It’s been two years since we launched Let’s Talk Climate, our pilot training programme to help people start conversations about climate change in their communities.
An idea we had as a team over coffee one morning is now leading to climate conversations in communities across the country and we’re about to start our next round of tweaks and improvements.
But before we throw ourselves into that process we want to look back to where we came from, take in the view, and share with you what we’ve learned, particularly now we’ve come to the end of our third delivery cycle – in which we made some big design changes.
A quick recap
Let’s Talk Climate is all about addressing the problem that while the majority of us are concerned about climate change, 56% of us rarely or never talk about it.
The big idea is for conversations to enable communities to share their concerns and build support for ambitious climate action locally and nationally. Crucially they’re about listening and helping people to feel heard, rather than trying to persuade or cajole them into ‘seeing the light’ on climate.
Training begins with a 2-hour online Workshop during which we help people to identify the barriers they face to talking about climate (like not wanting to sound preachy, or not being expert enough), give them ideas for overcoming these challenges, and offer practical tips on getting conversations started and how to keep them going well once they’re underway.
Those who want to put what they’ve learned into practice can then join the 6-week ‘Challenge’ where small groups get together online for an hour each week to set themselves goals for how many conversations they plan to have, compare notes with their peers on how they went, and do weekly deep-dives on topics like building relationships and talking to people with different points of view.
These Challenge groups are hosted by volunteers from our partner orgs – Parents for Future, the Women’s Institute, or The Wildlife Trusts to name just three of them – and we train and support them to do this.
What we changed for 2025
Back when we first started, the Workshops were hosted either by me or our former colleague Kate, and Alex delivered the training talks live. Challenge groups were hosted either by us, or by employees from our partner orgs.
While this hands-on approach is a fantastic way to learn about what’s working (and what isn’t), it’s less fantastic as soon as you want to start reaching more people with the training because there just aren’t enough hours in the day for such a small team to reach so many people!
Enter our brand new facilitators – Dan, Luisa, and Simone – who are now responsible for supporting our partners to deliver the programme. They host the Workshop (with live talks now replaced by animated videos), train the volunteer Challenge hosts, and support them throughout the 6-week process with coaching and advice.
Another key change is that our partners told us they wanted more autonomy in running the process, and we’ve listened. They’re now in the lead on scheduling, recruitment of participants, and administering the whole process, supported by template docs and forms we put together to help make their lives easier.
You won’t be surprised to know that putting them in the driving seat has been a positive development all round: partners can build the programme on their own terms and timeline, and it’s freed us up to focus less on admin and more on strategy and sharing the learning from what we’re doing as widely as possible.
Delivery
This year we worked with more partners at once than ever before. These numbers give you an idea of the scale of Let’s Talk Climate cycle 3:
– 12 partners
– 18 Workshops
– 432 Workshop participants
– 30 Challenge hosts trained
– 14 Challenge groups
– 98 Challenge participants
– 660 conversations catalysed by the Challenge
How we learn
Learning is in our DNA. It’s central to how we see our mission: we don’t want to grow to become a big organisation, but instead want to stay lean and nimble so that we can try out new ways of driving change, and share our learning as widely as possible in the change-making sectors we work with.
So it won’t surprise you that we’re obsessive about data and collect it wherever and whenever we can. There’s what the trainees themselves tell us through online feedback forms; what we hear from our partners in their ‘debrief’ session with us; and what our facilitators observe from being close to the action.
Added to this is everything we ourselves see and hear as part of the core team – the ad hoc emails, phone calls and messages querying this or that. We’ve brought it all together and these are our top five takeaways:
1. Let’s Talk Climate is (still) valued, helpful and effective
Phew! We made some pretty fundamental changes and nothing fell apart.
In their feedback, we ask people how much they agree with statements about their learning outcomes, and we had the same very high scores this year as we did last year. (We’ve captured the data here).
