Turn Climate Grief into Global Youth Action

Hello friends,

We wanted to tell you about our progress this quarter on addressing mental health issues related to climate action. We organized our second free virtual conference, ‘Climate of Emotions’ a project to create an online community to support youth action around climate in April 2021. This virtual retreat helped develop a hopeful vision for the future through virtual community collaboration across three themes:

1. Our Strength is with Each Other - where intersectionality, feeling interconnection, and diversity as strength were encouraged.
2. Open Up to Radical Imagining - discussing how we can get to the root, self reflection & story sharing and going beyond past limitations.
3. Feel Emotions as Collective Force for Change - by feeling both grief & hope, building trust and energizing growth.

The transformative power of this festival came from the involvement, imagination, and mutual sharing of the participants. In order to facilitate this and enable generative vulnerability, we hope the environment can be intentionally designed and facilitated to be affirming and culturally expansive. By conducting such events, we hope to empower youth to work together and make a positive change.

We’ve compiled some of the posts shared by our participants on social media. You can see them here at link below.

Thank you for being a part of our POP-UP community and helping us increase children’s wellbeing around the world. 

Warmly,
Patty Freedman

Links:

• see all the action from Climate of Emotions 2021 retreat
• get overview of the whole Climate of Emotions retreat program