Meetings Rooted in Compassion, Dialogue, and Adaptive Resiliency

“We must never relinquish the vision of a humane society and a humane world.” — Kjell Magne Bondevik

A note before you read.

Some of you will recognize this post. I have updated and reposted it several times over the years, and this September 2026 edition is the most substantially expanded version yet.

For those who have not come across Climate Change Community LLC before, picture a totem pole. We are the figure at the bottom, the one that barely clears the dirt and is easy to miss. That is by design. Our job is to carry the weight of everyone standing above us.

One last thing. Where I mention religious, political, or climate organizations below, I am not speaking for any of them. I speak only for Climate Change Community LLC.

I first put these personal ideas and suggestions on paper somewhere around 2019, formalized them on or around August 24, 2021, revised them on February 23, 2023, refreshed them in June 2026, and have expanded them again in September 2026 to reflect where the movement stands today. At the time I wrote them, I honestly was not sure I would ever share them. I am sharing them now, and they are directed entirely toward climate leadership and the organizations carrying this sacred work forward. Going forward, they will also serve as our manner of etiquette — separate and distinct from any Terms of Service — for the GEM-based toolboxes and for our community spaces on Climate Tribe Social.

Over the last several years I have attended a great many climate webinars and organizational meetings. If those who organize and lead these gatherings are open to it, I would like to offer some suggestions and ideas. And if not, please remember that you are reading on your own accord and may stop at any time.

PART I

These Practices Have a Lineage

I want to say something at the outset that I did not say in the earlier versions, because I have come to believe it matters more than any single item on the list that follows.

None of what I am about to suggest is soft. None of it is decoration around the “real” work. Nearly every durable movement in modern history was held together by exactly this kind of care, and the historical record is not subtle about it.

In 1932, Myles Horton founded the Highlander Folk School in the mountains of Tennessee as a training ground for labor organizers and, later, for the civil rights movement. In August 1955, a tired forty-two-year-old NAACP secretary from Montgomery named Rosa Parks attended a two-week workshop there, led by the South Carolina educator Septima Clark. Parks arrived worn down by years of effort that had produced very little. She spent two weeks among people who treated her as a complete equal and took her seriously, and she later said it was one of the few times in her life to that point when she felt no hostility at all. Four months later she refused to give up her seat, and Montgomery began to walk. Clark’s Citizenship Schools, built on the plain premise that you teach people whatever they themselves say they want to learn, spread across the South and helped tens of thousands of Black citizens register to vote.

Highlander did not win the civil rights movement. But it fed people, housed them, sang with them, listened to them, and sent them home stronger than they arrived. That is a meeting practice. It changed a country.

The lesson repeats wherever you look for it. The AIDS activists of the 1980s organized in affinity groups small enough that people knew one another’s names and one another’s health, and paired newcomers with buddies so that nobody carried grief alone. The disability justice movement taught the rest of us that access is not a courtesy extended to a guest but a precondition of anyone being in the room at all. Daisaku Ikeda built an entire philosophy of peace on the proposition that dialogue between two human beings is the irreducible unit of social change, and submitted forty annual Peace Proposals to the United Nations from 1983 to 2022 saying so. Labor halls, church basements, Indigenous councils, immigrant mutual-aid societies, the Caribbean rumba circles I grew up around — the form differs and the finding does not. People stay where they are cared for, and a movement is made entirely of the people who stayed.

We are the inheritors of that record. What follows is an attempt to apply it to our own emergency.

Suggestions for Climate Organization Meetings

Open or close with a moment of silence

Hold a moment of silence for those we have lost to our Climate and Ecological Emergency. This might seem like something we would not normally do, but keep in mind that more and more people are coming to your meetings precisely because the full brunt of the emergency has entered their lives. I have witnessed first-hand an attendee at a meeting who had lost two family members to disasters tied to our shared crisis. Al Gore is a beautiful example of compassion in this regard, often speaking with those who have lost loved ones in small groups or one-on-one.

Acknowledge those who attend but cannot fully participate

Some people are present but unable to take part as fully as they would like — because of demanding schedules, or because they are caring for a loved one with a disability who needs constant attention. We do not know everyone’s situation, so we must stay sensitive to the reality that some are joining us on a tight schedule, and that those who stay quiet often have very valid reasons. You will be hard-pressed to find a climate organization more conscientious about inclusion and empathy than the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led group that has modeled warmth and accessibility beautifully since its founding in 2017.

