Over the past few months, Pachamama Alliance has been developing Game Changer Action Trainings, a series of programs and experiences designed to help participants develop the skills, tools, and resilience to bring local climate justice projects to fruition in their communities.
For nearly 15 years, Pachamama Alliance has offered workshops, courses, and trainings that help people understand the root causes of the environmental, spiritual, and social crises we face, and inspire them to take action. But our participants and communities have told us that they need more—they want to know how to get into action. These trainings will offer just that.The First Pilot
In the fall of 2020, we piloted our first training with 28 pioneering participants from 9 different countries. They developed climate projects in their communities in areas such as food resilience and food waste reduction, promoting native plant landscaping projects, getting solar panels on schools, encouraging a local government to use forest restoration to address a natural disaster, and much more.
Here’s what participants have had to say about the pilot:
“Attending the course made my project clearer and it actually made me move forward.”
“This is a training that is perfect for anyone who wants to move forward on a local project related to the environment or social justice. It teaches many skills to plan and execute the project, especially community mapping and communications. It also offers a team of people to support you along the way.”
“I feel more embedded in my local community, more confident to speak of the numerous ideas that come to me, more confident to assume a leadership role.”
The Second Pilot—Happening Now
Enrollment for the 2021 spring training, Introduction to Community Climate Action, just closed and we are so excited to have over 100 participants from 21 countries signed up!
In this 10-week training running from April to mid-June, participants will be guided through a step-by-step process for building activist relationships with key stakeholders in their communities, grounded in interconnectedness, connection to the Earth, and social justice.
This pilot training is by invitation only, for graduates of our latest Game Changer Intensive course and select members of our Pachamama Alliance Communities. We hope they’ll give us key feedback for improving the training before we offer it more broadly.
We spent the last few months fine tuning the Introduction to Community Climate Action. We kept the core activist skills in place from the pilot we ran last fall, and added elements to deepen the context of interconnectedness and justice. We recruited participants from the pilot to be leaders in this next iteration, and are training them in the skills they’ll need to be successful.
Next Steps
We plan to launch another training in the Game Changer Action Trainings series in late summer 2021. This new training will focus on designing projects for local climate action using Design Thinking, a solutions-based process that integrates research, creativity, collaboration, and systems thinking. We’ll be designing the curriculum for this training over the next few months.
We are so excited to be bringing this new program to the world and will keep you updated on new developments to our Game Changer Action Trainings.
