Cascadia Climate Cafe: A Belonging Circle for the Cascadia Bioregion
A time for self-reflection. A welcoming environment to practice mindful listening and framing stories bookended with emotion-naming. Not a lecture, not group therapy, this is a listening and sharing gathering. Expect no more than 6 people in attendance.
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What to expect
Establish group agreements and safety
Hear about building personal resilience
Practice resilience skills
A volunteer reads mood setting introduction
Individual sharing, everyone has an opportunity
Afterwards, go around the circle for individual follow-up reflections to add to what the individual originally shared.
Practice skills again
Closing reading or additional facilitator input
Resource sharing by the Circle members / building hope
A peer support circle, share or just observe.
"The world hasn't ended, but the world as we know it has--even if we don't quite know it yet." Bill McKibben, founder of 350 .org and Third Act.
The Big Picture. Why should we acknowledge our feelings about the myriad social threats and the changing climate?
__The short answer: To avoid burnout. To find our strength. To put on our oxygen mask before attempting to help others.
A meeting for "clima-unity".
Coming together in a Circle like this one, gives each participant a chance to simply listen to perspectives of others. How do each of us as individuals take this into our understanding of the natural and built world?
In community, we learn from one another.
Hopefully, participating in this Circle, you can begin to unravel and process your reactions to the mess we're in, and practice your personal resilience skills with others.
ONLINE using the Google Meet platform.
Read more here: Climate Emotions Wheel | Climate Advocacy Lab
Belonging Circles
A safe space to process feelings about the uncertainties we face here in the Cascadia bioregion — in the age of the climate crisis.
This section contains some important additional notes about what to expect during our time together.
Belonging Circles are intended to be a casual and relaxed setting for each participant to share their unique perspective, experiences, thoughts, and feelings about the climate crisis and the overall state of the world as the poly crisis becomes apparent. This is a space free of educating or persuading to any particular view or course of action. We will take turns deeply listening to one other and allow moments of silence for deepening as it naturally arises.
In order to hold a space where everyone can feel as safe as possible to share deeply, it’s useful to listen without any cross talking. Cross talking can be understood as a back and forth dialogue, answering questions, opinion or advice-giving, and commenting of any kind upon what has been previously shared.
The pause between shares can be used as an opportunity to notice if thoughts arise around a shared experience. Our natural impulses to give advice, opinions, share a resource, to comfort or console, etc. is highly discouraged and not what we are going for here, we should strive to refrain from these habitual impulses.
Belonging Circles are held within the bioregion of Cascadia. We encourage knowledge-building towards bioregionalism and pro-future thinking in a climate-changed world. Turtle Island will flourish using regenerative practices.
Your hosts
Nguyễn Hoàng Việt is a social justice educator, restorative justice practitioner, and Fulbright scholar with over a decade of experience empowering marginalized youth and teachers across Vietnam. His professional work has focused on cultivating young environmental and social changemakers through innovative and culturally responsive non-formal education. Viet earned his Master's degree in Culturally Sustaining Education from the University of Washington's College of Education. His research explores how Restorative Justice can facilitate healing from intergenerational traumas caused by war and mass violence. Nguyen's works center the voices of affected youth while building bridges across divided communities. His scholarship contributes to emerging dialogues on transforming historical legacies into sources of cultural strength and reconciliation for Vietnamese in the diaspora and the homeland.
Drew Alcoser has a background as a climate activist and community connector. Drew is the founder of Cascadia Stack and has hosted many Belonging Circles. Drew continue to peel back the layers -- to understand the systems that underpin the climate crisis and to hear how others perceive it.