Hold a regular mental-health check-in

Create a weekly or bi-weekly space where members and guests can simply get off their chests their climate anxiety, grief, or related struggles. The Climate Mobilization has long excelled here. Margaret Klein Salamon’s Climate Awakening project continued for some time to convene small-group climate emotions conversations, and her book Facing the Climate Emergency remains one of the clearest guides we have for turning private climate pain into public climate action. The Climate Mobilization itself has since moved toward what it now calls survival initiatives — food, energy, water, land, and care sovereignty, resilience, and survival — a focus that maps closely onto the Adaptive Resiliency many of us are building toward. Climate cafés have spread worldwide as an informal, low-barrier version of the same idea, and they cost nothing to start. These gatherings can be organized by level of membership and, ideally, facilitated by licensed psychologists or counselors who are either members or invited specifically for this purpose.

Respond promptly to the communication you receive

Answer the questions, concerns, comments, suggestions, and ideas that come to you. There is little more discouraging than reaching out to a person or an organization and waiting days or weeks for a reply. This is simply a matter of respect and consideration for the person who took the time to make contact. I learned this lesson years ago from the writings of Daisaku Ikeda, in his Human Revolution novels. Whoever is reaching out may carry a viable suggestion — or may be moving through something traumatic and is trusting you with it. Third Act, founded by Bill McKibben in 2021 for Americans over sixty, handles this exceptionally well and is constantly finding new ways to grow in a manner that accommodates its members; for older folks, it is an ideal organization to get involved with.

Remember that meetings are not a stage for show-boating

They are not the place for comparing knowledge, seeking recognition in place of sincere concern, looking down on those who are less aware of the issues, or carrying oneself as though the gathering is a success simply because we showed up. We are there for one another’s well-being, to move humanity toward an extinction-free and sustainable future, with our children and young adults at the center. We are also there to organize honestly around removing from positions of power — in politics, in banking, and elsewhere — those whose agenda is built on propping up the fossil-fuel industry, unethical agribusiness, and other forces causing harm. Our biodiversity, our fellow species, and our young people deserve capable leadership and genuinely concerned, mature adults. The reason our sleeves are rolled up is that we mean business, so to speak.

Begin with a moment of humor and one piece of encouraging news

This sets attendees at ease and creates a relaxed, welcoming atmosphere before the heavier work begins. The encouraging item must be true — manufactured optimism is worse than none — but there is more of it available now than there used to be. The world installed a record amount of solar capacity in 2025. The global solar fleet passed three terawatts in early 2026, having tripled in only four years. Renewables overtook coal as a source of world electricity. And in April 2026, for the first month ever recorded, wind and solar together generated more of the world’s electricity than gas did. None of that is sufficient. All of it is real, and people who are frightened need to hear real things that are going right.

Host a recurring social night

A monthly, bi-weekly, or weekly dance and karaoke party, even if it happens over video conferencing. It is fun, it strengthens camaraderie, and it lets us show the silly, human parts of ourselves in a way that deepens our bonds. Older folks and those who are lonely will benefit from this enormously. I learned this from the Independent Living organization in Newburgh, New York, a few years back.

Hold a news night

Give those who want to stay current on climate events a place to discuss them together — including stories close to home, in their own town, state, or country. Think of it as a book club for our shared moment. I would add one thing I did not think to add in 2021: teach the room to check the source before it circulates. Our side is not immune to sharing a compelling number that turns out to be five years stale or a headline that misstates the study underneath it. Getting it right is part of being trustworthy, and being trustworthy is the whole of our leverage.

Match members to their passions and gifts

Not everyone can do everything an organization does, from phone-banking to protesting. So find out what people love. Perhaps someone has a gift for organizing people, an extraordinary feel for music and culture, or a Ph.D. in literature. Put those passions to work in ways that strengthen the whole. The Climate Mobilization is deeply attentive to this, and it is the organization I have supported financially and in any way I can for some time now. Marching alongside them in years past was not only a pleasure; the memory still brings me warmth today.

