What emerged was a powerful reflection on inheritance and world-building: on what we owe to those who came before us, what has been lost through the dismantling of public life, and why rebuilding social and civic infrastructure must be about much more than restoring what once was. Immy also spoke candidly about working across multiple justice intersections, the importance of proposition alongside resistance, and the tactical choices organisations sometimes make in an increasingly hostile political environment.

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Dami: Thank you so much for joining me today Immy. To begin, I would love to ask what has shaped your thinking and the work you do now.

Immy: My work is deeply shaped by what it means to be displaced from your homeland, and by having multiple ties to ancestry, history, and the things that give our communities meaning, often in quite brutal ways. My grandparents came here after Partition, so as I grew up, I observed what it meant to them, their community and their parents, and perhaps only later, through my work, understood more widely what displacement means culturally and generationally. Being born here gives you a different relationship to that history, but it is still deeply rooted in how we grow up, how we understand the world, and how we imagine building worlds.

I grew up around grandparents and ancestors who I would describe as world-builders. They came here having lost everything and yet, through so much horror, they showed extraordinary imagination and tenacity in rebuilding entire worlds: cultural memory, institutional memory, community life. My grandparents were among the first people who helped build the first Gurdwara in Bedford when they moved here. That matters deeply to me.

I think that is often lost in the narrative that our grandparents were “just surviving” and that only we now have the benefit of imagination. I understand why people say that, but I do not fully agree. They were world-builders. They were some of the most imaginative people I can think of, because they went from nothing and still imagined a whole world for themselves, their children, and their grandchildren, despite racism, exclusion, and all the contradictions that came with that.

The second thread is growing up in an inner-city, largely white working-class neighbourhood, where many of us working-class Black and brown people were also growing up. Looking back, I now see glimpses of what local social infrastructure meant. At the time it all felt normal, but now I realise how much has been lost from our collective memory of what matters. For example, I grew up near swimming baths that felt like absolute wonderland: incredible slides, cheap entry, something like 50p on a Monday. You could walk there with your sibling. It felt magical. I do not remember growing up in a very poor inner-city neighbourhood. I remember growing up in a place full of hope and imagination. I remember the park. I remember walking down the road with my mum. I remember nurses visiting homes. All of that made me realise just how critical social infrastructure is to our ability to connect to each other and to the places where we live.

Then, thirdly, more practically, there is the reality of the last 20 years: the dismantling of our social and physical infrastructure through austerity. That political project of ripping out the foundations of public life in order to “balance the books” is, to me, backwards, dangerous, authoritarian, and deeply unjust. These things are actually what form the foundations of public life, and from that, an economy is built. You cannot have grown up before austerity and then lived through it and meaningfully say that anything remotely good has come from it. So rebuilding all of that is something I care about deeply because it is going to be a generational project.

That rebuilding has to happen in the context of climate crisis, ecological breakdown, and the entanglements between the global and the local that we can now see much more clearly. That visibility may be new, but the interconnection is not. Indigenous peoples and my ancestors in Punjab understood deeply, in embodied ways, the relationship between social life, ecological life, and land.

So for me, the final motivator is this: if we are going to rebuild our social, ecological, and civic infrastructure in service of regeneration, then we have to think much more expansively than simply reopening the youth club or keeping the library open. Those things matter, but the imagination has to be much bigger than that. Those are the threads that drive me, from family history and memory to where I am now in this work.

Dami: Thank you so much for such a full answer. It was really powerful. I really hear what you are saying about hindsight, how, when we look back as adults, we understand things differently. I also want to say there is something important in giving real respect to the people who came before us, because they laid foundations that allow us to do the work we do now. You have already started to touch on this, but I would love for you to expand a little more. You work across several intersections rather than limiting yourself to one area. Why is that important to you, and how does it shape your work?

Immy: I think it connects to what you just said about hindsight. Compared to my grandparents and elders, one of the things my generation benefits from is the time and space that their labour made possible. That has allowed us to see interconnections differently. I say differently because I think they understood these things in embodied ways. What we are trying to do is externalise some of that understanding, make it visible and articulate it, although I do not think that is the end goal. Ultimately, we still need a deep, embodied way of living in balance, though imperial systems make that very difficult.

When I think back to those swimming baths, I now realise they were doing a million things at once. They were places for play, for care, for public gathering. They were cheap. They were relatively unpoliced. They created a sense of belonging for different communities. They were hubs, meeting places, places parents trusted. They held many functions at the same time.

Now, as an adult, when I watch younger family members in public places, I realise these are the spaces where people are carrying pain and joy, where life is being navigated together, where people help one another. My mum and dad did not finish school. My dad grew up in foster care. They did not necessarily know all the opportunities available to us. But a safe public building provided a huge amount.

When you fast-forward 30 years and think about that alongside spaces like the Impact Hub, Sure Start centres, and stories from people who were surviving postpartum depression, financial hardship or isolation, you begin to see that these places represent many things at once.

And then you combine all that with what we know about climate and ecological breakdown. It is tearing through the old illusion that the economy and the world can be endlessly predicted and controlled, that there will always be more resources, more growth, more extraction, more development. That illusion was never really true, but now it is visibly unravelling.

So if we are rebuilding, we have to build for uncertainty, adaptability and discovery. We need to rethink materials, jobs, skills, ownership and design. There are real opportunities there. People want to be part of building differently, more regeneratively, using better materials and creating better futures.

The spaces we build need to be adaptable. In many cases, they need to be owned and led by the communities themselves. They need to allow people to dream about better futures, but also respond to the immediate realities of storms, flooding, damp and climate disruption. Too often, infrastructure is built as though the world will continue exactly as it has. We are trying to create spaces where people can meet, create, dream and handle the practical needs of the present while also preparing for the future.

That can feel overwhelming when you think about the scale of the world’s problems. But there is something about designing physical spaces for community that also releases anxiety, because you begin to remember what becomes possible when people come together. We saw it during COVID. We have seen it in places devastated by war, colonisation and crisis. Even under the smallest shelter, children begin to play, communities begin to feed each other, and mutual aid emerges.

So the question becomes: what would it mean to design infrastructure around that deep knowledge of what is possible? Structurally and systemically, yes, but also emotionally and spiritually. For us as a team, this work is deeply healing. In the midst of all the horror, it gives us somewhere to place our hope, imagination and energy. It allows us to be propositional, not only resistant. It becomes a home for imagining what could be.

That is why working at the intersections feels natural in physical space. Wherever people are rebuilding after devastation, you see that the smallest shared spaces generate joy, care, mutual aid and dreaming. So what would happen if we designed for that? I do not know the full answer, but that is what we are trying to explore.

Dami: A lot of our readers will have heard about your work and CIVIC SQUARE’s pioneering approach, especially the question at the heart of it: what if the climate transition of our homes, streets and neighbourhoods were collectively led, designed, owned and governed by the people who actually live there? Your work is rooted in Ladywood in Birmingham, but it also resists easy definition. How do you balance doing slow, careful, neighbourhood-rooted work with the urgency of the wider narratives around ecological and social breakdown?

Immy: It is a really important question, and it is hard to balance. My generation has been organising and mobilising for around 20 years, and it is exhausting. The political, ecological, social and economic context is often described as “getting worse”, but I would say much of it is simply being revealed more clearly.

Take Palestine, for example, or resource extraction, or where the lithium for our phones comes from. These systems were always violent and exploitative, but now we can see them more clearly. Add to that post-austerity Britain, the dismantling of social infrastructure, and the devastation caused by neoliberal regeneration in cities like Birmingham, and it becomes very stark.

So for us, the question became: what do you do with that? Resistance matters deeply. Protest matters. Direct action matters. Movement work matters. But there also needs to be space for proposition and imagination. For us, the scale at which that felt possible was the home, the street and the neighbourhood.

We are not under the illusion that what we are doing in Ladywood will change the entire world on its own. But what matters to us is working in an open-source way, sharing learning, sharing discovery, and creating something that might offer building blocks for how social and civic infrastructure could be remade elsewhere.

We are not trying to franchise a model. We are asking what the essential building blocks are: land ownership, stewardship, materiality, design, jobs, skills, governance, finance. And we try to share those things live and openly, rather than pretending we have a finished blueprint.

What seems to resonate is that many projects across the country are grappling with similar threads, even if their starting points are different. So we try to sit right at the edge of the current system, not so radical that people dismiss it as impossible, but not so folded into the status quo that we simply reproduce the same inadequate infrastructure.

Being a deep demonstrator in Ladywood allows us to go deep on the big ideas: land, economics, design, materials, jobs, skills, and to stay in a posture of discovery rather than pretending we have all the answers. We do everything collaboratively. We have never done a project alone. That slows things down, but it matters. Then we share what we are learning openly and live, because no one project, policy, organisation or political party is going to solve all of this. It is going to take many people working in many different ways, collaboratively and boldly, over generations.

The rootedness in one place helps us grapple with the dark matter, the knotty stuff like economic systems and land systems, rather than staying at a level of abstraction that sounds good but does not actually hold when tested.

Dami: That makes a great deal of sense. At the Climate Migration Collaborative, and in this wider work, we often talk about the interconnections between climate justice, migrant justice and racial justice because we believe they are deeply linked. You do not explicitly frame CIVIC SQUARE’s work in exactly that way, even though it is clear that a deep understanding of those intersections and histories informs how you work. From our perspective, that feels intentional. Is that right? And why do you think the way you frame the work matters so much?

Immy: Yes, that is intentional. A few of us believe very strongly that there is a clear, organised, heavily funded media and political effort, especially on the right and far right, to delegitimise, defund, destroy, criminalise and burn out our movements and organisations. I have thought this for a long time, but it became especially clear to me during Brexit, and then even more so watching what has happened in the US. We have seen movement leaders and organisations picked off one by one, defunded, exhausted and criminalised. We have seen philanthropic spaces retreat. We have seen public narratives shift in ways that make this work harder to do openly. That does not mean I think everything in our movements needs to become watered down. We need strong organisations doing explicit migrant justice and climate justice work. But what has interested me is what it means to work by stealth in an imperial context.

For organisations like CIVIC SQUARE, one of the worst possible outcomes would be that we break, that we stop believing, stop building, stop continuing with bold and intersectional work. It is not that we do not talk about the intersections internally or in community. We absolutely do. We have done that through 3º Neighbourhoods, Reimagined Economics, our community suppers, and through the convening work we did at Impact Hub. We brought together people across many different justice movements, from Black liberation organising to pro-Palestine organising and beyond.

But from the period after Brexit through COVID and into now, the context has become much harder. So publicly, we have worked with more stealth. If we had openly framed ourselves outwardly as a land justice project taking land from extractive developers, or as a welcoming home for climate migrants, or fully foregrounded all the political intersections in our public messaging, I do not think we would have been able to buy the land or raise the money.

So some of our messaging has been tactical. We are trying to make sure that what is public can stand the test of time and get us to the point of opening the doors. Even opening the doors of this site will itself be an act of resistance. At the same time, those of us who came through Impact Hub and are still involved hold the organisational memory of what it meant to have a much more public, open and politicised set of ideas. That memory matters. So the long game is finding a balance between public stealth and deep internal integrity.

Honestly, it does not feel that strange to me, because if you are not white and do not hold elite political power in this country, you are often already living by stealth in one form or another. Some of this is tactical survival. Once the space is open, I think you will see a different version of us, because by then it will be much harder to block our planning, our funding or our future direction. At that point, it becomes harder for developers, right-wing media or political actors to stop what is already rooted. So yes, it is tactics. I do not know if they are perfect tactics, but they are tactics.

Dami: Thank you so much, Immy. There is so much in what you have shared, and I am really grateful for your honesty, depth and clarity. It has been such a joy to have this conversation with you.

Find out more about CIVIC SQUARE:

Website: CIVIC SQUARE BIRMINGHAM CIC

Medium: Neighbourhood Public Square

Instagram: CIVIC SQUARE (@civic_square)

We’d also like to share what’s on the horizon next. We want to honour the energies that we, and many friends and collaborators beyond - have poured into this work so far. At the same time, we recognise that we will need to shift our shape to match our capacities whilst continuing to show up for these times of polycrisis that we’re living in. Towards the end of this blog, we share what this could mean for what we may be able to offer in service of the wider field as connectors, facilitators, catalysts and producers.

The Story So Far

As a collaborative, we had set out an initial enquiry question: As our climate drastically shifts, and people migrate - both by choice and through displacement - how might we catalyse collaboration across sectors to put justice at the centre of society’s approach to climate change and migration? We hoped to act as a connector and catalyst of cross-sector collaboration at the intersections of climate, migration and racial justice with a focus on creating shared understanding, building new narratives and catalysing new models demonstrating alternative futures as part of a just transition.

• Organising Framework: We co-created an organising framework for our collective work on climate-linked migration. We’ve come to see this framework as an offering to the wider field as we identify leverage points in our systems where we can start to demonstrate new models and practices.

• Peer Learning Journey: We facilitated a 6-month peer learning programme resulting in the planting of some seeds of collaboration which were further nurtured during our in-person connections event.

• Connections event: We brought together practitioners from across the sector and beyond at an event designed to catalyse connections. The workshop included a facilitated Offers and Needs Market. Already, promising collaborations are emerging - early signals of what is possible when we align our work across sectors, movements, and lived experiences.

• Storytelling: We co-designed this project alongside six artists, activists and advocates resulting in four multi-media pieces. This collection is an accessible counterpoint to the growing field of technical reports and policy recommendations - is intended to offer more embodied insights into the realities of climate and migration injustice.

• In Conversation: We hosted conversations designed to spotlight the brilliant work of people and organisations who are doing pioneering, intersectional, justice-oriented work, with an implicit or explicit focus on climate and migration, including Centric Labs, Radical Ecology, C40 Cities and CIVIC SQUARE as well as Gaia Vince, author of Nomad Century. These conversations can be revisited at any time in our Substack archive.

We have been learning out loud since we began this project. This has come with huge benefits - the chance to share and learn alongside others on this journey - without pretending to have all the answers. Maintaining a posture of humility and openness to collaborate in service of climate and migrant justice, we have learnt from and alongside a rich ecosystem of practitioners, who in turn are deepening their own work, stepping out of siloes and applying a climate-migrant justice lens to their own work and in their own organisations. We are so grateful to each of you! Early seedlings from this catalytic work are emerging; we hope that the relational bonds that were built during the past year are strong enough to sustain it beyond this initial phase of work.

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The Story Ahead

In the spirit of learning out loud, we are also sharing that as our seed funding has now ended, we find ourselves in a curious position. We find that none of us has the appetite to formally incorporate an organisation - the natural next step to accessing further funding to develop our work. We feel resistant to replicating the same logics of domination and paternalism that many organising forms force folk into. So we are opting for a more networked many-to-many approach. This will also enable us to pursue other work that aligns with this project whilst continuing to build momentum.

Since starting this project, Julia has joined CIVIC SQUARE - an incredible opportunity to work with an organisation that embodies the intersectional organising and building of just futures that has inspired this project. Dami Makinde has become Director at the Justice Together Initiative, who are working to transform access to justice for people who use the immigration system. Olivia Blocker has delivered campaigns for the Migrant Democracy Project and is now embarking on several new projects.

We believe that at least some of our legitimacy in this space comes from being deeply in the work - whether that’s boldly moving money or helping to liberate neighbourhood infrastructure for equitably distributed climate resilience. This lived and learned experience of how our ecosystems uphold - or dismantle - injustice is central to our ability to notice the leverage points in that system where change could be possible.

Alongside Julia as host and co-producer, Dami and Olivia will continue their work with the Collaborative. Dami as an advisor, critical friend, speaker and occasional facilitator. Olivia on an ad hoc basis bringing her expertise as a narrative strategist, storyteller and organiser to specific projects. Amira will also stay within our broader ecosystem as an occasional facilitator, sharing her embodied grounding practices and patterning skills. Theo is for the coming months fully absorbed in other projects, but we’re deeply grateful for their belief in this work and the wisdom and care that they brought to the first seeds of this project.

And so, we are shifting our shape. This is our honest attempt at abundant generosity whilst honouring collective capacities. Going forward, think of us as a small, dynamic, evolving group of connectors, facilitators, catalysts and producers.

In the pipeline

Even as we shift our shape, we’re excited to have some projects in the pipeline, including:

• A creative climate-migration workshop for the Migrant Futures Institute in collaboration with Zamzam Ibrahim

• Launching a facilitation toolkit to support exploration of our Organising Framework

• An In Conversation piece with Immy Kaur, Co-Founder of CIVIC SQUARE (you’ll be both moved and mobilised by the fresh insights that Immy brought to this)

How you can work with us

Since you’re reading this, you’re very likely curious about how a climate-migration lens could transform your ability to play a part in a just transition to a more equitable, regenerative future. Whether you work in housing, health, civic infrastructure, narrative strategy, education or democracy, we would love to share our experiences and help to spark fresh, practical thinking about getting out of siloes and working across intersectional injustices.

Here’s how to work with us:

• Commission us to deliver a workshop or learning programme for your organisation - drawing on our organising framework as well as a toolkit of design, strategy and imagination practices

• Partner with us to co-host storytelling events that centre the voices of folk with lived experience of climate-linked migration - then help us get these narratives into the hands of decision makers up and down the country.

• Help us build and share precedents in this work - contribute to our facilitation toolkit, pitch us a blog for our Substack or share our work with your peers

• Connect with us as a fellow facilitator, producer or connector if you’re active in this space and are interested to join our crew

• Invite us to speak or facilitate at workshops and events that invite organisations across a wide spectrum to consider their role in dismantling climate and migrant injustice

If you’re reading this as a funder and are interested in offering support to your grantees to explore and act at the intersection of climate justice and migrant justice, we’d love to talk. And if we’re describing the type of work you’d like to invest in - as a philanthropic funder who wants to catalyse work around converging crises - you could also bolster our core capacity to offer this type of work to organisations for free! We’re open to fiscal hosting to enable such funding flows.

Signposting to further resources

Finally, we cannot - and have not tried - to do justice to all of the work in the past two years in this short blog. We warmly welcome you to explore our website - as well as our Substack - to read more about this work. We also really encourage you to also follow other organisations actively working in this space who we have been alongside at different moments in this journey so far, including the Climate Migration Coalition (hosted by Climate Outreach), Climate Migrant Justice (hosted by War on Want), Earth Refuge and Friends of the Earth. Do check them all out!

• Approaches that are rooted in human experience (connecting with people’s hearts and minds, rather than corporate/organisational speak);

• Activating strong, connected, caring communities — what are the ingredients to activate latent care before urgent crisis;

• Building up the skills to have courageous conversations whilst looking after ourselves — upskilling with care and intention for ourselves and each other;

• Centring people’s lived experience in community-led, non-extractive ways to challenge anti-migrant narratives;

• Solidarity framing — designing anti-oppression work that both understands how multiple injustices are intertwined, and brings people together;

• What can we learn from the joint exploration of regenerative and decolonial frameworks.

What emerged

As we moved our energies from ‘how might we’ to ‘how will we’, we started to imagine specific, concrete ideas for collaboration that brought together climate and migrant justice. The investment in relationships and connection-building early on was already starting to come to fruition, and several potential collaborations were already brewing.

Early in the programme, two participants recognised a significant overlap between their respective networks. Culture for Climate Scotland works with arts and culture organisations on climate justice, while City of Sanctuary UK’s Sanctuary in the Arts network supports arts organisations to engage with migrant rights.

Together, they explored how arts organisations could be brought into conversations about both climate justice and migrant justice, helping each sector recognise the importance of the other. This led to the development of a Refugee Week event that brings arts and cultural organisations together to explore the links between these issues, rather than treating them separately, and to encourage collaboration and cross-pollination. You can find out more about the event and register to attend online here.

An exchange also kicked off between Hope for the Future and WEN’s Climate Sisters over the course of the programme, working together to amplify voices of racialised communities using a decolonial feminist lens, and building capacity for policy discourse.

Several members of the peer learning journey were all based in the North of England, so towards the end of our time together the idea emerged of taking some of our peer networking approaches into a more place-based focus. From this idea, the Climate Migration North Circle is taking shape. On the other side of England, the Bristol Nature Partnership focused on climate migration for their Green Mingle this month, with collaborations with the local City of Sanctuary group.

There was also talk of Cooperation Sheffield testing and feeding back on a grassroots deliberative democracy / people’s assembly toolkit being developed by Hope for the Future, as well as the emergence of Riverkin Collective CIC. Altogether, a lot of activity - not all of it will continue, but some of it we hope will plant roots deep enough to be sustained.

Where did we get to and what comes next

There was a real move away from trying to articulate and intellectualise, towards being able to embody, regulate and move towards action. While many started the programme in a state of overwhelm, looking for a quick fix to an insurmountably complex problem, we left with recognition that we have to do this work differently if we want the outcomes to be different. We have to take the time to understand perspectives from different parts of the system, and our own sectors, if we want to really centre justice in our work. We have to invest in reflective practice and learning, so we can make the connections necessary to break out of siloed, panicked thinking and towards solutions that enable us to think in abundance.

None of this is easy. The individuals who were on the programme now have to commit to the practice of making time for these connections to embed, and connecting this work with wider organisational planning for the future. It’s one thing for individuals to learn, but this is about culture change and organisational learning - so the next step is ongoing work to feed in knowledge and connections developed into this process to centre justice in organisational decision-making. This work takes not just personal capacity, but organisational capacity too.

We’re deeply grateful to each and every member of the cohort for stepping into this work -

• Tay Malik at WeCanMake

• Roisin Cavanagh at Friends of the Earth

• Anisa Saleh at Wen (Women's Environmental Network)

• Hannah Green at City of Sanctuary UK

• Cyril Moyo at Hope for the Future

• Sophie O’Connell at Green Alliance

• Olya K-Mehri at Institute of Domestic Violence, Religion & Migration

• Jo Petitt at Asylos

• Eloise Smith-Foster at Cooperation Sheffield

• Amy Lightfoot at Greener and Cleaner

• Sarah O’Hare at Culture for Climate Scotland

• Anna Ralph at Bristol Climate & Nature Partnership

It also takes funders to invest in collaborations that take time, and to invest in communities like the one we were able to temporarily build thanks to Paul Hamlyn Foundation Ideas & Pioneers Fund.

In order to do that, the group was clear on some things that need to be composted to make way - not just for funders, but for our sectors as a whole. A sense of urgency that does not serve the complexity of the challenges we face. Siloed working that leads to burnout and closed thinking. And most of all, the idea that climate justice, migrant justice and racial justice can exist separately without recognising they depend on each other.

This was not a programme for people already working deeply at the intersections between climate and migration justice. It was not a training, nor a series of academic or theoretical lectures or workshops.

Instead, it was an entry point for those who felt concerned or overwhelmed about injustices that felt outside their immediate remit, but who had appetite to lean into complexity and scope for influence in their organisation’s work. The idea was to see if more cross-sector understanding and collaboration could improve the decisions we make, so that our work towards one kind of justice doesn’t perpetuate other injustices.

The people on the programme have expertise that spans lived experience, community action, cultural work, legal support, campaigning, and policy influence, across climate and migration justice. Their strategies range from legal frameworks to grassroots organising, from policy and advocacy to creative storytelling - read on to see where collaborations took them.

This was a free programme funded by Paul Hamlyn Foundation. You can read more detail of the programme’s approach and aims here.

Naming our conditions

It feels important to mention the timeframe of this programme, as the journey we were on together was accompanied by a global journey very relevant to both climate and migration.

We first met in November 2025 just as the UK government’s asylum reforms made refugee status temporary, and we had our last session in March 2026 a few weeks after these reforms came into effect.

In-between we witnessed a disappointing COP-30, a surge in violent ICE raids and deaths, the rise of the far right having an impact on safety for racialised people, and ongoing destruction and displacement for Palestinians in Gaza. We ended 2025 with widespread recognition that the world is now in a new era of climate extremes, and started 2026 with a US-Israel attack that prompted the current Iran war, causing not only devastating loss of life but also both large-scale displacement and significant emissions and environmental damage.

We mention these occurrences not to be inflammatory or cause overwhelm; we mention them because these were (and are) our reality. In the lineage of Staci K Haines’ work including The Politics of Trauma (which both myself and my co-facilitator Amira Tharani have been influenced by), naming our current conditions is an important first step to finding a way through. It has felt vital throughout this journey towards collaborations to never shy away from the reality of what we are living in, as there’s been increasing recognition that we cannot respond to these crises in ways we are used to. As Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé says, “the times are urgent: let’s slow down”.

This has been particularly important as many of the global events had deeply personal consequences on people in the group. Black and brown participants spoke about tracking these changes in their bodies with spikes in racialization, concerns about safety while mobilising for climate justice and in response to rising far right violence, and in some cases grief through family connection to regions under attack. We cannot ignore that injustices related to both climate breakdown and migration disproportionately impact Black and brown people, and racial justice must be a core thread through any solutions we may find.

How we responded

Overwhelm and urgency were present at the start, given the scale of the issues we were attempting to address. This made it vital to approach our peer learning journey in a way that not only leaned into the reality of our current conditions, but also provided space for care and complexity. Another quote from Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé came to typify much of the learning from the group throughout – “What if the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis?”

And so, we slowed down. We landed in shared understanding of the context with a session with Fahmida Miah of Climate Outreach, but did not try to rush straight into solutions or collaborations – instead we started with a grounding in knowledge and investment in relationships, and moved through questions towards ideas for action. All this was guided by land and connection. This meant having a seasonal approach to the journey of the programme as a whole to give it shape as we moved from complexity to action. It also meant starting and ending every session with grounding in ourselves, a commitment and connection to each other, and the land we are on.