For example, people consistently tell us that the Workshop has helped them to feel more motivated (95%), more confident (93%), and that they’ve learned a practical skill that will help them to start conversations about climate change (92%).
Those who go on to complete the Challenge agree that they feel more ready to have climate conversations with a wider range of people, including those who may have different views to them (96%). They also say they have more tools to build relationships in their community (94%) and a better appreciation for how their approach to a conversation shapes its outcome (93%).
It’s clear that trainees are putting their learning into practice, too. As one person told us:
“It’s given me the confidence to have conversations in parts of my life I previously couldn’t.”
The feedback we’re getting also helps us to understand which messages and ideas are working at gently nudging people into giving climate conversations a go. In particular, lots of our participants report that this quote from writer Amanda Ripley really hits home:
“People need to be heard before they will listen.”
Our focus on asking curious questions, practising active listening, letting go of the idea of being ‘perfect’ and instead treating every conversation as a little experiment also come in for lots of positive feedback.
Above all, though, there is one theme that stands out above everything else.
2. Connection is what people value most
Time and time again, people told us how good it felt to be in the Workshop and Challenge with others who shared the same anxieties and struggles.
We ask people to tell us what they value most about the training and give them a free text box for their answer. Over and over they told us things like: “connecting with others in small groups”, “likeminded people with the same anxieties getting together” or “being able to share ideas”.
These feelings deepened once people were part of a Challenge group supporting each other over the course of six weeks. As one person told us:
“The warmth, support and generosity of the whole group as I have moved through the challenge has been invaluable.”
It’s worth noting here that none of this is accidental. Here at Larger Us we’ve long been obsessed with the power of small groups and with giving people the opportunity to connect on a deeper level.
It’s been built into Let’s Talk Climate from the beginning – from the breakout groups in the Workshop to the way people are encouraged to share their conversation experiences in the Challenge – and the difference it makes to people’s experience is clear.
This peer support is crucially important in spurring people on to have climate conversations – often with interesting or surprising consequences.
3. We’re hearing amazing stories but we also know we’re missing some
Take Harri, who works for Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust. She lives in a rural village in the north of the county which is currently up in arms over a proposed solar farm.
Harri could have kept quiet about her support and quietly grumbled about her neighbours at work but instead, inspired by taking part in the Challenge, she started to have climate conversations in her local pub over a series of Friday nights. She found much more support for nature than she was expecting and her bravery helped to bring climate change right into the heart of village life.
Or what about Katy from Earth Action North Devon who engaged a local Reform councillor in a climate conversation that ended very badly?
Her experience might have put her off reaching out to those with different views for good, but instead she shared what happened with her Challenge group and their support gave her the confidence to try again with another Reform councillor – and this time, the conversation was much more positive.
These stories get to the heart of what Let’s Talk Climate is all about – being brave enough to step outside of your bubble and reach out to people who you know may not agree with you on everything, in the hope that through conversation you might find some common ground.
Anecdotes like these are inspirational and we know there are more of them out there, but at the moment we’re only capturing them during our ‘debriefs’ with partners, almost by accident.
We want to get to a place where these kinds of stories are being captured more systematically so we can build the evidence base for the impact of the training, and share them more widely to inspire others to start their own climate conversations.
4. There’s demand for an expanded universe
It’s been very heartening to hear our partners talk to us enthusiastically about how Let’s Talk Climate might grow and develop. We’re fielding a lot of pitches right now!
We’ve heard some brilliant ideas about what might be next, such as: expanding training to different issues like migration; designing a programme for different groups like young people or academics; or new workshops addressing topics like countering misinformation.
There’s unmet demand out there for sure and we’ve got some decisions to make about what we can commit to based on our capacity, our overall goals as an organisation, and (unavoidably) what we can get funding to develop.
But there’s one thing we definitely do want to focus on.
