Leading in the Wild – For Sustainability Professionals

Why this Course?

Climate action is slipping down the priority list in many governments, corporations and organisations.

You may feel this in your work: shrinking budgets, weaker mandates, growing resistance or lack of alignment. At the same time, climate impacts, such as heatwaves, flooding, extreme storms, and sea-level rise are intensifying. And the window for limiting irreversible damage is closing.

Climate resilience, or cultivating the conditions to anticipate, adapt, and transform in response to unavoidable climate change impacts, is becoming essential. But many professionals were never trained for this kind of work.

You might be asking:

• How do I design meaningful responses to climate risks and impacts in my context?
• How do I act without clear roadmaps or institutional backing?
• How do I address root causes of climate vulnerability—not just symptoms?

Building climate resilience is not only technical. Nor is it about more effort. It requires a different way of leading. It asks for new capacities that are deeply personal such as: working with uncertainty, making decisions with moral clarity in complex systems, navigating resistance, collaborating with multiple others effectively, and staying emotionally engaged to foster transformation over time, without becoming overwhelmed by stress or grief.

In a very real sense, you are being asked to lead in the wild. No wonder this feels overwhelming. Especially if you care deeply, but lack of the navigation system and support you need.

This course is designed to support you:

Drawing on 20 years of experience in climate resilience and transformation, this course combines:

• practical approaches and tools to design and guide climate resilience initiatives that address the root causes of vulnerability
• daily practices and a learners community to re-imagine your leadership and strengthen inner resilience over time

So you can respond more effectively to climate change impacts, and continue doing the work that matters, despite climate instability.

What is this transformative course about?

This transformative course is all about practical knowledge, tested tools, and hands-on activities that help grow the technical, emotional, and relational skills you need to develop climate resilience in your own context and with the people you serve.

It is about re-imagining leadership and supporting sustainability professionals in practicing what it takes to lead transformation in complexity, when there is neither a playbook nor directly visible results, and yet so many humans and more-than-human beings who need you to act differently now.

It is designed to help you face real-world challenges, while acknowledging the essential work you are already doing, and the precious experiences you bring to this emerging learning space.

It is about acknowledging what we know and what we do not know, what we need to keep learning together, and what we need to reckon with, take accountability for, grieve, or repair.

We are opening dialogues, and spaces to grow together.

Whom you will be learning with?

Who is this course for?

This course is for corporate sustainability leaders and professionals, NGO practitioners, and consultants working on socio-ecological transformation and related topics.

It will be particularly relevant for you if you are seeking:

• Alignment: There is a noticeable gap between your purpose and the values and actions of your organisation. You feel like you have to mask your true self and perform when you are at work. You want to gain the skills and confidence to speak up about what matters to you and take aligned action.
• Upskilling: You feel concerned about increasing climate instability locally and globally, and even more so by the fact that climate change impacts and risks are barely factored into the work that you do. You feel that the knowledge, tools, and methods you have are outdated to drive the change you want to see in the world.
• Depth: You notice yourself being in a reactive mode to what’s happening in the world, unable to find and sustain focus and prioritise long-term goals. You feel stuck in an environment that focuses on solving symptoms rather than addressing root causes. You have a longing for deep work, with potential for systemic transformation, but don’t yet know how.
• Peers: You are doing all you can to push for new models, systems, or ways of being, yet feel alone in this endeavour. You are misunderstood, set aside, over-extended, both restless and powerless, as change needs to happen now. You crave a community of peers to feel supported, be held accountable, and exchange ideas.
• Consistency: You have taken courses, done retreats, learnt about new frameworks but nothing sticks. You are open to learning, un-learning, and experimenting with new perspectives and tools, but need something else to embed courage and care more fully into your life, so as to keep going with joy and fulfillment.

This course might not be for you if:

• You are looking for quick fixes, ready-made solutions, climate-resilience to-do lists, and certainty.
• You are uncomfortable questioning the status quo, examining your own assumptions and biases, or opening up to a deep transformation of our ways of living, working, and organizing.
• You think that tending to our emotions, exploring our inner world, and questioning cultural narratives is a waste of time, as we should focus our energy only on taking outward action.
• You cannot dedicate at least 2 hours a week to participate in the live sessions or engage with the recordings.

We are growing a strong network of committed humans who are ready to grow together in reciprocal relationships.

What will you learn?

You will learn new essential leadership skills and capacities to keep doing your much-needed work in a chaotic climate. 

These climate-resilience building skills will help you guide your teams and support your community in a context-specific way, regardless of whether you work in biodiversity conservation, climate mitigation, socio-ecological transformation, circular economy, ecosystem regeneration, or other green/sustainable sectors. They include developing:

·   Systems-thinking and critical thinking skills to understand and address the root causes of climate vulnerability

·   Emotional capacities to keep engaging in the work despite climate chaos and the unknowns of transformation

·   Accountability and repair skills to engage with others with integrity, acknowledging the harms that are caused by our entanglement with the current systems.