We started to name some of the tensions we were feeling in this work through a series of Wicked Questions - how can we respond to the interconnectedness of systems of injustice, while being able to do really deep work in one area? How can we be open and inclusive, and also hold strong boundaries around our values and principles? How can we keep space and time to explore, while ensuring that our actions have tangible impact in the shorter term?

It soon became clear through time in conversation that there were two clear yet interconnecting focuses of the group: community-led decision-making, and storytelling + narrative-building. We started organising around two questions:

• How might we (as climate, migration and racial justice organisations) collectively shape the narrative around climate migration so that justice is centred in our approach?

• How might we (as climate, migration and racial justice organisations) collectively develop community-led approaches to climate migration and adaptation so that justice is centred in our approach?

A strong feeling across both questions was the need to root both narratives and actions in people’s everyday lives, avoiding jargon - making things rooted in human experience. For people embedded deeply in justice-based work, this real-world approach sometimes gets lost amongst the systemic analyses - and we need to be careful to speak about these issues in ways that feel as real and relatable as they are.

One participant said, ‘We can cognitively craft narratives but how do we reach people’s hearts?’ In Minnesota we were seeing people activated led by a deep sense of what’s wrong - how might we sustain this activation in the longer term? Strong, caring communities are sometimes activated by extreme events like Covid or anti-ICE raids, but how do we activate it before things become extreme? How do we activate latent care as a normal day to day way of looking out for each other? How do we build narratives that lift up people’s lived experience, in a way that is about care not using an identity to further an agenda?

These questions led us deeper into collaborative organising around:

• Approaches that are rooted in human experience (connecting with people’s hearts and minds, rather than corporate/organisational speak);

• Activating strong, connected, caring communities — what are the ingredients to activate latent care before urgent crisis;

• Building up the skills to have courageous conversations whilst looking after ourselves — upskilling with care and intention for ourselves and each other;

• Centring people’s lived experience in community-led, non-extractive ways to challenge anti-migrant narratives;

• Solidarity framing — designing anti-oppression work that both understands how multiple injustices are intertwined, and brings people together;

• What can we learn from the joint exploration of regenerative and decolonial frameworks.

In part two of this reflective blog that we’ll share in the coming days, we’ll talk more about what emerged, where we got to and what next. Stay tuned, friends.

Our goal, in curating this small collection of stories, was to create an accessible counterpoint to the growing field of technical reports and policy recommendations. The collection is intended to offer more embodied insights into the realities of climate and migration injustice, and the ways it has impacted the way individuals approach their work and driven them to action.

In doing this, we hope to show how the impacts of climate breakdown and displacement reach across so many aspects of our lives, and illustrate how we all have our part to play in moving towards a justice-centred approach to climate-linked migration.

An sincere thank you to the brilliant storytellers for sharing their work with us: Emmanuela Yogolelo, Sarker Shams Bin Sharif, Fahim Rezowan Rabid, Shams Moussa, Zamzam Ibrahim and Elmi Ali.

Emmanuela Yogolelo for adapting her participatory musical storytelling piece, Tales from the Congo Basin, into an audio production for this project.

Listen here: Tales from the Congo Basin

Sarker Shams Bin Sharif and Fahim Rezowan Rabid for your animated telling of climate displacement in Bangladesh.

Watch here: Chased: The Story of Climate Displacement in Bangladesh

Shams Moussa for the incredible conversation and trust in sharing your reflections on resource extraction and home.

Read the interview here: An Interview with Shams Moussa

Zamzam Ibrahim and Elmi Ali for your brilliant collaborative and deeply personal poetic multimedia piece that explores what it means to stay grounded when the world is shifting beneath you.

Experience the piece here: How do you find balance when the ground beneath your feet starts to soften?

See the full collection and read more about how we co-designed and developed the project here: A Story Collection by Advocates, Activists and Artists

Please do get in touch if you would like to share or reproduce any of these stories, if you would like to commission further work directly with the storytellers, if you are interested in co-hosting an event, or otherwise creating a platform for these stories to be brought to new audiences - whether policy-makers, social sector organisations, city or local authorities or communities.

Opening With Honest Hope

We began with a quote from Gaia Vince’s Nomad Century which we’ve shared many times already: “The planetary nature of humanity’s crisis can feel overwhelming, and our situation hopeless. It is not… Uncertainty stops us planning, preparing, and even looking too far into the future… [We must find] the courage to envision a different way of being human.”

The line felt even more resonant now than when she wrote it. With frightening global shifts toward fascism, escalating climate breakdown, attacks on migrants, unaccountable leaders launching entire regions into conflict, and an extractive economic system controlled by tech elites, there’s a lot to worry about.

But this is exactly why we gathered. For us, this work, and this event, was about looking up and out of our own siloes and recognising that the world we want to create must be built, and we all have a role to play. When it comes to communicating about climate and migration justice, that means being honest about where we are at whilst creating stories of hope and identifying pragmatic solutions that benefit us all – across housing, health, civic infrastructure, democracy and more.

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Grounding Ourselves: Our Organising Manifesto

Together, we rooted the event in the organising manifesto that has emerged from countless conversations with many of you—both in the room and across our wider Substack community.

At its core is a simple truth: People have always moved. Movement is a natural form of adaptation. We must resist the weaponization of migration as a tool of oppression.

Migrant justice is climate justice is racial justice.

This shared grounding helped us hold the complexity of the moment while staying connected to each other and to the long arc of change we’re part of.

A Journey Through Layers: Past, Present, and Future

We then shifted into a more personal, reflective space using the Human Layers Reflection developed by Ella Saltmarshe and hosted through the Collective Imagination Toolkit (Huddlecraft and Canopy for JRF Emerging Futures).

The exercise is a powerful one, and it aimed to expand our capacities to think like good ancestors, strengthening our collective capacity to imagine beyond crisis, beyond urgency, and toward possibility.

Participants then explored two questions that opened up vivid, emotional conversation:

• What experience - professional or personal - first made climate‑linked migration feel real to you?

• What place has shaped how you think about climate or movement, and why?

These reflections helped us name what motivates us, what anchors us, and what futures we feel accountable to.

Collective Questions for Collective Futures

Next, we invited the wider group to sit alongside our peer learning cohort to explore some live, emergent collaborations, organising around two themes.

How might we—together as climate, migration, and racial justice organisations—

• shape the narrative around climate migration

• develop community‑led approaches to climate migration and adaptation

…so that justice remains at the centre of everything we do?

Already, promising collaborations are emerging:

• A NorthWest Climate Migration Circle is forming—a peer thinking and solidarity space for organisers in and around Manchester. They’re dreaming big.