Host seminars and invite teachers

People like Al Gore, Dr. Michael Mann, Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, Margaret Klein Salamon, Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, and Robin Wall Kimmerer — the list of knowledgeable voices around the planet is wonderfully long, and they can educate us in ways that strengthen our organizations significantly. This matters especially for newer members, many of whom are innocently uninformed about the emergency. Learning together reassures them that they are not alone and that there is nothing whatsoever wrong with continuing to educate ourselves. Invite the local teachers too — the county emergency manager, the hospital nurse, the union steward, the farmer. Expertise wears work boots as often as it wears a lab coat.

Make room for many languages and many schedules

Offer bilingual or multilingual access wherever you can — captions, translated materials, interpreters — and provide asynchronous ways to participate for those who cannot attend live. Post the recording and the notes. Inclusion is not only about who is invited into the room; it is about who can truly take part once they arrive.

Involve young adults and children in every aspect of the work

This cannot be overstated. They will inherit what we leave behind, and we simply cannot hand them a blueprint, pull them in, and ask them to run meetings without first giving them ample space for their voices to be heard. Most importantly, we must listen to their concerns. This principle comes directly from Daisaku Ikeda’s annual Peace Proposals, which he submitted to the United Nations every year from 1983 to 2022. Ikeda passed away in November 2023, but his forty proposals remain a living blueprint for youth empowerment and a culture of peace. For a perfect example, look to the Sunrise Movement and to Fridays for Future, the latter founded by Greta Thunberg, which still organizes strikes around the world. Greta, if you are reading this — thank you for all that you do. So many of us older folks appreciate you immensely and regard you as a world-treasure. Keep it up, and never forget that we stand beside you in your endeavors.

Build rest into the structure

This is the largest thing missing from every earlier version of this list, and I have watched its absence hollow out good organizations. We lose more people to exhaustion than to disagreement. Rotate the demanding roles on a schedule rather than waiting for someone to collapse. Set terms for leadership and honor them. Put a no-meeting week on the calendar and defend it. Make stepping back an ordinary, respectable thing a person announces, rather than a disappearance they feel ashamed of. And when someone does step away, thank them publicly and leave the door unlocked. Susi Moser put the principle better than I can: people who are burnt out are not equipped to serve a burning planet. Pace is not the opposite of urgency. Over any horizon that matters, pace is urgency.

Facilitate with care for what people are carrying

Tell the room before you show footage of a fire or a flood, or before you put a mortality figure on the screen. Give people a moment to step away, and make stepping away invisible and unremarkable. Never call on someone to describe their loss in front of a group, and never assume that a person who has lived through a disaster wants to be that meeting’s example. Let them volunteer or let it rest. A good facilitator watches the room as carefully as the agenda, and is willing to abandon the agenda.

Make the meeting itself a source of practical readiness

Here is where Adaptive Resiliency stops being a phrase and becomes a task list. The emergency is no longer arriving; it is here, and it will reach your members’ homes before it reaches any policy you are advocating for. So use part of your gathering to build the capability your neighborhood will actually need. Build a phone tree, and test it. Keep a voluntary list of members who are elderly, medically fragile, or dependent on powered equipment, and check on them during heat waves, cold snaps, and outages. Know where the nearest cooling and warming centers are, and whether they are actually open. Run a go-bag workshop. Sign the group up for local emergency alerts together, in the meeting, so it actually gets done. Learn which blocks flood and who lives on them. Identify who has a generator, a truck, a spare room, a well, a pot big enough to cook for thirty. None of this is a substitute for confronting the fossil-fuel industry. It is what lets your people survive long enough to keep confronting it, and it is the fastest way I know to turn a room of concerned strangers into an actual community.

Let those closest to the harm lead

Frontline and Indigenous communities are not a topic for your agenda; they belong at the head of the table. They have been reading the land longer than our instruments have existed, and they are absorbing the first and worst of this. When COP30 convened at the edge of the Amazon in Belém in November 2025, that geography was the entire argument. Apply it locally: if your organization is working on heat, the people who work outdoors in it should be setting the priorities, not being surveyed about them. Share the microphone, share the budget, and share the decision.

