Hope, Grief, & Climate Resilience

What would it look like for Friends to participate in flourishing and just communities amidst climate change? Our collective habits and patterns must transition to a new way. This workshop will consider what this might look like through conversation, activities, information, a grief ritual, and worship sharing. Over the course of the week, we will…

Workshop Description

What would it look like for Friends to participate in flourishing and just communities amidst climate change? Our collective habits and patterns must transition to a new way. This workshop will consider what this might look like through conversation, activities, information, a grief ritual, and worship sharing.

Over the course of the week, we will support participants to ground in the reality of the climate crisis while holding on to the truth of their connections to one another, to committed and concerned folks around the globe, and to the community of all life. Our goals are to:

• Strengthen spiritual groundedness in the face of climate realities
• Build a toolkit of skills and techniques for coping, activating, and sustaining, with the purpose of avoiding and pivoting away from tendencies to become frozen from despair and/or powerlessness
• Strategize about ways to build and deepen connection with community (both our Quaker communities and our broader neighborhoods, as well as our ecosystems)
• Use our imaginations and creativity to consider our own unique roles, leverage points, and opportunities to contribute toward societal transformation
• Recognize inequalities relating to environmental injustice, theft of land from Indigenous people, and economic power imbalances, consider how to work together in solidarity

Day 1: Building a safe learning and growing space through story-telling, community norms, understanding our relationship to our values, identities, conflict, and big feelings relating to climate change and intersecting justice concerns.

Day 2: Quaker patterns and practices that are helpful and harmful: ways we’ve contributed to settler colonialism and extractive social, economic, and political systems and ways we’ve resisted and tried to live another way.

Day 3: Collective grief ritual + worship sharing time, offer tools for ongoing expression of grief and anxiety in our home communities.

Day 4: Hope and imagination: examples of climate resilience and just transitions, considering what our meetings or other parts of our communities might be able to contribute to a just and sustainable future in our neighborhoods and watersheds.

Day 5: Wrapping up, reflections, sharing commitments of how we’ll live this out at home.

Leader Experience

Dwight Dunston (he/him) has been a social justice facilitator for the last 10+ years. He leads groups through experiential activities to stay connected across difference, deepen relationships with one another and with nature, and deeply and radically envision new worlds while embodying their values and sense of purpose in the present. He has led workshops for young people as old as five, to folks who are 95+ years old. He loves to support people to connect to their unique super powers.

Cherice Bock (she/her) is a Quaker from Oregon. She teaches at Earlham School of Religion and serves as the climate policy manager at 350PDX. Cherice holds a master of divinity, a master of science, and a PhD in environmental studies. Her books include “A Quaker Ecology: Meditations on the Future of Friends” and “Quakers, Ecology, and the Light” (with Christy Randazzo). She also edited (with Stephen Potthoff) the volume “Quakers, Creation Care, and the Light.” Cherice has served as scholar in residence, given plenary messages, or been a keynote speaker for a number of yearly meetings and Quaker organizations. She is a member of Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends.