On World Mental Health Day 2024, the focus is on mental health in the workplace.
At Psychology for a Safe Climate we understand how climate change impacts our holistic health – including our emotional, social, and mental health – at work just as much as at home!
One of PSC’s ongoing, core offerings to support mental health is our Climate Café program.
Climate Cafés are in-person or online gatherings, where participants openly discuss their thoughts, feelings, worries, fears, or hopes about the climate crisis, in a non-judgemental, advice-free space where the focus is on deep listening.
As our Climate and Mental Health Manager, Christie Wilson, says:
“Climate Cafés are a kind process; they offer space for exploring non-hierarchical systems of communication and practice of deep listening to others and the quiet voice within ourselves, nested in place and in honour of Dr Miriam Rose’s work of Dadirri.”
A PSC Climate Cafe accommodates both the need for silence and the voicing of the diversity of participants' lived experiences, which is a gifted opportunity to listen to a different view from your own. Listening and sharing is a starting place for us to find our way back to each other from where patriarchy, capitalism and colonisation has forced us apart in the cruellest of ways. By preventing sacred nature based wisdoms to guide us as a global community. Climate Cafes are a rare space for people to express their feelings in the unfolding polycrisis, to take the time to slow down and connect with what is most important to them and to feel less alone.
Climate Cafes are a quiet steady political movement; what is more potent than an increasing undertow of people gathering in small groups worldwide to talk about how they feel about the places, people, and things they love the most being threatened, harmed and driven to extinction? When we are together, listened to, validated and feel a sense of belonging we start to heal. Healing gives us more capacity to take action. Action can take many forms, a climate cafe is an action.
Essentially, at the core, we come to a Climate cafe out of love, love we are searching for in ourselves, the love that we hold for family, friends, community, the love we have for other beings and ultimately if we allow ourselves to feel it, it's because we are driven by love to protect life.
UPDATE: If you are called to host an in person Climate Café in your area, or online we have limited places left in the Climate Café Facilitator Training for April 2026:
Register here: https://events.humanitix.com/climate-cafe-facilitator-training-april-2026?dateId=698d242bb824c5ae8a02fc46
– Christie Wilson