Protect your members’ privacy and digital safety

This was barely on my mind in 2021 and it is unavoidable now. Do not record without asking. Do not photograph the room without asking, and honor a no without requiring a reason. Do not publish attendee lists, and think hard before publishing photographs in which faces are identifiable. Keep your membership data in as few places as possible, name one person responsible for it, and delete what you no longer need. Understand that members may have immigration status, employment, family, or safety considerations that they are under no obligation to explain to you. An organization that cannot keep a confidence cannot keep members.

Be honest and literate about artificial intelligence

I use AI daily and openly, and I believe it is one of the most useful instruments our movement has been handed for research, translation, accessibility, drafting, and thinking out loud. I also believe we have to be disciplined about it. Say plainly when a document was AI-assisted. Verify every citation, statistic, and quotation before it leaves your organization, because a confident fabrication in a climate briefing is a gift to the people who want our credibility destroyed. Use it to widen the door — to caption, to translate, to summarize a 300-page plan for a member who works two jobs — and never to replace the voice of the person actually living the impact. Teach your members to use it rather than leaving them on the wrong side of another divide. And be candid about the energy and water that data centers consume, because our own members will raise it, and they should.

Meet despair with the same patience you offer denial

For years the obstacle in the room was someone who did not believe it. Increasingly the obstacle is someone who believes it completely and has concluded that nothing can be done. Doomism demobilizes as effectively as denial does, and it walks in wearing the clothes of realism. Do not argue it down and do not paper over it with cheerfulness. Let it be said out loud, agree with the parts that are true, and then hand the person one specific thing, close enough to reach, that they can go do this week. Agency is recovered through action long before it is recovered through argument.

Remove the ordinary barriers to showing up

Ask why the people you expected are not there, and then fix the answer. Offer childcare or make the meeting child-welcome. Put out food. Cover a transit fare or a parking cost without making anyone ask twice. Use sliding-scale dues and never let money decide who belongs. Rotate meeting times so that shift workers and caregivers are not permanently excluded by a standing 7:00 p.m. Tuesday. The composition of your membership is largely a record of the logistics you chose.

If you meet in hybrid, run it fairly

Most of us are hybrid now, and most of us do it badly. The people in the room drift into side conversations the remote attendees cannot hear, and the online participants slowly become an audience. Assign someone whose only job is to advocate for the remote room — to read the chat aloud, to bring online hands into the conversation, and to interrupt the physical room when it has left people behind. One microphone that everyone can actually hear is worth more than any amount of good intention.

End every meeting with one concrete thing, close to home

Not a topic. A task, with a name attached and a date. A public comment period that closes on the fourteenth. A utility commission hearing. A school board vote on a heat policy. A building-code or emissions-compliance deadline in your own city. A neighbor to call. The gap between a well-informed group and an effective one is almost always this single habit. Policy literacy is climate competence, and it lives at the county and municipal level far more than most of our members realize.

Write down your agreements, and your way to repair harm

Put your norms in writing — brief, plain, and public — so that newcomers are not left guessing at rules everyone else absorbed by osmosis. Then name the harder thing: what happens when someone in the group hurts someone else in the group. Name the process and name the person to go to. Every organization eventually needs this, and the ones that wrote it down before they needed it survive the day they do.

Keep the memory of the group, and mark the wins

Take notes and keep them. Record decisions and why they were made. Write a short, honest account of how your organization does things, so the work does not live exclusively in the head of one exhausted founder. And celebrate — the ordinance passed, the tree planted, the member who got a hundred neighbors registered for alerts, the anniversary of the first meeting. We are asking people to stay engaged with the hardest subject of their lives for the rest of their lives. They are entitled to some joy along the way.

This list will keep growing, so please check back.

On Climate-Action Opposition

We all know that no matter how much good we try to do, there are those who not only oppose viable climate action but take contradictory steps to make progress harder. This is news to no one. So as you put these ideas into practice, expect that some people — whether driven by ideology, by unaddressed pain, or by something else entirely — will try to make the work more difficult.

I have learned over the years that attacking others for their ill intentions simply does not work. One alternative is to create a dialogue forum where opponents can come and express their disagreement, and where we can engage them genuinely — because they may have something beneficial to offer that we had not considered. Now that the emergency is growing more dangerous, we need to work together and use every tool available to us.

