Climate & Society Weekly Reflections

Taking advantage of my employee tuition benefits, I have been taking classes part-time in addition to my full-time job to complete the Master of Arts in Climate & Society program at The Climate School, Columbia University. This series is a weekly blog assignment for my Spring 2023 course, Applications in Climate & Society. The series captures my thoughts and reflections based on the provided prompts.

Week 5 - Feb 20

Prompt: Do you have any big ideas that you’d like to see translated into action? What are they and what tools might you use to put them into action?

Speakers: Briana Carbajal - WeAct for Environmental Justice, Kallie Aultman - IFRC UN Office, Ilona Duverge - Movement School

This week’s invited speakers presented a diverse range of tools for translating climate knoweldge and awareness into concrete actions or advocacy for action across different areas of climate and environmental justice. Previously, I had also attended a discussion panel that included another invited speaker who was ultimately not present, Kizzy Charles-Guzman, Executive Director of Mayor Eric Adams’ Office of Climate and Environmental Justice. As always, it is inspiring to hear from women who are working on the frontline of climate actions, policy, and advocacy.

When I first became aware of global warming and other climate and environmental issues through debate in high school, I knew there are vast bodies of knowledge and expertise that I needed to tap into before I could even figure out what I want to do or can do about it. What began as a limited exposure led to an entire educational and professional journey that is still ongoing. As with most idealistic and naive hopes and dreams one may have had as a teenage first-generation immigrant, my approach to climate and environmental actions has evolved over time. While it’s important to imbue in young people that they have the ability and the power to make change (as I’m trying to do now for young people in the Mekong Delta region), the reality is that not everyone need to be the singular lead or the lone instigator to tackle an issue, especially those as complex and encompassing as our ongoing climate crisis. Along the way, I realized that there is already a collective movement and a community of people and organizations working tirelessly behind most of the changes and actions I want to see. I stopped wanting to be a founder or starter—which was often mentally and emotionally exhausting and extending beyond my financial and physical capabilities. Instead, I looked to existing efforts and organizations that I can join, support, or coordinate with.

The most important skills I’d learned through my leadership trainings and experiences is not “how to be a leader” but how to build, sustain, and strengthen a network of partners, collaborators, champions, enablers, and allies to align and empower our shared values, missions, and causes. Whenever someone sets out to “do the right thing,” chances are they are never alone in this mission. There is always more work to do, so the abundance and volume of human power, talent, and passion are much welcomed. But what can happen when many people and organized or unorganized groups are working on the same or similar causes? Fragmented or duplicated efforts can result in inefficiencies, wasting of precious resources, or even needless competitions and conflicts. I often wondered if there can be better and greater coordination and alignment of already-active people, initiatives, and organizations that share common goals and missions.

I thought the solution to this would be to establish a common platform to seed, nurture, host these types of alliances and collaborations, and linking visions with actions and with financial backing and other resources. Specifically, I want to be able to bring together artists and scientists, people belonging to two seemingly segregated worlds but have much to teach and support each other in raising public awareness and dialogue on important issues such as climate change and environmental justice. I have supported and facilitated the cross-pollination of art and science in various ways, and I would like to see these collaborations take place more frequently and at greater scales. But across the board, organizations and groups specialized in different areas of expertise, geographical locations, and key sectors can typically find benefits and values in coming together.

But I’ve also rethought my “big idea” over the years. Even Big Tech companies like Meta/Facebook/Instagram and Twitter face enormous challenges when it comes to developing and growing social media platforms for profit. How would I go about building and sustaining a public and non-profit platform for nonprofits? And as it turns out, there are increasingly more social and listing platforms that have been developed in recent years with similar goals: opportunity and job boards, online directory of organizations, categorization within existing platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed, etc. And so I defer back to my first principle of not duplicating something that already exists, seeing that it would not be beneficial to invest much of the starting efforts and resources towards building yet another a platform to convince users to enroll.

I still see the need in the development of additional extensions to these platform to connect collaborations and initiatives with funding calls and opportunities from grantmakers, philanthropic foundations, and individual donors. Furthermore, donors and grantmakers would also benefit from greater awareness of what efforts and approaches are taking place on the ground so the calls for proposals and grant applications can be tailored to better fit the current gaps and needs of frontline changemakers. I will continue to observe and refine my proposed strategies in these areas.