Burnout Is Climate Change in Your Body: What Happens When the People Driving Change Are Running on Empty?
About the session
We talk constantly about resilience.
Resilient communities. Resilient organizations. Resilient ecosystems. Resilient movements.
But what about the people trying to create them?
Across climate and social change, people are working against enormous urgency. The problems are accelerating, the resources rarely feel sufficient, and there is always another campaign, funding deadline, crisis, negotiation, or organizational challenge demanding attention.
The expectation is often that the people doing this work will simply keep going.
Until they can't.
Burnout is usually framed as an individual wellbeing problem. Rest more. Set better boundaries. Become more resilient. Learn to manage stress.
But what if burnout is also information?
What if exhaustion, disconnection, leadership fatigue, and strained relationships are signals about the systems and cultures in which changemakers are being asked to operate?
Regenerative Changemaking (RCM) works with people and organizations tackling climate and ecological challenges and sees these pressures showing up not only in workloads, but in people's bodies, nervous systems, relationships, leadership, and organizational cultures.
This session starts from the proposition that we cannot build regenerative systems through ways of working that continually deplete the people trying to create them.
So what would change if climate organizations and movements were designed around regeneration rather than endurance?
What would we notice if we treated burnout as a systems signal rather than evidence that an individual has failed to cope? Which organizational norms would we have to reconsider? What would regenerative leadership actually look and feel like? And what responsibility do funders, boards, and institutions have for creating the conditions in which people can sustain difficult work over time?
The goal is not to remove urgency from climate work. The urgency is real.
It is to ask whether exhausting the people responding to that urgency is actually helping us meet it.
What to expect
A highly participatory conversation combining reflection, shared experience, and practical somatic and organizational tools.
Rather than spending the session talking about burnout from a distance, participants will have opportunities to notice how pressure and depletion show up in their own ways of working and to explore what different practices might make possible.
RCM co-founders Marion Brastel and Erinn will facilitate a conversation about the assumptions underneath climate and social-impact work: what we reward, what we normalize, what we ask people to endure, and what might change if regeneration became part of how organizations and movements actually operate.
This is not a session about self-care as another item on an already impossible to-do list. It is an exploration of what becomes possible when we stop asking people to adapt indefinitely to systems and cultures that are exhausting them.
Who this is for
This session is for people working across climate, philanthropy, conservation, social change, and systems transformation, particularly those carrying responsibility for organizations, movements, teams, funding decisions, or other people.
What you will get out of it
A different way of understanding burnout as a signal about organizational and sector conditions, not only individual wellbeing
Practical somatic and organizational tools for recognizing patterns of pressure, depletion, and regeneration
Space to compare experiences with others carrying responsibility across climate and social change
A chance to examine the assumptions about urgency, productivity, resilience, and endurance embedded in how change work is organized
Practical ideas for what regenerative ways of working could look like within teams, organizations, movements, and funding relationships
Featuring
Marion Brastel, Co-Founder, RCM
Erinn, Co-Founder, RCM
Hosted by
Regenerative Changemaking