Colleague Climate Café at Cambridge University Press & Assessment

As part of the team of sustainability volunteers at Cambridge, and as a trained coach, I am particularly passionate about giving people space to acknowledge and talk about their emotional responses to the climate crisis. To this end I am working with a group of colleagues from our Environment Staff Network and Coaching Community of Practice to establish a Colleague Climate Café at Cambridge University Press & Assessment. 

The purpose of the climate café is to share experiences, worries, hopes and ideas, and see what happens when people come together with no agenda but just the space to chat. In this article I want to say a little about what motivated us to set up the café and how we went about it.

Around the time of COP26 I was involved in various conversations about what we could do to support staff as they started to engage with the organisation’s sustainability programme, particularly in terms of recognising and managing their emotional responses.

We know that when people make changes at work or in their personal lives to address the climate crisis it can be energising and meaningful and that taking action can help people feel hopeful too. But it can sometimes feel scary, frustrating and hopeless, especially as you start to understand more about the scale of challenge and the potential consequences. One of my colleagues has experience in running death cafes and we talked together about the similarities with climate cafes: they are both designed to give people a safe space to talk about particularly challenging and not often spoken about subjects. 

Motivated by this conversation I did some more reading and research into climate cafes. I was particularly inspired by the words of Dr Sarah Jaquette Ray, programme leader of the environmental studies department at California’s Humboldt State University in a Guardian article (September 2021). She said making people feel less individualistic was key to combating inertia and despair around the climate emergency: “A sense of the collective is probably the most important thing that will alleviate climate anxiety, but also mitigate climate change.” 

I shared my findings with colleagues, and we decided to give it a go! We held two online cafés using Teams, one in November and one in December 2021. The conversation was rich and supportive with excellent feedback:

"Thanks to everyone who organised and attended this. Such a lovely, positive space, and so good to 'e-meet' those of you I hadn't met before. Great ideas too. Thanks all." 

"It was a great event.  I really enjoyed meeting new people and having such an interesting conversation with you all. I'm looking forward to the next one."

Diving in at the deep end and trying them out was a great way to test whether climate cafes could support staff in the way we hoped. The experience showed they can play a key role in supporting staff making changes at work and in their personal lives process their emotional responses to the climate crisis. We are planning to run them once a month from now on and see how we get on.

We would be happy to share our experiences if you are interested in setting up a café in your own area. You can contact me via info@cambridgeinternational.org with the subject ‘Climate café’. A big thank you to my colleagues Agnes, Janna, Ruth, Emese and Monica for working with me on this  – it would have been impossible without them. Here’s to our next café! 
 

Written by: Amy Budd, Head of Brand at Cambridge International, part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment.