids and working these jobs that are 20 fourseven. It felt really, really exhausting and unsustainable. And I felt like there was this part of myself that I kept stuffing away. There had been this idea that like sometime I'm gonna have more time to write and it started to feel like that's not gonna happen unless I make a decision.
Anna Farro Henderson:And so I'd made a decision that I was gonna do that and it wasn't gonna make sense to anybody. My parents weren't like excited about that. It was a decision I was gonna make and I was just gonna have to like be brave and like see what happened. But maybe also to put it in perspective, like my idea of not being employed actually ended up being kind of busy because I taught a class at the university. When I look back on it, it's like actually there was like no time when I wasn't doing something, it's just that I was trying to do things that left some time for writing.
Anna Farro Henderson:I think my perspective is skewed in that thinking that I'm giving myself open time but actually still having quite a lot of responsibilities for me to work on like creative writing, which I'm doing besides this book, I'm writing other things, but that it's this continual boundary that I'm setting up that doesn't really make sense in the world that we live in, but it's just like a personal maybe like spiritual choice. And I think it's interesting for my kids to see that and I don't know what it means to them yet and how how they're gonna look at that. You know if they'll be like wow that was so cool or if they'll be like man you could have like made a lot more money doing something else. But I haven't regretted it. And I think it was also like a thing of like listening to my body.
Anna Farro Henderson:So when we were leaving the governor's office, people would call about jobs that were really cool jobs to recruit me and the idea of doing them made me feel like I was gonna throw up. So it was like I was like I have this like very loud strong message from my body that there's something else I really need to do even if it doesn't make sense in our economic ways of thinking about work or even, like, societal power way of thinking about work.
Tenzin Dolkar:Yeah. We often ask public to show up at meeting spaces all the time at different locations, and sometimes those meetings are happening, like, after work hours. So we we generally tend to have those expectations. Roberta, very similar question to you. If you think about the different offices, political offices you have worked at, you know, it's the center of gravity, power.
Tenzin Dolkar:Your ability to influence goes up by, like, % from when you are outside to when you are inside and you actually have direct line of communication with the decision maker. For each one of them, you made a choice to step away from those rules. Were those decisions hard or were they driven equally by, like, trying to find more sustaining family life?
Roberta Downing:I think that it is a huge issue that is not examined enough at all in the workplace is how organizations lose talent because they don't have managers that know how to believe in their employees or micromanage their employees. And when I worked in the senate, it's like you really are a part of the team. And I think you guys have this in the governor's office because everybody is you're working as a team. You're working for that person to advance the initiatives. And so you have, like, this cohesiveness, and a lot of jobs don't have that.
Anna Farro Henderson:I really miss that cohesiveness. I think from hearing from Roberta and I thought essential to maintaining talent in an office is that management is lifting up and supporting the experts, trusting them, and giving them flexibility. There's no reason that somebody with children, even really little children, can't be incredibly effective in these positions and that the perspectives of people with family responsibilities, whether it's for older people or or younger people, bring so much that is important to political offices. Because really what we're trying to do in politics is create a society that supports everybody and supports care, and so we really need the perspective of people who are caregivers to be part of that.
Roberta Downing:One thing just to add to that, I found time and again, being a working mother, I had different insights into different policy issues that people who did not have kids couldn't see. Whether it was things that happened in daycare or things that were going on in schools, when you're living it, it's a lot different than, it is for people who aren't living it, and you understand it differently. And it can also really spur the fire in your belly to make changes, when you see real kids experiencing things.
Tenzin Dolkar:So as we're wrapping this up, Anna and Roberta, I am wondering as we reflect on our background and our having worked in policy making both inside and outside, I am wondering what are the top three to five takeaways. So my sort of kind of three big takeaway is, one, the public service. I think public service is a calling. And, truly, when people say public service is a public servant, there's some truth to it because you do a lot of thankless job. And there and there are often days when you feel this way where elected officials or the publics don't see the work that you're doing.
Tenzin Dolkar:But in my time, having worked with state agencies, having been part of the governor's office, I have not met a single person who wasn't extremely passionate and that that was working in public service. It's a truly calling and dedication that you make towards because you believe in something beyond yourself. You care about an issue. You care about making something. And sometimes you go into the most detailed implementation process that most general public don't even know the details.
Tenzin Dolkar:They will see the mishaps in the news, but they don't see all the fine details that you go through and that you worry about to make sure a state is running smoothly or somebody's life is getting better or that we're running things normally like, you know, the light is going on. The energy is running on time. People are getting their bill paid on time. People are getting their insurance on time. It truly is a calling.
Tenzin Dolkar:The second thing I will say is everybody has the ability to influence, and everybody has the ability to access that power of influencing. And you can have a very dominant voice in what happens in our public policy arena, policy design, influencing elect election officials. It takes time. It takes organizing. It takes being really, concentrated and dedicating time to it, but it is doable.
Tenzin Dolkar:The third thing I will say is the power of people, and I've watched this over time. Sometimes, I think elected officials are not god. They're not omnipresent beings where they will know everything. And sometimes I think the public is ahead of where the politics are. And we have watched this over and over again where the organizing of people really leads to massive legislative change that people work at it.
Tenzin Dolkar:People get really smart. They organize. They strategize, and they make it happen, and they create the political will. And so I think the power of people truly stands outside influence over anything that happens in public policy arena.
Anna Farro Henderson:So I have a couple thoughts on my own, but I wanted to restate a couple things said earlier in the podcast, which is the importance of combining a personal story with data to get your voice heard and to really communicate the urgency and importance of your issue. And then the other thing I wanted to restate is the importance of listening to people who disagree with you. And following on that, don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Success in politics is incremental change. It's not getting exactly what you want.
Anna Farro Henderson:We are working together as all different kinds of people in your state and in this country, and we have different perspectives. Success is having your voice heard. It's having small changes made. It is ongoing engagement over time. In terms of going to speak to elected officials offices, I can't overstate the importance of just being polite.
Anna Farro Henderson:Just be a nice person and don't underestimate the staff. They might be young. They might change jobs. Those are jobs that do turn over, but the people who are in them are gonna remain relevant. So the person you got to know in your senator's office is now a high level person working at the state.
Anna Farro Henderson:They're still probably important to know. So it is worth your time to get to know them and remember that they're people. My final thing I'm gonna say is that if you're having a meeting or if you're making a phone call, you're sending a letter to ground that communication. So elected official offices are working on so many issues, and to to use plain language, to start by explaining things, to tell them who you are and where you're coming from and why you care about the issue. Well, Anna, I really wanna
Roberta Downing:thank you for bringing us together today. It's been really fun to talk with both of you and especially after reading your book. Your book really shows perspective that I haven't ever seen out there of what it is like working in these jobs, being on the other side of the table, and the personal perspective that you brought to it as well as a working mom and the path that led you to engage in that work. So thank you. The book is a ton of fun to read and also really, really informative.
Roberta Downing:I very much enjoyed reading it, and I know others really will too.
Anna Farro Henderson:Thank you. Thank you both so much for joining me and sharing your stories and experiences, and thank you for reading core samples. I'm really excited, and I'm excited to get out on a book tour, and I'll be traveling around the state and traveling around to different parts of the country and I can't wait to have conversations and learn from folks who are out there.
Roberta Downing:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Core Samples, a Climate Scientist's Experiments in Politics and Motherhood by Anna Faro Henderson is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.