5. It’s time to start building community
It’s becoming clear to us that there’s potential for a world beyond the Workshop and the Challenge. There’s a kind of magic happening in the small group sessions that’s making people reluctant to step away. Here’s how one Challenge host from Parents for Future described it:
“There is a lot of evidence of personal growth beyond our capacity to have climate conversations. This included shifts in both perspective and identity.
Several group members noted that their personal relationships had improved since being on this course, as a result of the discussions we’d had over the weeks.
The group agreed to keep meeting once a month for the foreseeable future.”
We’re holding questions about what people might ‘graduate’ into after the Challenge, how we can keep them motivated to continue their conversations, and how we continue to capture the resulting stories.
There’s an opportunity to help people feel part of something ‘bigger’, perhaps even a climate conversations movement where members feel supported, share stories, and inspire each other.
This is a huge challenge and would require more funds and resources than we have right now to bring it to fruition – but that doesn’t mean we can’t start some little experiments so we’ll be thinking hard about those over the next few weeks.
Time and space to learn
And lastly, a final bonus takeaway. Let’s Talk Climate exists because our early funders – the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, the Cisco Foundation and Unbound Philanthropy – trusted us to test a new idea. The theme of experimentation runs through Let’s Talk Climate, not only in our own approach, but also in how we encourage our trainees to think about their conversations.
Too often, organisations like ours are expected by funders to come up with winners from the get go. But the reality is that at a time when old theories of change are no longer working as they used to, the real need is for space to try stuff out and feel confident about sharing what doesn’t work as well as what does.
So we implore funders, or big orgs with heftier budgets, to put your trust in good people and be prepared to invest in a bit of experimentation. It’s practically a relic now, but Eric Ries’ book The Lean Startup was all the rage in the early 2010s. It’s aimed at businesses, but third sector orgs and teams can learn from it too.
In a nutshell, it’s about letting go of ‘perfection’ and instead prioritising learning: make the simplest, cheapest version of a thing that you can, test it, get feedback and use what you learn to make it incrementally better. Reading it helped us to escape the straitjacket of perfectionism which has in turn made space for a learning culture to flourish around Let’s Talk Climate – us, our partners, our trainees, and our funders, all learning together.
Join us
So take this as your invitation to learn alongside us. In the Workshop we share this quote from Tony Benn:
“The aim of a good conversation is not victory but progress.”
We’re making progress, but we know that Let’s Talk Climate isn’t the only game in town. Others are experimenting with conversation-based approaches to changemaking too and we’re so here for it! We have a number of fellow travellers – Greenpeace’s Chats for Change, With Many Roots’ Difficult Conversation Series and City of Sanctuary’s Courageous Conversations being just a few examples.
If you’re working on something similar, we’d love to hear from you, and you might also want to join the Climate Conversations Impact Group that we co-host with Climate Outreach. Every couple of months we get together for 90 mins to share learning and ideas. If you’d like an invite to our next session, get in touch at hello@larger.us
Next steps
We’re spending the autumn making changes to Let’s Talk Climate to address the things we’ve learned, ready to go again with a focus on Yorkshire and South Wales thanks to funding from the European Climate Foundation.
We’re excited to be working alongside charities and grassroots groups from across these regions to build on the incredible work that’s already being done locally. The discussions we’ve had so far have been so inspiring and we look forward to learning alongside local leaders about how climate conversations can make a difference in communities. If you’re in those areas and want to get involved please reach out at claire.brown@larger.us.
We’ll keep you posted.
Thank yous
A huge thank you to everyone who has taken part in the training so far and to all our brilliant partners who help us to make it happen: Climate Action Ilkley, Earth Action North Devon, EcoBerko, Grapevine Coventry & Warwickshire, Let’s Go Zero, Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust, Herefordshire Wildlife Trust, National Trust, Northumberland Wildlife Trust, Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust, Parents for Future, Tearfund, The Climate Coalition, UNISON, University of East Anglia, the Women’s Institute, and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.