Let’s be clear – Let’s Talk Climate wouldn’t exist without our partners.
Two years ago, when we started pitching our idea about training people to have climate conversations, a few brave orgs put their hands up to help us.
Some you’ll know, like the Women’s Institute, UNISON and The Wildlife Trusts, and others might be less familiar like Grapevine Coventry & Warwickshire, EcoBerko or Earth Action North Devon. But no matter what their size or status, all our partners share similar traits. As well as being committed to action on climate and nature they are also willing to try something new, to take a risk, and learn something together in the process.
Of course, when we speak about organisations, we’re really speaking about people. The relationships we’ve built aren’t with logos and visions statements, they’re with Lucie, Nikki, Steve, Michelle, Emma, Clare, Tobias, Leonie, Hannah, Camille, and John to name a few of the amazing humans who have helped us to get this thing off the ground.
We’re now into our third cycle of delivering and testing the training. So far we’ve worked alongside fifteen partners with different structures, cultures and priorities and despite everyone’s best efforts, it can still be tough to get joint programmes over the line.
Here are five lessons we’ve learned along the way:
1. Give partners ownership
In our first two training cycles we made the mistake of not giving partners enough oversight of the whole programme. We had the best of intentions, we knew they were busy and we didn’t want to overwhelm them with documents, instead, we agreed a delivery plan with key dates but emailed them with a list of tasks to do week-by-week.
Our partners soon helped us realise the error of our ways – in trying to protect them from being drowned in admin, we were actually making it harder for them to plan and run the training successfully. Their feedback led to the creation of our Action Planner with links to every doc needed to administer the programme. Giving up control and trusting partners to own the process has led to a classic win-win situation – we’ve reduced our admin burden and they’re empowered to crack on with delivery in a way that’s best for them, not what we think is best for them.
2. Match their pace
No matter how deep their enthusiasm for the training, some orgs are able to get the show on the road more quickly than others. Small orgs with flatter structures can be nimble and often want to start yesterday, while larger orgs sometimes need more time to align with their membership and internal stakeholders. Both are legitimate approaches, so we need a delivery model that can match the pace of every org that wants to work with us.
This sits in tension with the reality of being a small org, for example, in our early cycles we had to deliver to a certain timetable in order to meet funder deadlines and/or fit delivery around the limited capacity of our team. In the short term we’ve resolved this by recruiting our brilliant new facilitators which has allowed us to offer partners more choice as to when their training cycle begins.
Our long-term goal is to run Let’s Talk Climate on a rolling basis so that partners can have full determination over their training timetable. Bringing facilitators into the team has been a great start but diversifying our income – including paid-for versions of the programme – will also help us to move away from cycles tied to obligations to our funders.
3. Be flexible
Striking a balance between our capacity and the aspirations of our partners is tough. From the partners’ point of view, they love the training but there’s always something that would make it ‘even better’ for their members and supporters – and that’s totally fair.
But, as a tiny team – just two permanent staff and a small team of freelancers – having one version of the training is extremely efficient. For example, we have one standard Workshop plan, the same Workbook for all our trainees, and each week of the Challenge is the same no matter which partner you’re affiliated with. This helps us to work within our capacity and to be laser focused on testing what is working and what isn’t.
If we were to start running multiple versions at once, each tailored to a specific partner, the admin burden would be so much bigger and it would be hard for us to compare evaluation data between partners if they were all running a slightly different model.
That said, being flexible can be helpful to partners and beneficial to us as long as we both enter into it in the spirit of learning. For example, one partner wanted to run our peer learning Challenge sessions in-person (when they are designed to happen online). We didn’t have the capacity to rewrite the session plans so instead we gave the partner some ideas about how they might adapt them and asked them to share their experience with us.
The partner knew it was a test and we learned together what might be needed if we decide to design in-person sessions in the future. It’s helpful when partners push up against the boundaries of what we’re able to do as it nudges us towards improving what we do. In the future, as the programme runs ever more smoothly, we hope to be able to take on more of these challenges.
4. Respect their relationships
Members, supporters and volunteers are the lifeblood of all our partner organisations. The relationships our partners have with them may be personal like in the case of grassroots groups or have been built over decades like in the Women’s Institute. For it to work, Let’s Talk Climate has to fit seamlessly into the cadence and topic of conversation partners are having with their supporters – it has to be relevant to what they’re trying to achieve together and be communicated in ways supporters have come to expect.
The challenge for us is to design promotional material and administration templates that convey key messages but give partners the flexibility to make them their own. And once the training is underway, it’s our responsibility to give their supporters the best possible experience to make good on the trust partners have placed in us. This includes everything from the design and facilitation of the Workshops to our training videos and written materials, and it’s a continuous process.
For example, we have replaced a roleplay task some found tricky in the Workshop with another working from scripts; changed the way we offer support to Challenge hosts to reduce their time commitment; and simplified our Workshop Workbook and Challenge Guide for trainees so they’re easier to follow. These incremental changes demonstrate to partners and their supporters that we’re listening and respect their feedback and make the whole process feel more like a collaborative endeavour – which it is!
5. Be honest and transparent
It is so easy to slip into perfectionism when trying to deliver for a partner – you’ve embarked on something together and you want to do everything you can to make your joint venture a success – but papering over the cracks is exhausting and ultimately unhelpful. If you’ve missed a deadline, a Workshop has fallen flat or there’s a problem with some content it’s best just to hold your hands up and admit something’s gone wrong.
Let’s Talk Climate started as an experiment and we’re continuing to learn and improve it. We’ve been open about this with partners from the beginning and have tried our best to make it a co-learning exercise. We’ve shared our evaluation data, tried to be honest about problems or mistakes we’ve made and we hope for the same in return.
We’ve also been open with our trainees that we’re learning alongside them and have encouraged them to give us honest feedback because it’s so valuable to us. Critique given in good faith is a gift. You can read here about positive changes we’ve made thanks to the honest relationships we’ve built with our partners and their supporters.
Working in the third sector – and on weighty issues like climate – isn’t easy. Like us, our partners are grappling with funding, capacity and political headwinds alongside their core activities. We’re so grateful to everyone who has chosen to work with us because it’s not easy to agree to trial new ideas when you’re already under pressure. There are no shortcuts to good partnerships because building trust takes time. Trust allows us to take a chance on something new, to commit to learning together and to be gracious with one another when things aren’t going to plan. We trust our partners and we’re in awe of the faith they have placed in us. Let’s Talk Climate is all the richer for it.