Do elected leaders really listen to what community members have to say? If you’re a Green Foothills supporter, you probably know that they do. You probably also know that when trying to persuade a local official to take action, some approaches work better than others. This month, Green Foothills Leadership Program participants learned how to get local leaders to listen.

The highlight of the April session was a visit from Joe Simitian, a former California state legislator whose distinguished career included serving in the State Assembly and State Senate, as well as on the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors, Palo Alto School Board, and Palo Alto City Council. His talk, entitled “13 Tips for Effective Advocates,” is one of the most popular parts of the Leadership Program, garnering enthusiastic reviews on post-program surveys. The talk describes best practices for building relationships with elected officials, with examples drawn from his own experience on the city council, state legislature, school board, and county board.

His talk gives the Leadership Program participants insight into how things look from an elected official’s perspective, and what it’s like to try to make decisions in situations where there are many competing interests, all parties disagree, and leaders are receiving a lot of competing requests. He suggested taking time to find out what the official you’re approaching cares about most, so that you can frame your issue in a way that shows why it should be important to them. Success is more likely if you are clear, concise, and specific about what you want, come with solutions and not just problems, and have alternative solutions in mind in case your first choice of solution isn’t accepted. These are just a few of the valuable tips he shared.

The April session also included the opportunity for Leadership Program participants to practice crafting their own messages. In addition, there were lessons on the history of public lands in the United States, and lessons about some specific Green Foothills conservation campaigns that were successful, along with details about how they were carried out. Participants then spent time continuing to brainstorm and do research for their capstone projects. The capstone project involves planning an advocacy campaign that benefits open space, farmland, or natural resources and advances equity; this may be a real-world project or simply a learning exercise, and participants work on it throughout the 8-month program.

This Leadership Program session, like every session, was translated into Spanish in real time by an on-site translator for the program’s Spanish-speaking participants.

Supporters of the Green Foothills Leadership Program include Applied Materials Foundation Community Fund, the County of Santa Clara, North Santa Clara Resource Conservation District (NSCRCD), Sand Hill Foundation, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Wildlife Conservation Network’s California Wildlife Program, and Green Foothills donors. Please consider making a donation to support the Leadership Program.