Greetings friends. I write today from under another air quality alert related to air pollution. The back of my throat is scratchy, my son needs his inhaler refill asap.
I also write in continued reflection from my time serving as a Zoom room and tech host during the Summer Institute, our 3-day, collaboratively planned, virtual conference for educators and teachers. The panel presentations and the workshop topics were diverse, timely, and generally just awesome, yet my biggest take-away was from witnessing the conversations happening in the zoom chats. The high fives, the statements of appreciation, the expressions of vulnerability and frustration, the asking for help and the offering of resources reminded me of the words of Meg Wheatley:
Whatever the problem, community is the answer.
As important as the knowledge production and sharing, the supportive relationships – the community of practice – that are created during the Summer Institute and all year through the Teach Climate Network offerings are what is really important. Our shared work—building awareness, teaching—is a practice. We do this work in community, because of community and for our communities. We share a love of all life and an interest in a just and abundant world free from the climate crisis.
The CG team is exploring the concept of practice. We are in deep and often hard conversations about undoing the practices of white supremacy culture. We are together learning about our individual and collective default practices (defensiveness, making assumptions, thinking more is better, hoarding power, shutting down, triangulation), practices that may have actually enabled us to survive, but practices that no longer serve us.
We are trying to identify new healthier and liberating practices to, well, practice. We want to embody our Guiding Principles, walk our talk. It is not an easy space for us to be in, but a leg in our journey that we all understand is necessary. Change is so hard. And community makes it possible! The high-fives, the statements of appreciation, the expressions of vulnerability and frustration, the courage it takes to lovingly call a colleague into awareness, asking for help, offering what we can, naming the harms, offering repairs.
Healing happens in community. The most important things we aspire to do as humans are collective, rather than individual, endeavors.
So get with your people my friends, find your community—be with these folks through the good, the bad, and the ugly, and build something brilliant together, be the fractal and contribute to changing the world!
Susan Phillips
Executive Director