Engage 1B People Practicing Emotional Intelligence

The Climate of Emotions activation at NYC Climate Week 2024 was a roaring success! We had a sold out event in September for our first live Climate of Emotions (COE) activation. Climate of Emotions brings people together to learn more about emotions and their role in the climate crisis so we can have more inner sustainability and increase capacity for change. Together with our partners Narrative 4 and Unthinkable, we held a 3 hour event for 100 participants. 

COE design has three parts:

Grieving in Connection -- We come together and share emotions (for many people this is grief) because we are humans in a time of a crisis. We respect the diversity of people, who they are, where they come from, what they are feeling so we begin a process of connection.

Radical Reimagination- We create something together and practice new ways of seeing and thinking about things. This part is joyful, expressive and helps us build energy through creative collaboration.

Regenerative Planning- We take our fresh ideas and perspectives to make future plans. This is both individual and collective-- what new skills and strengths have we developed inside ourselves and what new friendships, partnerships, alliances have we forged that we can leverage in the future?

Why is COE different from other activiations?

It is fun, joyful, and active. It centers YOUTH -- they are the speakers, leaders and facilitators.  It brings emotions into the room and values epression, collaboration and community. It engages both thinking and feeling.

Here are a few takeaways from the event:

“All emotions are valid and should be listened to.”

“Emotions may come and go but that is important is how we react to them. If we get carried away with our emotions they become harder to communicate for us and harder to understand and perceive others. So basically chill out a bit, take a breather and communicate with a cooler head.”

“I can see the power and impact of our emotions to engage in climate change activism and the importance of support.”

“We need more spaces to be vulnerable. More normalization of sharing emotions. More space for working through not ignoring climate emotions.

“Emotions are useful tools towards collective action. By sharing and working through our emotions together we can use them to inspire and create solutions.”

We had a fantastic film crew documenting the event–and will share a short film on our social media channels soon. In addition, we are conducting a study on the effectiveness of the COE program by measuring participants' pre and post assessment scores. Preliminary results are encouraging!  We see the intervention having an impact on reducing levels of Climate powerlessness, Climate isolation and Climate anxiety and increasing levels of Climate enthusiasm for participants. We are preparing to submit a paper on these findings this year.

We can’t wait to see how much more impact progress we can make with Climate of Emotions. Thank you for all your support on this project.

With gratitude-

Patty

Links:

• for more information about Climate of Emotions