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Flooding in York (photo by Chris Gallagher on Unsplash)
The Covid-19 pandemic saw people everywhere in Britain co-operating to support each other. Hampstead was no exception. Neighbours here gave help where it was needed and shopped and ran errands for those who could not.
Refugee camp, photo by Salah Darwish on Unsplash
Community resilience is our collective capacity to handle shock and disruption. In these increasingly difficult times, we need to cultivate it. The Neighbourhood Forum has taken this to heart, and embarked on projects to raise our communal resilience.
Last autumn we collaborated with Churches Together in Hampstead to offer a series of ‘climate cafés’. They were welcomed and we have scheduled more for 2025.
Climate cafés are advice-free spaces in which to share our concerns for ourselves and our families.
The climate we were raised in has changed. The world temperature has risen 1.5C° sooner even than feared. Wildfires, heatwaves, failing harvests and rising sea levels herald a difficult future for humans everywhere. Bird and insect populations have crashed. After decades of peace, war has returned to Europe. The UN warns that hundreds of millions of us will migrate this century. Scholars talk openly of “social collapse”.
This is a hard future to think about, let alone speak about. Yet anxiety is simmering everywhere and, of course, particularly among the young, who will live their lives amid these changes.
2024 café programme
Most of us were raised in a world of steadily rising living standards: the future would always be better. That has held true for fewer and fewer over recent decades. What kind of lives shall we live in a future of decline? Who will we be, and what will matter to us?
Climate cafés are advice-free spaces in which to share our concerns for ourselves and our families. Taking action is important, but the cafés are not workshops where we devise solutions and make plans. To find our way in a radically changed future we first need to face our grief for what is now being lost, and connect with each other and our sources of joy.
The climate cafés follow the design of the Climate Psychology Alliance, in turn adapted from the Death Café events, that “aim to help people make the most of their (finite) lives.”
Attendance is free but space is limited: please let us know at climatecafe@hampsteadforum.org if you plan to come.