The School of Education is launching the Climate Justice Challenge 2022 and we want you to get involved!
As part of the “Advocacy” element of the School’s Climate Action Plan, during the month of March 2022, the School of Education is undertaking a ‘Climate Justice Challenge: Learning from Change’, supported by cCHANGE, a team of experts in transformational change from Norway.
The aim is for the challenge to help us explore how we mobilise to make wider changes. In particular, it will help us work on how we can act, as individuals, in teams, in our School, and in the wider University community, in ways that are consistent with the University’s declaration of a climate emergency. The challenge focus was chosen to reflect the broad agenda and commitments of the School.
How it will work:
We want to build a sense of community around the challenge of addressing climate change and creating climate justice; we want to support creative responses, leading to lasting changes at individual and system levels. So, we are recruiting 40 ambassadors from students (across all portfolios) and staff (professional services and academic) to participate in the Challenge.
We’re going to explore: What makes it easy or hard to break habits, or create new ones? How do friends, colleagues and families react when we choose to do things differently? What connects our little change with the big picture? How do the personal, professional, and political connect? … and much more.
What ambassadors will do:
- LEARN HOW! We will receive training in February from cChange to prepare us for the challenge.
- MAKE THAT CHANGE! We choose one thing to change in our own life related to climate justice either at work or at home, from 1 March – 30 March 2022.
- SHARE OUR STORIES! We’ll share our reflections during these 30 days on a digital platform – thinking about what we can do easily and what might need others or wider changes to help us address.
- SUPPORT AND COACHING! We will receive supportive and coaching text messages from the cCHANGE team to help us develop our challenge and the team at cCHANGE will comment on the posts we make on the platform to further support our work.
- ACCESS TO COLLABORATION! We’ll have access to weekly (optional) workshops where the whole ambassadors’ group will be invited to share progress and ideas.
- SPREAD THE WORD! We will be encouraged to share our experiences with classmates, friends, family, and our wider community, and to get them involved.
Ambassadors are free to pick any change they want, as long as it is connected to climate justice. It’s important that the change experiment is achievable, and at the same time it should be a stretch – something that we are not already doing in our life.
Some examples of challenges:
- Cycle to and from work 3 days a week
- Use public transport from Monday to Friday
- Eat plant-based meals on weekdays
- Spend an hour outside in nature each day
- Pick up litter wherever you are
- Go without electricity for 1 hour each day
- Reduce your use of disposable plastics
- Photograph or document your landfill waste each week and try to halve it
- Spend 20 mins a day reading climate justice research
- Raise issues of climate justice in teaching sessions /seminars /meetings each week
- Limit the emails you send; have a conversation instead of sending an email, at least once per day
Be an Ambassador: We are recruiting for volunteers now!
To find out more, or to sign up, please contact Alf Coles at the School of Education: alf.coles@bristol.ac.uk
This initiative is supported by The School of Education Climate Action Group, the Senior Leadership Team, Senior Management Team, and the cCHANGE Team, Norway.