Workshop 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. These free workshops will be offered by Be The Change Earth Alliance, a Canadian non-profit organization, in partnership with UBC Climate Hub. Building upon the successful Youth Climate Ambassadors Program, 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 the hope and agency needed to tell compelling, powerful climate stories that bring justice into the climate conversation. Feeling empowered is the best way to overcome climate anxiety.
Each workshop is facilitated by youth volunteers, 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 Content:
Part 1:
- Establishing a foundational understanding of climate change as a concept, including an exploration of its complexity.
- Open sharing around participants’ associations, ideas and feelings regarding climate change, with an emphasis on validating each person’s experiences.
- An experiential introduction to research-based resilience strategies that can support youth as they navigate their emotional responses to climate change.
Part 2:
- A reflective discussion about participant responses to the ideas and feelings that came up during part 1.
- Personal stories from the facilitators on how the climate crisis has impacted them and how they have responded.
- An in-depth exploration of the research-based resilience strategies introduced in part-1, with an emphasis on building personal and community capacities.
- An opportunity to ideate on what effective climate action looks like both collectively and individually, followed by a discussion of what moving forward could look like.
Workshop Objectives:
- 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 wellbeing.
- Provide participants with hope and agency through compelling, powerful, and inspiring stories.
- Help participants understand the complexity of our climate predicament, and that it is a social justice issue, not just an environmental crisis.
- Activate participants’ imaginations for effective strategies to encourage others to support climate solutions, policies, and action.
Currently these workshops are available in the geographical region covered by School District 73, Kamloops-Thompson, School District 74, Gold Trail, and School District 83, North Okanagan-Shuswap. BTCEA is hoping to expand the availability of these workshops in the near future. Please complete this form if you would like to book a workshop or to be notified when they are available in your district.
Still have questions? Email [email protected]