• In Glasgow, an emerging new partnership between climate and migration organisations is building on, around and with strong existing progressive community infrastructure.

These are early signals of what is possible when we align our work across sectors, movements, and lived experiences. And we’ll be sharing more insight from the peer learning programme later in the year.

Practising Connection: The Offers and Needs Market

In the second half of the day, we held an Offers and Needs Market. This is a simple but transformative tool, created by the Post Growth Institute, that represents a conscious shift into a solidarity economy. It can disrupt colonial, capitalist default behaviours and unlock different ways to be in relationship with one another. It can be a simple, fast, effective way to resource a movement

Participants shared 149 offers and needs across the room.

That’s 149 opportunities for connection, collaboration, resource‑sharing, and mutual support across everyone from grassroots organisers challenging the fossil fuel and borders industries to organisations working in global mayoral diplomacy for just climate action.

It was a reminder that despite organisational ego, scarcity mindsets, and structural barriers, collaboration is not only possible—it’s already happening when we create the right conditions.

At the moment, the Offers and Needs resource is only available to those who were part of these initial conversations. But we’re exploring how we might partner with others to build a bigger, more open resource that anyone can access. For now, we’re celebrating the spirit of the day, and those 149 sparks of possibility.

If you were there, thank you for your openness, your honesty, and your imagination. If you weren’t, we hope these reflections bring you into the circle and inspire you to look around at the connections you might make beyond your immediate ecosystem as we find ways to make a just transition for all.

In this edition of our “In Conversation” series, I spoke with Jazmin Burgess, Director of Inclusive Climate Action at C40, the global network of mayors working together to deliver the urgent climate action the world needs. Jazmin leads C40’s work on inequality, inclusion, and economic justice, helping cities design climate policies that improve lives and livelihoods. The work closely touches on the needs of communities most vulnerable to climate impacts, including migrants, informal workers, and those often left behind in policy conversations. Our discussion explores how cities can lead with justice, create good green jobs, and drive climate solutions that genuinely serve everyone.

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Dami: Thank you so much for making the time to speak with me, Jazmin. I’m really looking forward to this conversation. To start, could you tell me a bit about your journey and how you came to work in the climate and urban sustainability space? What specifically drew you to C40?

Jazmin: Absolutely. I’ve been working in this space for over 15 years, but my interest started much earlier. When I began my career, the Kyoto Protocol had just been signed, and climate felt like an emerging, exciting field. What drew me in was realising that climate isn’t just an environmental issue, it’s also very fundamentally about people. My first role after university was working with refugees and migrants in inner London, which shaped my perspective on urban life, inequality, and how migration ties into wider systems. I then spent several years working on climate in the UN system and then back in London at City Hall. By then, the Paris Agreement had just been ratified, and there was a big push to figure out how to deliver climate action locally. That work connected me with C40, and I loved how they brought together my passion for international collaboration and local, city-driven action. Now, I lead our work on inequality, inclusion, and economic justice within climate solutions, which really ties together everything I’ve worked on so far.

Dami: That’s such an interesting route into the work. What would you say excites you most about working with city leaders to bring together climate action and social justice?

Jazmin: What excites me is that cities sit at the frontline. Mayors and city leaders often have a deeper understanding of inequality and social justice challenges because they see the impacts up close. They have the opportunity to create solutions that are ambitious but also people-centred.

Dami: That makes sense. So how does C40 decide which initiatives and cities to support? And what sort of projects have you been working on?

Jazmin: The unique thing about C40 is that we’re city-led, we don’t impose priorities; cities tell us what they need, and we respond. Our inclusive climate action work, which I lead, actually started because cities themselves, from both the Global North and South, were saying, “We can’t separate social and economic progress from climate action.” While we don’t have rigid selection criteria, we balance support between cities in different regions and look at their needs. Sometimes cities only need tools and case studies; other times, they need hands-on advisory support or funding to pilot solutions. For example, Barcelona trained social workers to advise vulnerable residents on energy efficiency and heatwave preparedness, helping reduce bills and energy poverty. Accra, Ghana, improved working conditions for informal waste workers who play a critical role in recycling and climate goals but often face exploitation. Through our Global Green New Deal programme, we’ve helped cities pilot inclusive, equitable climate solutions with direct funding and capacity-building support.

Dami: I love that. It can’t be easy though. When you’re working with city leaders, how do you work together to balance urgent climate interventions with the needs of marginalised communities, including those who might be displaced or affected by new policies?

Jazmin: That’s one of the biggest challenges. Often, it’s not about lacking resources but about changing ways of working. City departments tend to operate in silos. For example, the climate team might not speak regularly with teams focused on social inclusion. We help cities think more deliberately about coordination and bring in tools like equity assessments. These assess how different communities will be affected by a policy and encourage cities to involve residents early in the process. For example, if you’re rolling out a low-emission zone, you need to talk to low-income communities who might be disproportionately impacted. By engaging them upfront, you design better policies and build trust, which ultimately makes climate action more resilient and effective.

Dami: That links nicely to my next question. We often hear about “climate-resilient infrastructure” at city and neighbourhood levels. How does C40 think about supporting migrants and new arrivals in the context of the green transition, especially when it comes to creating green jobs and inclusive opportunities?

Jazmin: Yes, migration actually has a really huge role to play in the green transition. Cities thrive when they bring in new people, skills, and perspectives, but to make the transition fair, we need to ensure migrants can access the opportunities that climate action creates. We know climate action drives job creation in renewable energy, construction, waste management, and more, but those jobs don’t automatically reach those who need them most. We help cities bridge that gap. For example, London has created training programmes in green building and construction, opening pathways for young people and new migrants. Berlin has taken similar steps in developing inclusive job pipelines. In Bogotá, the city is training disadvantaged women, many formerly homeless, to become electric bus drivers. Crucially, they also focus on retention, ensuring supportive workplaces so women can stay in those roles long-term. The goal is not just to create jobs, but good jobs, ones that provide stability, dignity, and growth opportunities.

Dami: Those are such inspiring initiatives. But given how interconnected these challenges are, cities can’t tackle them alone. How does C40 support cities to build partnerships with civil society, the private sector, and other stakeholders?

Jazmin: Partnerships are essential; inclusive climate action can’t be done to communities, it has to be done with them. We support cities by encouraging resident engagement and collaboration with local organisations. Running the Inclusive Climate Action Fund, where funding criteria require cities to demonstrate how they’ll involve civil society. Providing tools like equity assessments to help identify where partnerships can make policies stronger. Promoting just transition approaches, which bring unions, workers, and affected communities into climate planning from the start. A good example is Vancouver, which partnered with disability groups to design policies responding to heatwave risks. By co-creating solutions, policies become fairer and more effective.

