How to Start Your Own Climate Love Group

Creating a Climate Love group has the potential to be an empowering, fulfilling addition to our lives where we can meet like-minded peers that we may not ordinarily have found. Finding our kin and working together to make a difference in our local areas is both beneficial to the community, nature and ourselves.

Thank being said, first thing is to not over think it! It’s a fun exploratory process that can blossom in any number of ways. Below is our go-to list of tips to get you started, but you can introduce your own personal flair to the group, and make it as ‘you’ as you like.

7 Steps

1. Find People

   To start, this could be just yourself and one other, or five others. The point is not quantity, it’s quality. Find the people that you feel most comfortable with and who genuinely seem interested and go from there. That way you can really hone your leadership and team member skills in a safe group and you’re starting how you mean to go on. The group can grow over time.

2. Create a Whatsapp Group

   Once you’ve gathered your pack of Climate Lovers, next step is to create a Whatsapp Group (or whatever your communication form of choice is). Say an intro thanking people for being involved and create an open space for people to put in suggestions.

3. Organise a Meeting

   This could be an online zoom meeting - depending on you and your group it can be kept super casual, or if you’d prefer make it more professional you could have a small presentation. Or it could be a chat in the pub, and a pow wow at lunch. To start we’d recommend keeping it simple with an open mind.

4. Start Small

   From our own experience when starting Climate Love, during these initial meetings, there can feel like a 100000 possibilities, a whir of ideas and that’s great. However sometimes that can lead to overwhelm and in reality it’s not feasible to carry out that many tasks. That’s the beauty of community, no one person or group has to do everything, we all can do a few small things consistently which combined lead to big changes.

5. Create a ritual

   So to start we recommend keeping to one or two actions. Perhaps a clean-up and commit to doing it once a month, once you’ve done that a few times and feel firm in that ritual you can begin to add in more things. We’ve found thats a better use of energy then trying to do lots of new and different activities and then feeling disappointed when you can’t keep to that many commitments leading to burnout. Keep it simple, feasible and repeatable.

6. IDEAS

   Other options or activities to host with your group are hosting a swap with friends or community, writing template letters to your TD standing up for the environment, starting a community garden, having mending afternoons, generally building a culture of sharing clothes, goods, furniture so that nothing goes to waste, going on a monthly hike together to get out in nature, joining a yoga class, being each others support with eco anxiety and climate deniers…..there are many ways that you can grow your group. Just don’t try to do it all at once!

7. Show your Part of the wider Climate Love Community

   If you do host an event or have a Climate Love gathering be sure to take pictures and tag us @climateloveireland. And if you can, paint or draw our heart to show you are part of a wider community. Together we can help each other shift the tide to make caring for nature and community a central part of Irish life.

   Let’s do this!