Talking about climate change is one of the best ways to increase public action but many people – however committed they are to the cause – find starting a conversation really tricky.
Common barriers are not feeling ‘expert’ enough, being worried about coming across as preachy, or becoming disheartened when faced with apathy.
That’s why we’re on a mission to train people to have meaningful and inspiring conversations about climate change that help them to engage others in climate action.
The story so far
We’ve teamed up some amazing organisations to run the first couple of rounds of pilots of this training – including UNISON: the public service union, the Women’s Institute, the Wildlife Trusts, The Climate Coalition, Tearfund, Parents for Future, Grapevine (Coventry and Warwickshire) and Mothers CAN.
Over these two rounds of prototypes, we’ve worked with them to offer their members the opportunity to join our three-part training programme – Learn how to have conversations that matter about climate change. The format is:
Part 1: The Big Idea – 1-hour online session to demonstrate why conversations matter so much to the climate movement and how this training can help members to overcome the barriers they have to talking about it in their community.
Part 2: The Skills – 2.5 hour online workshop introducing the basic skills members need to start and maintain a great conversation including how to dismantle barriers and set achievable goals.
Part 3: The Challenge – 6 x 1-hour online sessions with a small group where members share their conversation experiences, deepen their knowledge and improve their skills further. Weekly topics will include building trust, cultivating empathy and personal storytelling.
Some of our top line take-aways from the round 1 prototypes are set out in this blog (17 January 2024) – you can find lots more learnings from them below, and you can find the independent evaluation of round 1 here.
Sharing our learning
We’ll be charting our progress through blogs as we make our way through the pilot. Here’s some of what we’ve learned so far:
What makes a good climate conversation? (31 January 2024)
5 barriers to talking about climate change and how to overcome them (31 January 2024)
3 good reasons to overcome your fears and talk about climate change (31 January 2024)
What we learned in our first round of prototypes (17 January 2024)
Introducing our climate conversation training partners (11 September 2023)
Climate conversations – what’s next? (22 June 2023)
Breaking the silence on climate change (15 May 2023)
Get involved
If you’re interested in being involved in a potential future version of the training programme or would like to find out more about the project, then do get in touch! You can email us hello@larger.us.
**Stop press**
We’re running a Workshop jointly with The Climate Coalition ahead of this year’s Great Big Green Week, from 6-8pm on Monday 20th May. Want to join? Sign up here.