“youth have the passion and ideas to activate changes we need now; for ourselves, future generations, and the more-than-human world.”

Youth activists across the globe have been calling on the world to declare a global climate emergency and “act now, before it’s too late." Led by these youth demands, Canada officially declared a national climate emergency in June of 2019 alongside 24 other countries. This is a radical education program to meet these calls to action and Stay with the Trouble (as Donna Haraway so brillianty says). Youth have the passion and ideas to activate changes we need now; for ourselves, future generations, and the more-than-human world. Our educational systems often leave students feeling ill-equipped to face these times. So, we’ve chosen to intervene.

This program is certified by York University but runs very differently than a typical classroom. Rooted and Rising empowers young people to reclaim their sovereignty: to move with trust in their gifts, enact their responsibilities, while feeling held within a community of care.

gratitude

We began on the land to root into gratitude (under COVID-safe protocols) with Elder Whabagoon who grounded us in curiosity, care for water, and respect for slow, spiritual + heart centered ways of interacting with ourselves, land, the more-than-human-nations, and each other.

care + resilience

We mapped our networks of care using MilaNote, feeling into the people, places, and beings that care for us in our everyday lives, while reflecting on how to embody reciprocity for that care. We shifted into an understanding of self-care and community-care not as binaries, but as deeply interconnected.

uplifting transformation

In our communication session, we exposed the imposter syndrome so many of us feel in climate and justice work. We explored how to step into more authentic & loving conversations with self – and how to translate this into honest conversations with others. We came back to an understanding of conflict and tension as moments of self-discovery, expansion, and transformation.

care + resilience

We explored lessons from disability justice activists, and created space to process climate grief. The presence of death holds so many teachings, yet is often avoided, or only spoken of through the lens of species extinction in climate change dialogue. We explored the idea of “seeding plant-people conspiracies” in the Planthroposcene, to shift us away from the human-centered Anthropocene.

Each session was team-facilitated, and the teaching team modelled rotating leadership.
In the Rooted and Rising space, we bring Relational Ways of Being to the Center.

Students self-organized into projects, rooting into group activations over the final month of the program. We disrupted traditional understandings of leadership, expanding into the many ways leadership is embodied. Students identified their personal strengths, gifts, and passions to ground into their project work!

After hearing from our partner organizations in a panel they were encouraged to dream. We supported their self-organizing through group brainstorms and project plan templates. The range of projects were beautiful, with many connecting to the work of our partners: one team took up Mike Schreiner’s invitation to policy work and developed arguments to push for a youth council on climate change at the provincial level, as agreed to in the 1992 Rio Declaration. Another group, inspired by Yannick’s sharing on systems thinking, started to develop a simple computer simulation that helps people see the systemic connections in food system issues. A third group made up of artists, aspiring teachers and CMC members, developed a children’s book on respecting water. Group 4 created a video series featuring youth climate activists who wouldn’t normally label themselves as activists but still do the work; Group 5 created three stickers with illustrations of corn, caribou, and a canoe, to be plastered around the city calling attention to the life-forms and ways of being that used to thrive where the city stands now, and could exist again. Group 6 focused on intergenerational healing through clay work in a private workshop with Filipina artists Tamara + Hilary, creating a video on the power & importance of making studio spaces accessible for BIPOC youth to create with Earth for healing. Group 7 worked with one member of the teaching team in their land restoration work outside the program – they planted 70 strawberry plants along the Humber River, and created a stop-motion video with a voice-over detailing strawberry teachings they received as they planted.