The Climate Wisdom Lab for Educators is a professional development program for faculty and staff of higher education institutions designed to support institutional efforts to prepare students for sustainable engagement with climate change, structural oppression and inequality, and other systemic challenges.

The Climate Wisdom Lab is designed to help institutions and educators address the psychosocial impacts of climate change, injustice and inequality by integrating emotional-affective learning into new and existing curricula. The Lab helps prepare participants for the new realities facing higher education by:

• enabling awareness, identification, and mitigation of mind states and psychosocial reactions to structural stressors, such as climate injustice, environmental degradation, and structural oppression;

• providing critical tools for developing and maintaining individual, organizational, and social resilience in the midst of dramatic systemic disruption;

• helping participants learn how to help students respond to their emotional experience of climate disruption; and

• creating a collaborative, creative process for piloting innovative pedagogies that better respond to the unique existential demands of this historical moment on the next generation of leaders.

The program is typically offered as a two-day, in-person workshop, and can also accommodate virtual delivery and alternate lengths.

The Climate Wisdom Lab for Students is an interactive and intersectional program intended to prepare students for sustainable engagement with climate change, structural oppression and inequality, and other systemic challenges.

The Climate Wisdom Lab for students focuses on the key psychosocial dimensions of a rapidly changing world, and guides participants through the purpose and process of rewriting personal and cultural narratives to support greater engagement and meaning. The Lab helps prepare students for this new reality by helping participants:

• become more aware of their own affective responses to climate and social crises,

• explore the structural connections between climate change and environmental degradation, economic inequality, social injustice, individual well-being, and global industrial capitalism;

• understand the nature of emotions and their impact on internal experience and external behaviors;

• build community of practice with other students; and

• co-create strategic projects for integrating program content into their campus and community experience.

The program is typically offered as a two-day, in-person workshop, and can also accommodate virtual delivery and alternate lengths.

Emergent Resilience workshops are intended to build resilience for a climate changing world and to empower sustainable engagement with the major challenges of our time.

Working in environmental fields during this time of rapid ecological change gives us a unique perspective into the current state of our planet. The resulting burdens, when combined with the stresses of everyday life, can make it difficult to remain engaged and present, which is vital to being effective in our work. Building on our shared understanding of the state of the environment and our common experience working on behalf of the natural world, the Climate Wisdom Lab for advocates is designed specifically for those already engaged in environmental and systems change work, including scientists, experts, advocates, attorneys, and changemakers.

Typically offered as a series of five 2-hour workshops, the programs:

• enable in-depth understanding of the challenges and opportunities faced by those in frontline environmental and systems change occupations,

• provide space for acknowledging and processing the difficult affective aspects of the converging crises of our time,

• teach practical tools and techniques for promoting resilience that can support sustainable engagement with our essential work, and

• create a unique forum for professionals to find connection and build community with others also engagement in the hard work of systems change.

Client Spotlight

This nature-based rite of passage program is designed to help anyone engaged on climate and justice issues who wants to create new connections and to deepen their sense of purpose and meaning in their work.

The converging crises of our time can be considered a global rite of passage, one requiring us, as individuals and as a culture, to discard old mindsets and outdated structures while making space for the emergence of life-affirming beliefs and behaviors. This guided vision fast ceremony is for professionals, scientists, educators, advocates, and activists who are called to serve the vision of a better world. Bringing together a group of dynamic changemakers, the ceremony will enable participants to connect to inner and collective wisdom, separate from what no longer serves, and cross the threshold to claim new ways of being that support the creation of a new, regenerative culture.

• Locations: West Coast (CA) and East Coast (WV).

• Program Length: 10 days, including 3-day solo fast.

• Guides: Lead by experienced guides and wilderness educators.