Dami: And as climate risks intensify, how do you see the intersection of urban planning, climate action, and migration evolving over the next five to ten years?

Jazmin: We know climate impacts like extreme heatwaves and flooding are increasing, and they disproportionately affect low-income and marginalised communities. That means cities need to plan now to address these inequalities, not as an afterthought but as a core part of climate strategy. Migration will also be a growing reality for many cities. It’s important to move away from seeing migration as a challenge in isolation and instead frame it as an opportunity, bringing in new skills, ideas, and capacities to support the green transition. Cities have a critical role in telling that story and leading by example, even when national narratives are more polarised. At C40, we’re focused on supporting mayors and city leaders to showcase inclusive, successful models that others can replicate.

Dami: To wrap up, then, when you think about your work, what does success look like, for you personally, for cities, and for the communities most affected?

Jazmin: Success, for me, looks like climate action that benefits everyone in a city, where residents aren’t just consulted but are involved in shaping and delivering solutions. It’s when climate policies don’t just reduce emissions but also lower energy bills, create jobs, and improve quality of life, especially for those who’ve been excluded in the past. At a city level, success is when mayors feel confident pursuing inclusive approaches and proud to showcase their leadership globally. On a personal level, I find motivation in seeing how tackling inequality and climate together can create more resilient, equitable, and thriving cities.

Dami: I love that holistic vision, tackling one challenge while improving so many others in the process. Thank you so much, Jazmin. I’ve genuinely learned so much from this conversation.

To learn more about C40’s work: https://www.c40.org/

And so… it’s a big moment for our small collaborative as we share with you the outcomes of an 18-month design process through which we have brought folk together to co-create an organising framework for our collective work on climate-linked migration.

Everything is connected to everything else - Barry Commoner

It’s rooted in an understanding that what affects one of us, affects all of us. And when we work in siloes, we act in just one part of a system. This limits our impact or causes consequences elsewhere. Everything is connected, but this can create overwhelm, and even paralyse.

We hope that this framework can help us to open up conversations and navigate our own roles in climate and migrant justice, whatever our background or our work. Each of us has a role to play as we reframe, repair and reconnect. So this framework is for anyone who is interested in exploring climate-linked migration.

But we’ve particularly imagined it being useful for organisations who are interested in learning more about how a climate-migration lens can help them contribute to a green and just transition for us all, collaborating across sectors, from wherever their starting point may be.

Explore the framework on our website

Explore the framework on Miro

We know that frameworks are not for everyone, and we have some other ways that you can get involved via our peer learning programmes and storytelling project. But it felt important to us to create a conceptual container to organise our thinking and as a way to communicate with each other across sectors, inspiring collaborative action.

From systems map to organising framework

Systems mapping work was one of the starting points for this project. Yet what began as a few of us doodling on a Miro board grew to encompass the perspectives of more than 80 people aged 16 to 76, studying, working and living across the UK and 20+ countries beyond. We held online workshops which helped us to evolve some systems mapping into a co-created, action-oriented organising framework. We also field-tested an early version of this framework with students of transformative systems change at a coastal campus in Wales, just a few miles from a village at risk of catastrophic flooding due to climate change.

We’ve come to see this framework as an offering to the wider field as we identify leverage points in our systems where we can start to demonstrate new models and practices across diverse domains as well as spotlighting examples of work that are already inspired by a climate-migration lens.

Ultimately, we hope to inspire understanding of the ways in which climate justice, migrant justice and racial justice are deeply interconnected, and to highlight the ways in which our systems, institutions and infrastructure uphold these injustices. We hope to catalyse fresh thinking around how these structures can be reoriented towards a justice-centred approach that supports the ‘right to stay’ and the ‘right to move’ as we experience climate breakdown. And we hope that it will be used to catalyse intersectional collaborations to that end.

Using the Framework

Exploring the framework at your desk - our framework is hosted on our Notion website and is structured for easy navigation if you are seeking to familiarise yourself with the work, and start sharing it with others

Exploring the framework with a group - if you are ready to start interacting with the framework and using it with a group, we have a version of the framework hosted on a Miro board. You can make a copy, experiment, use it to catalyse conversation. You can also use it as a jumping off point for a deep dive into a particular theme or leverage point.

Taking the framework off the page - if you’d like to run a workshop using this framework in person, it’s quite easy to map out the building blocks onto sheets of flip chart paper, just as students did at UWC Atlantic College last year (see pic above from their workshop) then get creative with post-its, sticky dots and marker pens!

What next?

We’d love to see individuals and organisations engaging with the framework, and letting us know how it lands with your teams. We’d really warmly welcome your feedback as we can only improve it and unlock more impact with your help!

Our first engagement working with the complete framework will be at Goldsmiths, University of London, where Anthropology students on the Critical Ecologies module will be joining a workshop that we’re designing to explore climate and migrant justice from a systems perspective.

We’re also speaking to organisations who would like to commission a workshop or learning programme for their own organisation to explore and unpack the framework in their own context as they work to centre climate justice, migrant justice and racial justice in their work. Whether you’re an environmental charity, a housing project, a health service, a green jobs scheme or a community asset builder, we’d love to hear from you!

In the meantime, we’ll be developing some facilitation prompts and exercises to support engagement with the framework and hope to be sharing these as open source materials early next year. You, our lovely Substack subscribers, will be the first to hear when they are ready!

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Finally, a shout-out to the Climate and Migration team at Climate Outreach who are hosting an online event on 26th November Local to global: How diaspora communities mobilise climate action, chaired by Fahmida Miah. Click here for info and registration.

This comes against the backdrop of Belém’s COP30, where the slogan “Global Mutirão” has been celebrated (originally from the Tupi-Guarani language), meaning ‘collective efforts’ and encouraging action worldwide.

So we are really excited to share that we are now developing a collection of stories from people working across the climate and migration sectors who have also been personally impacted by climate and migration injustice. We hope that this collection – a more accessible counterpoint to an often overly technical array of reports and policy recommendations - will offer more human insights into the realities of climate and migration injustice, and the ways it has impacted the way individuals approach their work and driven them to action. In doing this, we hope to show how the impacts of climate breakdown and displacement reach across so many aspects of our lives, and illustrate how we all have our part to play in moving towards a justice-centred approach to climate-linked migration.

If you are interested in participating in this project, please fill out our brief Expression of Interest Form.

