January Newsletter: Sharing Gratitude & Excitement for 2024!
Happy New Year! We hope you had a memorable holiday season and a positive start to 2024. At Be the Change, we are energized and excited for the year ahead!
Be the Change’s climate storytelling workshops for high school students start with two simple questions:
-What comes to mind when you think about climate change?
-Thinking about climate change, what emotions and feelings come up?
I’ve delivered this workshop dozens of times, but I’m always struck by students' responses:
“Drastic temperature changes, environmental disasters....I feel hopeless.”
“Ice melting, forest fires...I feel angry, disappointed, sad.”
“End of the world… I feel fear and impending doom.”
But this storytelling workshop, which we organize and deliver in collaboration with the UBC Climate Hub, isn’t about reinforcing the severity of the climate crisis or students’ feelings of despair and grief.
It’s about helping students turn their own associations and emotions with climate change into personal, compelling climate stories aimed at calling others to action. It’s about empowering students to raise their voice and call for change!
Learning through examples just how powerful youth climate stories can be, students begin to see their role in the climate crisis differently. Here’s what students had to say after the hour of storytelling and creation:
“I have more power and bigger role in fighting climate change than I thought.”
“I realized that I have a voice and I can help our environment just by telling my story.”
“It showed me that there is hope out there and that people are actually trying to make change happen.”
Imagine if youth across BC and Canada received this workshop, and learned to harness their fear and grief into powerful stories. Imagine if with these stories, youth were able to bring their parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles onboard with ambitious climate action.
You can help turn this vision into a reality through a $5, $10 or $50 monthly gift to Be the Change (a registered Canadian charity). As part of our Giving Tuesday campaign, your gift will be matched by a generous donor, doubling your impact!
We delivered an amazing 29 climate storytelling workshops in our pilot last school year. We’ve adapted the workshop for virtual delivery and gearing up to reach hundreds more students this year. But with reduced revenues due to Covid-19, we need your support more than ever. Chip in to help empower a generation of climate storytellers!
Thank you,
George Radner
Executive Director, Be the Change Earth Alliance
Latest posts
December 2023 Newsletter - ⛄‘Tis the season to celebrate at Be The Change!⛄
As 2023 comes to a close and school winds down for winter break, we’re taking a moment to reflect back over the past year. 2023 was a very regenerative time for BTCEA! We developed and delivered our Climate Action, Resilience, and Emotions (CARE) program in communities on the frontlines of wildfires in our province. And as an organization, we prioritized creating space to discuss what decolonization could look like both internally, and in our programming. Here are the highlights:
Oct 2023 Newsletter - Check out our mid-October climate-justice resources!
Hello,
An introduction from Communications Coordinator, Lucy Wicken
Dear Be The Change community,
As we approach mid-October, I’m reflecting on the changing seasons, from the warm and active days of summer to the cooler and quieter days of autumn. Personally, I’ve noticed a desire to slow down, take on fewer responsibilities, and stay inside where it’s cozy. Have you felt this way too?
As 21st century humans living in a world that operates under capitalism, white supremacy, and other oppressive systems, we can be made to feel guilt or shame about listening & responding to our needs. We are expected to maintain the same energy and productivity levels throughout the year, no matter how cold or dark the days are, how heavy world events feel, or how much we’re struggling in our personal lives.
This is where the concept of regenerative education comes in. Introduced to the BTCEA team by former staff member Jake, regenerative education calls on us to slow down and turn inward to consider our connection with the natural world. It asks us to examine the living systems that are breaking down due to violent human activity (such as fossil fuel extraction, destruction of Indigenous lands, and human-caused flooding and wildfires) and connect this breakdown with our own high levels of stress.
