The Community Climate Coaches initiative is looking to expand its training and support in South East England, focusing on skills, tools and methods for community engagement and climate action. This blog by Steve Charter, Community Climate Coaches lead, Permaculture Association (Britain), introduces the initiative and outlines how it might benefit SECA member groups.
Community Climate Coaches (CCC) is for individuals and organisations that want to build their skills and knowledge for taking meaningful community action on climate, biodiversity and wellbeing. Our training and tools support communities to develop community resilience and climate action plans, and to implement actions that build local resilience in the face of social, ecological and local-level economic crises.
The initiative focuses on the vital importance of good facilitation and engagement skills, tools and methods for building and maintaining momentum in community climate action initiatives. Four pilot workshops, partnering with local initiatives in Leeds, Stirling, Bristol and Carmarthen, have strongly confirmed the value of the CCC approach.
The most recent two-day CCC workshop took place in May at the Sero Community Environment Centre in Carmarthen, with participants from 12 local ‘critical yeast’ community organisations. (Sero Carmarthen was inspired by Zero Carbon Guildford). Sue Holmes, a director of Sero, said about the training: “It’s come at a pivotal time for us and it’s been amazing… it’s given us the opportunity to sit back and evaluate, and to really move forward for the future… I’d recommend it to anyone.”
The CCC initiative was started by a partnership of community sustainability and climate action organisations across Europe, who recognised the very important and often neglected need for facilitation and engagement skills and tools for taking community climate action initiatives forward. So the CCC approach fills a gap, differing from and complementing existing training that focuses on climate science and carbon reduction strategies, such as Climate Fresk and Zero Carbon Britain. CCC is now being taken forward by the Permaculture Association (Britain) and other partners in the UK (with support from the Network for Social Change), whilst partners in Ireland, Luxembourg, Spain and elsewhere are taking CCC forward in these countries.
How does it work?
We have already learnt a great deal about the challenges and opportunities for engaging with diverse audiences and reaching beyond the typical audiences for climate action work. For example, we emphasise personal and community resilience as a starting point, and that overall this work is about empowering, supporting and facilitating positive community action on many interconnected issues (from food poverty and affordable warmth to youth engagement, nature connection and health & wellbeing), where climate issues are naturally addressed by responding to deeper (more systemic) issues.
The CCC approach centres around a ‘six-phase resilience pathway’, which starts by looking at personal resilience and capacity (Phase 1) for doing this work – because we all know it’s tough, and a lot of people driven by the passion to try to make a difference suffer from burnout and emotional exhaustion. We then focus on building team resilience and capacity (Phase 2), and connection with community, place and nature (Phase 3). These initial phases all come before starting to map existing initiatives and strengths, considering visions for a resilience locality, and the actions and activities that can stimulate and strengthen change over time (Phases 4, 5 & 6).
There are different ways to learn about and take up the CCC approach, which can be taken forward independently, but which we believe is strengthened and supported by the training we offer:
- Free online self-study Intro to Community Climate Coaches – hosted on the Permaculture Association community hub – including tools you can use and apply in your climate action work;
- Two-day Community Climate Coaches in-person workshop – typically with a local host partner, aiming for at least ten local community organisations to be represented amongst the participants;
- Six month+ Community Climate Coaches CPD certified programme – extending and deepening the material of the two-day workshop, with participants applying the learning to design and implement 12 months or more of community engagement activities.
The six-month programme is the planned next step which we are looking to take forward with all four of the partners who hosted the two-day workshops: Climate Action Leeds; Scottish Communities Climate Action Network; Shift Bristol; and the Sero Centre. In addition we are partnering with Business In The Community, who have submitted a major funding application for rolling out the CCC approach as an integrated part of wider community-led climate action initiatives over two years across six ocalities in each of the four UK nations.
How might the CCC initiative help SECA members and their communities?
We would love to explore the potential to run a two-day workshop or six-month programme catering for SECA members. This could focus on bringing together organisations in a local area or training up teams from a group of SECA members in how to apply and develop the CCC approach, which would help to build a stronger community of practice in the region, applying this and other approaches to our work – or we could do both of course!
We already have two CCC facilitators in the South East, one is the lead for the CCC project in the UK, and the other works for Sussex Green Living, a SECA founding member. We would like to build this team to at least four, and have one excellent candidate ready and waiting to join. We are already exploring funding options for starting to deliver CCC workshops and programmes in the South East.
We may in fact have enough budget to run one more free training, so once you’ve checked the webpages and online course, do get in touch if you’d like to be considered for this.
We are happy to work in partnership to secure the resources needed to cover the costs of the training. And whilst our main focus for participants is community organisations, we are of course happy to work with local authorities or other partners that would like to host and support this important work.
If you’d like to know more or want to explore how to make this happen, please contact me at steve@sc2.org.uk or steve@permaculture.org.uk
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