Resilient Palisades Hosts Virtual Community Meeting

By LILY TINOCO | Reporter

Recently founded environmental group Resilient Palisades hosted a community meeting on Thursday, September 3, to reinstate its mission and to grow its relationship with the community.

The meeting was held virtually and began with a short breakout session for neighbors to learn more about one another.

“One of the main purposes of this meeting is for us to get to know one another and to talk to each other, which I have to just admit upfront I’m a little bit nervous about because this is on Zoom and it’s not the … likeliest form for doing this, but we’re going to try our best,” Ingrid Steinberg, one of the founders of Resilient Palisades, said. “We just ask for your patience as we kind of experiment with this technology … for the first time.”

Steinberg suggested attendees introduce themselves, share where they live, their reason for joining the call and to set an intention: asking attendees what they planned to bring to the meeting and what they plan to take away from it.

Steinberg then went on to share a presentation with attendees, stating that the group’s mission is to bring Palisadians together to address climate change and environmental degradation.

“It’s as much about the journey as the end results, and when I think about what an organization like Resilient Palisades can do, it’s about achieving an end result which is to address the climate crisis,” Steinberg said. “But it’s also about doing so as a community and building relationships so that we can be more resilient.”

Steinberg shared the ways the organization wants the group to learn together, like inviting guest speakers, having learning activities and workshops, learning from others’ experiences, and assisting neighbors in making changes at home and in the community.

She shared hopes of starting community teams where individuals can come together to tackle a particular issue, developing and implementing initiatives while educating and involving the community—eventually implementing campaigns.

There are also plans to keep the organization informed of what neighboring communities like Santa Monica are up to that are relevant to the environmental work they want achieve.

“We are all in this together, we really want to start off with great clarity about our values, about how important it is to us to hold at the center of every campaign the importance of how those campaigns are going to impact various communities and not just our immediate surroundings,” Steinberg said.

With the 2020 election around the corner, Palisadian Jonathan Zasloff was invited to speak for a few minutes on the Environmental Voter Project. Zasloff is an activist and a law professor at UCLA.

The Environmental Voter Project works to identify people who are concerned about environmental issues and climate change, and ensure they make it to the voting polls. Zasloff offered to conduct a training session for Palisadians to canvas by calling or texting in the near future for those who are interested.

“What they’re really trying to do is get people to vote, and over the next 59 days, I will drop what I’m doing to tell people about this organization and how you can get involved,” Zasloff said.

Additionally, local resources are available on the Resilient Palisades website and are constantly being updated for individuals to learn more about addressing environmental issues.

For more information, visit resilientpalisades.org.