Raise Her Up - Turning Eco Anxiety into Eco Agency

Turning Eco Anxiety into Eco Agency

11/03/21 • 33 min

With the UN Climate Change Conference COP26 in session, we address the issues of eco awareness and eco anxiety and how we can broach and discuss this with our children. As parents we may feel conflicted - too overwhelmed with the day-to-day running of family, home and work to participate meaningfully. Perhaps we do worry about climate change but don’t know how to engage our children without transferring our own anxieties to them. Or maybe we just don’t yet have the words to reassure our youngsters given the scale of the problem.

Our guest today is Kathleen Hamilton, Programmes & Partnerships Director at Force Of Nature, a youth nonprofit who work to empower young people to turn their eco-anxiety into action, and with leaders across business and education to drive intergenerational solutions. Kathleen suggests ways for us to engage with our children and students to reassure, encourage and mobilise them, hopefully reigniting our own agency in the process.

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Previous Episode

Communicating for Change

The murder of George Floyd in May 2020 brought about a cultural shift in the way many of us now speak about racism and discrimination. Moved on by a groundswell of people across the globe demanding change, we have revisited how we perceive and address these issues. In the workplace, this might have involved more focused Unconscious Bias training, learning to be more culturally sensitive and taking a more open and curious approach to our community and colleagues. What about at home, and at school?

If we want to make a positive difference, we have to know how to recognise our own biases and blind spots – only then can we understand how to be part of the solution and start having meaningful conversations.

In this episode of Raise Her Up journalist and communication consultant Genelle Aldred offers suggestions and guidance to help us be better listeners, readers, watchers and talkers. With insight drawn from years of experience, she breaks down the barriers to effective conversation so we can communicate in a more nuanced, thoughtful way and understand our part in bringing about a more just society.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Next Episode

Starting career conversations

The work landscape has changed and the pandemic has left us with a weakened economy, and the prospect of some tough times to come. Covid has also accelerated some changes that were already emerging in the workplace: flexible working; digital nomads; and the concept of having the same job for life feeling increasingly outdated. As we frequently tell our students at the GDST, we need to help prepare them for jobs that don’t even necessarily exist yet, through developing transferable skills that will serve them well regardless of the career direction they take.

However, many young people just don’t know what they want to do, and parents are often the ones to initiate conversations around this; parents who themselves come from a very different work experience and hinterland, and bring their own anxieties about an uncertain future to the table. This episode’s guest, Erica Sosna, is a GDST alumna, a careers consultant for several large firms, the author of recently published book The Career Equation, a 2 x TEDx Speaker and an authority on the subject of careers and the future of work. Erica offers some context and practical guidance for adults and young people alike on how to think about careers in a way to leave you feeling empowered, motivated and reassured.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.