Building upon the successful Youth Climate Ambassadors Program in partnership with UBC Sustainability Hub, Climate Action, Resilience & Emotions (CARE) is a two-part classroom workshop that helps youth navigate and process their climate-related emotions, build emotional resilience, and take positive environmental action in their communities.
Based in BC’s Interior and delivered throughout the Central Okanagan and Thompson-Nicola regional districts, CARE engages local trained facilitators under the age of 30 to deliver climate programming to younger students. This by youth, for youth delivery model ensures the program remains locally relevant as well as informed by and impactful to its youth audience.
Workshop Content
In Part 1, students will:
- Explore foundational understandings of climate change from the local to the global level.
- Acknowledge, explore, and process their climate-related emotions.
- Hear climate stories from trained youth facilitators, helping them to construct their own understanding of the impact of and response to climate change in their own and others’ lives.
- Explore the varied and disproportionate impacts of climate change on different communities.
In Part 2, students will:
- Use creativity and art-based exercises to connect to their climate emotions.
- Learn research-backed emotional resilience strategies for living in a climate-changed world that can carry far beyond the workshop.
- Discover local examples of positive climate action and tangible ways to get involved and take action.
Workshops can take place in classrooms, after school, in the community, or online. The workshop is geared for ages 10-18, but an adapted version can be delivered for students ages 6-10 or 18+.
This is a 2-part workshop. The recommended length of each session is 65 minutes, the two parts are designed to be scheduled one-week apart to best support participants. CARE workshops are available in-person in the Central Okanagan and Thompson-Nicola regions.
Please let us know if you have any accessibility requests, and we will do our best to accommodate all learners. Potential accommodations could include: Adjusting activities for students with limited mobility, preparing a list of key terms in advance for ELL students or those who need more time to process, and more.