Project Background:
Climate change is here, and our youth are experiencing a diversity of challenging climate emotions. A 2023 study found that 78% of Canadian youth report that climate change impacts their overall mental health.
This project engages youth and the educators who support them in order to build youth climate resilience and wellbeing in front line communities. It empowers youth to take climate action and navigate potentially powerful climate emotions by fostering personal and community resilience, agency and regeneration.
Project Overview:
Climate Action, Resilience, and Emotions (CARE) is a youth-led response to the need for narratives that acknowledge the emotional impacts of climate change and uplift hope and action rather than doom and gloom. Building upon the successful Youth Climate Ambassadors Program from UBC Climate Hub, these workshops connect trained youth (ages 18-25) facilitators with school and community groups, creating opportunities for peer-to-peer storytelling centered around climate justice, systems change, and community resilience and empowerment.
Communities are most receptive to climate change narratives delivered by people they trust, and the voices of youth community members are especially salient. Young people’s voices are key to communicating the urgency of the climate crisis and the need to engage in climate justice.
Many efforts to communicate the climate crisis have focused on insurmountable eco-threats. Narratives of an inevitable apocalypse burden youth with debilitating grief and anxiety that prevent them from taking action and thriving. These workshops will mobilize a systems thinking and global equity lens to empower youth with hope and agency. Feeling empowered is the best way to overcome climate anxiety.
Each workshop is facilitated by trained youth, who can meaningfully relate to and engage with their peers. Workshops can occur in classrooms, before or after school, in the community, or online. The workshop is geared for ages 13-17 but an adapted version can be delivered for students ages 10-12 or 18+. This is a 2-part workshop. The length of each session is 65 minutes and are designed to be scheduled one-week apart to best support participants.
Workshop Objectives:
- Help participants understand the complexity of our climate predicament, and that it is a social justice issue, not just an environmental crisis.
- Make explicit the spectrum of emotional responses to the climate crisis and affirm participants’ experiences and feelings.
- Give participants tools to effectively deal with these emotions in order to foster resilience and well-being.
- Provide participants with hope and agency through compelling, powerful, and inspiring stories.
Workshop Content:
Part 1:
- Establishing a foundational understanding of climate change as a concept.
- Open sharing around participants’ associations, ideas and feelings regarding climate change.
- Personal stories from the facilitators on how the climate crisis has impacted them and how they have responded.
- An experiential activity that provides the opportunity to consider how climate change impacts everyone differently.
Part 2:
- Personal stories from the facilitators on how the climate crisis has impacted them and how they have responded.
- An art-based exercise designed to help participants connect to their climate emotions.
- An introduction to research-based resilience strategies for living in a climate changed world in order to support participants beyond the workshop.
We are currently only accepting CARE workshop bookings in the Thompson-Okanagan region. Please reach out to [email protected] if you would like to inquire about getting a workshop in another location
Still have questions? Email [email protected]
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