I don’t know how to write this post to ask you to join the streets.mn board. This is supposed to be my rousing invitation, and every time I start typing, I find myself writing about the IPCC instead. But that’s not actually all that far off. Climate change–our role in causing it, the consequences we face, and the desperate, immediate need we have to shift how we live–is exactly what motivated me to join the streets.mn board to start with and why I’m inviting you to apply for it now.

Our climate breakdown is about the same things streets.mn is about: land use and transportation, the ways we live and move, zoning, infrastructure, engineering, the geography of the ground beneath our feet, Minnesota. Responding to our climate crisis is a task as big and hard for us to fully comprehend as the crisis itself; our success requires all of us, working together, diving into conversations and creative solutions and immediate, robust action to collectively steer ourselves towards survival. And that’s basically streets.mn.

Our organization–the exchanges and connections that we have in each post–is a small but powerful part of tackling everything that climate change means to our state and our world. And guiding this organization, fostering and growing these conversations, is even more important work as we enter into a new understanding of the scope and scale of what we need to do, as well as the challenges we’ll face to get there in an equitable way. As you figure out how to commit yourself to our shared survival, I invite you to consider applying for the streets.mn board.

The deadline is 8 AM Monday, November 12 and you can find more information here. If you want a bit more of a sense of what you might be getting yourself into or who else you’ll be spending time working with, there’s a Meet-the-Board event on Wednesday, November 7th from 4:30 to 6:30 at Foxy Falafel (791 Raymond Ave) in St Paul.