The Green Resilience Project

The Green Resilience Project (GRP) partners with local organizations to host activities that explore connections between climate change, income security, affordability issues, and community resilience. The GRP has partnered with 51 organizations from across Canada, 62% of which work primarily on issue areas that intersect with climate change—food security, income security, housing, and anti-poverty social justice, to name a few. By fostering a community-led listening approach, the project functions as an opportunity to strengthen and amplify solutions emerging from within communities, advancing policies and practices that work better for people and the climate. In short: a planet-saving conversation starter.

The climate emergency and the failure of social and income security systems are dangerous, all-encompassing challenges accelerated by legacy responses that fall short of addressing their root causes. The Green Resilience Project (GRP), a partnership between The Energy Mix, the Basic Income Canada Network, and a group of volunteers, stands at the intersection of these systemic issues.

When this project was launched in 2021, public opinion polls showed strong support for action on climate change and income insecurity. Efforts by the Alberta Narratives Project had broken important ground in building conversations with communities on the front lines of the low-carbon transition, while Basic Income Alberta had engaged in a broadly similar dialogue and messaging process on income security issues. The team involved in developing the GRP sought to build a wider and deeper understanding of the links and synergies between community resilience, income security, and the low-carbon transition.

During Phase 1 of the project the team set out to learn how policies in these areas can support each other at the local level. They engaged with locally based community partners to document viewpoints from a wide range of lived experience. Finding strategies that could take conversation beyond the silos of climate change and income security advocacy and share points of common ground with a wider public audience was a core goal.

Impressively, the GRP secured 29 partners who hosted conversations in 33 communities, with the team acting as a resource supporter and networker between groups, offering learning resource tools and networking opportunities. Partners included environmental organisations, anti-poverty organisations, a healthcare worker, a health policy researcher, Indigenous-led community organisations, basic income pilot sites, a cultural organizer, three youth-focused organisations, a think tank, a community economic development organisation and a member-based farming organisation. Partnerships were forged in urban, rural and remote communities and in all provinces and territories with the exception of Nunavut where the partner had to cancel due to an outbreak of a COVID variant in the area in the winter of 2022.

While the team provided a script, a slide deck, and a conversation planning guide, use of these materials was optional. They asked only that each community incorporate four questions into their conversation (which they could re-word or re-work) and that they send back a report on what they heard. The four questions were:

1) How are changes to your community’s environment or economy affecting you, your family or your community as a whole?

2) How are these environmental and economic changes related to each other?

3) What are some possible solutions?

4) How do you think these solutions can be achieved to build, maintain or strengthen community resilience? Who is responsible for these changes—individuals, community groups, governments or a mix?

The team spent time listening and exploring how the uncertainties brought on by climate change, income insecurity, inequality and discrimination overlap in the lives of people in Canada. An understanding that people rarely have time to think about climate change or carbon footprints when they’re scrambling for rent or looking for work, but that marginalized communities are often the hardest hit by economic disruption, underpins the project. Climate chaos, a global pandemic, and/or sudden, local climate disaster devastate incomes and health as well as the surrounding environment.

Taking what they learned from conversations hosted in phase 1 and conducting additional research, the team shifted their approach and objectives. An extreme affordability crisis, coupled with relentless misinformation from the fossil industry, has been pushing climate change lower on the public opinion radar and this sad reality needed to be factored into the GRP approach.

In phase 2, which is still ongoing, in addition to partnering with organizations to host conversations on identifying connections between climate change and income security or affordability issues, they’re working to find opportunities for partners to identify ways of incorporating a missing lens into their existing work.

The missing lens could be climate change and how it integrates with responses to issues like income insecurity, housing precarity, food insecurity, mental health issues, systemic oppression and other issues affecting community resilience. For organizations working on climate change issues, the missing lens could be affordability or justice related issues that if prioritized help ensure climate solutions meet people where they prioritize equity and offer tangible benefits. The overarching goal is to increase broad acceptance of bold climate strategies and do this without stampeding over anyone.

Creating a meaningful, cohesive project, where funders and allies could be updated, while decentralizing the project and letting partners take the lead, was part of the challenge.

By choosing to prioritize the expertise and comfort levels of their partners and their participants, they chose a less prescriptive path. This meant handing over control of variables like data collection, the content and format of conversations, the type and number of participants, and more.

Communication with their partners from the beginning to ensure that interests are aligned and that the partners believe this experience would be beneficial for their work is key. Importantly, GRP provides funds as well as support. Partners are encouraged to explore and explain how this opportunity could work for them—what outcomes serve them best and how those outcomes can be achieved. By taking a listening approach to conversations, by asking “What do you care about?” Rather than saying “This is important, you should care about this”, GRP conversations help organizations meet people where they are, make connections between issues and go from there.

As an organization, Energy Mix and the Green Resilience Project would like to see faster, deeper carbon cuts supported by bold climate policies—and they understand that achieving that will take mass mobilisation. According to data from Re.Climate, as the climate crisis intensifies, the harder the climate community struggles to convey its essential message and the farther behind they fall. The GRP provides a potentially planet saving conversation starter, for organizations outside of the climate bubble to take part in discussions about climate change, and for organizations within the climate bubble to engage with their community about issues outside of climate change.