And if it becomes clear that inclusion will not work for some, no matter how much effort we pour into it, then simply thank them and keep moving forward despite the opposition. I suspect that, in time, some of them will come to understand what is happening and decide to help after all.

I will add one caution learned since I first wrote that paragraph. Open dialogue is a gift, and a small number of people will treat a gift as an opening. Distinguish between a person who disagrees and a person who has come to exhaust you. Extend enormous patience to the first. For the second, protect the room, close the door gently, and get back to work.

Added February 23, 2023

Several of these ideas appeared in greater detail in the GEM manuscript I wrote between 2016 and 2021, particularly in the fifth GEM-based Climate Emergency Toolbox, which I had already begun and secured a URL for. That fifth toolbox is predominantly dialogue-based: it can host weekly climate-grief and mental-health discussions, involve our younger generation, and carry cultural activities such as weekly or bi-weekly cultural events. It is built around “spaces” rather than “groups” — soon we hope to have video conferencing embedded, although not all spaces will. That vision now lives and grows within Climate Tribe Social.

“Through adversity, not only are we given an opportunity to discover our inner strength, we are also given the gift of foresight so we can shine a light for others who go through the experience after us.” — Rachael Bermingham

End of Part I

PART II: PERSONAL THOUGHTS

The further we drift from the climate action that is needed — and that is now mandatory — at every level, the more we will watch a planet fall into shambles. I felt a great sigh of relief seeing some of the new innovations and ideas come to the front, and I am hopeful they will be applied quickly. We can discuss inventions, solutions, and ideas until we are blue in the face, but unless they are applied, we remain stagnant and at risk of complacency.

For years I wrote that predictions scientists once placed around the year 2100 appeared to be arriving at our doorstep. The bookkeeping has since caught up with the sentence. The World Meteorological Organization put 2025 at roughly 1.44 °C above the 1850–1900 baseline, making it the second or third warmest year in a 176-year record. The years 2023, 2024, and 2025 now stand as the three warmest ever measured, and the eleven years from 2015 through 2025 as the warmest eleven. Copernicus reported that the three-year average across 2023–2025 exceeded 1.5 °C — the first time any three-year stretch has done so. Ocean heat content kept climbing. Arctic sea ice after the winter freeze was the lowest on record.

A word on why those two numbers do not contradict each other, since someone will ask. A single-year anomaly, a three-year mean, and the long-term warming level that the Paris Agreement threshold actually refers to are three different measurements, drawn in some cases from different datasets. Paris is assessed over a multi-decade average, which is why crossing 1.5 °C in a single year, or even across three, is not the same event as breaching the limit itself. The distinction matters for accuracy and it changes nothing about the direction. This tells us we should be moving as fast as the emergency itself is moving, and we are plainly not.

And yet the other half of the ledger is real too, and I refuse to leave it out. Solar is no longer a promise; it is the largest installed generating technology on Earth, its global fleet having tripled in four years to pass three terawatts. Renewables overtook coal. India passed the United States in annual solar installation. For one month in April 2026, wind and solar out-generated gas worldwide for the first time in history. Bill McKibben spent his twentieth book, Here Comes the Sun, making the case that this is a last chance for the climate and a fresh chance for civilization. I think he is right, and I think the rate of deployment, not the existence of the technology, is now the entire question.

At COP30 in Belém last November, nearly two hundred nations adopted what the Brazilian presidency called the global mutirão — a Portuguese word for the collective, neighbor-helping-neighbor labor that raises a house or clears a field. The package moved money: a call to mobilize $1.3 trillion a year by 2035, a push to triple adaptation finance, a just transition mechanism. It also omitted the one thing more than eighty countries came to Belém to get — a roadmap away from oil, gas, and coal — with Brazil promising voluntary roadmaps outside the formal process instead. I take the name seriously even where the outcome disappointed me. Mutirão is exactly the right word attached to exactly the wrong result, and the distance between them is the work. COP31 convenes in Antalya, Türkiye, this November, with Australia leading the negotiations and the pre-COP held in the Pacific, where the water is already at the doorstep. Whatever it produces, it will not produce what your block needs. That part is ours.