·   Storytelling skills to reframe climate resilience as a gateway into a deep transformation of how we live, work, and relate to one another

·   Futures thinking and creativity skills to keep envisioning and relating to different futures and climate-resilient ways forward

To help you acquire those skills and capacities, this course will give you a deeper understanding of:

·   Multifaceted factors contributing to vulnerability to climate change

·   Both incremental and transformative approaches to building climate-resilience, including approaches that connect climate-resilience to Indigenous knowledge systems and practices, social and ecological regeneration, and deep-time thinking.

·   Co-creation and collaboration that fosters accountability, repair, openness, and joint-learning

Throughout the course, you will learn how to connect with all your emotions deeply, grow your imagination and curiosity, and your ability to lead with care without overstretching yourself. You will do so in a peer group of maximum 30 fellow leaders.

How is the course structured?

The course will take place over 8 weeks from May 5th to June 23rd, from 3-5 pm CET every Tuesday (check your local time). It will consist of:

·   Weekly interactive workshops of 2 hours, which will be recorded in case you cannot attend

·   An optional weekly online space for questions, in case you need to further discuss specific challenges or issues that you are facing

·   Weekly assignments to ground your learning into your own context and daily practices

·   Weekly care practices to expand your emotional capacities over time

·   Additional learning materials in the form of curated readings, bonus videos of presentations given by climate-resilience leaders, selected podcasts… to dive deeper into specific topics

·   Access to a moderated online platform to ask questions in writing, and connect with other participants in the course. The platform will serve as a repository for the online resources and will remain live after the course ends.

The course commitment should be 3-6 hours per week. You will receive a certificate of completion after taking a final assessment.

We can also facilitate extra access to mentors from different regions, so as to discuss your specific challenges more in depth.

What are the dates, times and pricing?

The course will take place over 8 weeks from May 5th to June 23rd, from 3-5 pm CET every Tuesday.  Check your local time.

We offer trust-based sliding-scale pricing. This means we trust that you choose the pricing that best matches your privilege and financial circumstances. The normal price reflects the true cost of this course. We use a social pricing method, which means that we rely on participants who can afford a higher participation price or “pay it forward ticket” for those with less privilege and financial means to participate. Any extra resources generated through this course will be used to support the non-profit activities of One Resilient Earth, including supporting young change-makers from marginalized backgrounds working towards climate resilience.

We provide invoices upon request. If several members of your team would like to join together, please contact us.

• Corporate/ Pay-it-forward rate (for those with financial stability and a readiness to support others in participating):  €900
• Normal rate (true cost of the course): €650
• Supported rate (for those from underprivileged regions and backgrounds):  €450

Which questions will be addressed during the workshops?

During the 8 workshops we will be together, we will address the following questions:

• WEEK 1: Why you and why climate resilience? We will explore why sustainability leaders and professionals need to integrate climate resilience knowledge, tools, and skills into their work today, and what may be holding them back from doing so. We will also highlight the multiple benefits in terms of health, equity, and long-term prosperity that stem from engaging with climate resilience.

• WEEK 2: How can we nurture emotional and mental wellbeing while engaging with climate chaos? Feeling and co-regulating emotions associated with climate catastrophes and change are a critical first step to fostering long-term climate resilience. We will share useful knowledge and practical tools for emotional and mental wellbeing as the basis for enhanced creativity and collaboration.

• WEEK 3: How can we understand and map climate vulnerability? Understanding climate vulnerability and its root causes is essential to grow climate resilience across situations and contexts effectively. Leading courageous change requires the ability to understand histories, interconnections, and feedback loops.

• WEEK 4: How can we connect incremental and transformative resilience building? We will explore the multiple opportunities we have to grow climate resilience locally and globally, including both the limitations of certain climate adaptation actions and the transformative potential of others.

• WEEK 5: Why should leaders dive deep into transformation for long-term climate resilience? Leading transformation requires vision, flexibility, appeal, and perseverance – we will shed light on how futures thinking tools and frameworks to expand imagination and creativity can help craft new narratives and collaborative practices for climate-resilience.

• WEEK 6: How can we address the root causes of climate vulnerability? We will investigate how to work with and through the individual, collective and intergenerational trauma of facing colonial continuities and various systems of oppression. This enquiry is critical to supporting community-led and equity-centered resilience.

• WEEK 7: How can we work with and for the more-than-human? This topic sheds light on the synergies between ecosystem regeneration and climate resilience. We will also introduce ethical ways to learn from Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge systems.
• WEEK 8: How to become the climate-resilience guides we need? We will take some time to compost some of our past actions and reflect on how to nurture long-term legacy. This will include assembling your own community of learning, care and purpose, and reflecting about the next steps in your own context.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will the sessions be recorded? 

Yes, recordings will be available after each session on our online learning platform.

Do you offer full scholarships? 

Our ability to offer full scholarships will depend on the number of pay-it-forward contributors and will remain limited for this programme. However, there are numerous learning journeys that One Resilient Earth offers for free to young changemakers, educators, and creatives. Visit our online learning platform to learn more.

How can I reach you if I have some more questions?

Please email us at [email protected] and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible. We are also open to scheduling a short call with you if you would like to check whether this online course is the right match for you.