We have to operate with the understanding that we are working to save not only ourselves but the whole of humanity — the future of our children and young adults — along with the countless animal species and plant life heading straight onto the extinction list, some of which have already been scratched off.

What I find difficult to comprehend is that those propping up fossil fuels — the government, the banks, the leaders, and the businesses at their beck and call — are not, I believe, ignorant of what is coming. Some remain enamored with the idea of financial gain over the well-being of our children’s future; some are gripped by a hunger for power or by the fear of losing it; and who knows what other motives bind them to the fossil-fuel agenda. The point is that this is our undoing in the present moment, and it must be called out, again and again.

The drive to keep drilling, laying pipelines, and pulling natural gas — rather than ramping up renewable energy with the urgency the science demands — will harm us in dramatic and unimaginably dangerous ways if we give in to it. For many of us sounding the alarm, the warning was, for a long time, only words: we need to move toward renewable energy faster, or we face great danger. Well, the “great danger” is now an everyday occurrence. Most of us watch the evening news, and for years severe weather was barely part of the broadcast; now it is a constant reality.

So yes, it will get worse, and without sufficient action it will take many more lives, damage our oceans and biodiversity, and leave in its wake dead lands, dead silence, dead life.

And still I would ask you to notice what the first half of this essay is really about. The organizations that make it through the next twenty years will not be the ones with the best analysis. They will be the ones whose members are still there.

Get Involved

Please consider joining a climate organization — there are so many, and the right one for you is out there. Among the groups that have meant the most to me are the Sunrise Movement, The Climate Mobilization, Fridays for Future, Third Act, and the Earth Guardians. On the political side there is Climate Hawks Vote, and for news I would point you to Grist and Inside Climate News.

A note on how the landscape has shifted since I first wrote this. Some of the bolder direct-action groups have changed shape. Just Stop Oil announced in 2025 that it was hanging up the hi-vis, ending its disruptive direct-action campaign after three years and thousands of arrests, and folding its energy into broader movement-building. Extinction Rebellion likewise stepped back from disruption-first tactics in 2023 to become more inclusive and welcoming. Several of the organizations I have named have broadened their focus well beyond climate alone, on the reasoning that you cannot win a livable climate inside a political system that does not function. You will have your own view on that, and you are entitled to it. My own suggestion is to look at what a group actually does in its meetings and for its members, and to judge it there.

Do a search for groups local to your area, or for faith-based ones that may speak to your spirit. Look at your county’s emergency management office, your local mutual-aid network, and your community land trust — these are climate organizations whether or not they use the word. Whatever you choose, now is the time to get involved, to make a difference, and to keep educating ourselves and one another.

A Note on This Revision

This September 2026 edition adds the following to the earlier versions: a section on the historical lineage of these practices; and new suggestions on building rest into the structure, trauma-informed facilitation, turning meetings into practical disaster readiness, front-line and Indigenous leadership, member privacy and digital safety, honest and literate use of artificial intelligence, meeting despair as carefully as denial, removing the ordinary barriers to attendance, running hybrid gatherings fairly, ending every meeting with one concrete local action, written community agreements and a path to repair harm, and keeping the institutional memory of the group. The figures throughout have been updated through September 2026.

One More Thing Before I Let You Go

Alongside everything above, we are building something at Climate Tribe Social that I believe will be genuinely useful to organizations like yours. It is early. We are at the construction stage, and I would rather describe it properly later than describe it quickly now. What I can say is that it concerns how climate organizations fund their work, and whether that funding has to keep moving through the same few narrow doors.

If that sounds like a conversation worth having, write to me at contact@climatechangecommunity.com and we will arrange a Zoom. Please send the email without links — that is a spam precaution, not a discourtesy. I would rather work out the details with a handful of people who actually run organizations than announce something polished and wrong.

Closing Note

I use artificial intelligence to enhance my creativity and my thinking — for research, for drafting, for translation, and for arguing with myself productively. The convictions, the choices, and any errors are mine.

Regards,

Que Humanidad / Compiled & Mr. Alvarez’s Thoughts | AI Enhanced.

Published alongside this post: “The Democratic Socialists of America and the Wider Left: A Field Guide for Climate-Minded Citizens” — a map of the organizations people are joining, and where climate sits in each of their agendas.