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The Call to Action

Our goal in sharing this collection of stories is for people to gain insight not only into what it means to navigate a journey of climate-related migration, but also how those journeys inform organisational strategy and programme design, and otherwise shape the perspectives of the individuals who make collaborative and creative programming, service delivery and advocacy possible. These stories are from our colleagues, programme participants, community leaders, and members of our working groups; they are the people who design, build, implement, and make creative, impactful cross-sectoral work a reality.

How we hope to do this work

We are inviting people working in the climate and migration sectors who would like to share their story to co-design this project with us. There are myriad ways to tell stories, and we want to co-develop the approach, the priority outcomes, as well as what the final collection can look like. We will facilitate an initial open listening space to those who are interested in the co-design process to establish a shared approach to story collection/creation and distribution.

We are open to written submissions from writers who already know what they want to say and how, but we are also open to creative formats including art, poetry and music. For those newer to storytelling, we will offer a more facilitated, interview space to support the storytelling process. What’s most important to us is that storytellers feel a strong sense of their own agency to shape their story with authenticity and humanity, centering justice, joy and community where we find it. The stories will always belong to the storytellers, but we ask their permission to share these on Climate Migration Collaborative platforms (website, socials, Substack). They will never be reproduced elsewhere without storytellers’ permission.

What do we hope to achieve by sharing these stories?

Our primary audience is individuals and organisations working across key domains that intersect with climate justice, migrant justice and racial justice. These include health, housing, civic infrastructure, education, democracy and narrative building.

Through these stories we hope to connect the personal realities of climate and migration injustice to the creative, collaborative work that is being done on the ground. These stories are meant to elucidate the realities of climate-linked migration, and inspire the development of more collaborative work across the climate and migration sectors from our colleagues and partners who understand it through their personal and professional experiences.

Time Commitment

The time taken to be a part of this process will vary but should not be more than 6 hours, unless you choose to stay involved in other parts of our work, of course!

Payment

We know that significant emotional labour goes into telling a personal story, as well as the actual time taken to build a relationship with us, help us co-design the work, share your story, and provide editorial input into the final version (review, comment, approve). We are working with a modest overall budget, but can offer £300-450 to each storyteller (depending on whether you’re employed/freelance). If you would prefer non-financial compensation, talk to us about alternative options e.g. a professional headshot, coaching session or something else that we haven’t thought of. For anyone who is sharing their story for the first time, we can also offer guidance on how to prepare and decide what you would like to share/not share.

A note on developing this concept: This concept was shaped by a number of generous people who took the time to advise and share what good practice in storytelling looks like for them. They helped shape this concept into something that centres care, agency, purpose and impact. Thanks especially to: Fahmida Miah (Climate Outreach), Eloise Smith-Foster (Falay Transition Design), Yazan Miri (JCWI), Dami Makinde (Justice Together Initiative), ZamZam Ibrahim (Somalis for Sustainability/UAL AKO Storytelling Institute Advisory Board).

And finally - if you feel inspired to immerse yourself in some of the amazing storytelling out there already - why not get involved in Our Shared Futures – Climate & Migration Community Film Festival curated by Counterpoints Arts in partnership with City of Sanctuary, the Climate Migrant Justice Organising Group and Earth Refuge. Its running 21-30 Nov 2025 - you can host a showing, find one near you, or simply register to watch at home.

Dami: Thank you so much, Hannah, for agreeing to take part in our ‘In Conversation” series. I'm so grateful to be sitting down with you and talking about the important work you're doing. Could you tell us a bit more about why you specifically chose to focus on this area, and the communities you work with?

Hannah: Of course, we are Centric Lab, and we focus on building infrastructures that support communal healing and advance health justice. We utilise data and scientific evidence to do this, often through community-based research. This means we work with various groups, such as those affected by air pollution, obesity, and migration, to understand their experiences of health and the factors influencing it. In our research, we aim to both expose the systems that impact these communities and create healing pathways that offer solutions.

Dami: Could you explain what these healing pathways look like?

Hannah: Healing pathways can vary depending on the group. We work with different communities in different ways. One approach has been a community member holding "healing circles" with people with shared experiences, creating kinship, space for healing and psychosocial interventions. Another approach is co-producing tools, like community health impact assessments, where people evidence their own experiences. This is like a tool against "gaslighting," where communities are often told their health issues are simply a result of their demographic background. Instead, we help them recognise that these issues are often caused by larger systemic factors. Through our work, we aim to provide knowledge, emotional support, and self-advocacy tools to enable people to feel empowered in their health journeys.

Dami: I really appreciate the work you’re doing, particularly around healing justice, which has clearly adopted a wide systemic lens including migration, climate and racial justice. Could you explain what healing justice means to you, and why it’s so important to keep intersectional injustices at the centre of these conversations?

Hannah: Healing justice, to us, is about ensuring that everyone has the opportunity, resource and space to collectively heal. Some of the people we work with are survivors of displacement, genocide, or other historical harms, and that trauma often gets passed down. For some, healing might be re-matriating to the Land with community, or for others it is to experience joy in times of precarity, for others still that could be finding their agency. We believe that healing is about being able to return to a state of equilibrium, rather than living in a state of constant stress. This is especially important in the context of migration and displacement, as people are experiencing the ongoing stress of movement, discrimination, and other forms of structural violence. We see health as ecological; our well-being is intertwined with the health of our environment, the air we breathe, and the communities we belong to. We cannot thrive if we are simply replicating those structural and ecological harms that have caused displacement in the first place.

Dami: So, recovering from trauma involves the healing of not just bodies but communities, relationships, and the environments people inhabit. That makes so much sense. It’s fascinating how you provide both the infrastructure and the tools, allowing communities to shape their own narratives. That’s a unique approach. So in your experience, how does climate-linked migration intersect with health, and how might displacement affect our health in unexpected ways?

Hannah: Displacement is a highly stressful experience, both physically and emotionally. When people are displaced, they lose a sense of belonging and stability, which directly impacts their health, they may not only be displaced from place, but also their imaginations. Moving from one place to another also means adjusting to new diets, living conditions, and environments. People could experience health challenges simply because their bodies have to adapt suddenly to new air, water, and food sources. Moreover, displacement can exacerbate the mental health impacts of stress, as people struggle with the loss of community and familiarity. Even basic functions like sleep and digestion can be affected, as displacement introduces multiple layers of adaptation that impact our bodies in subtle but profound ways.

Dami: So, this disruption isn't just a temporary effect; it can have long-term health consequences, including an increased vulnerability to physical illnesses and mental health conditions. In this context then, since we know that migration isn't just a political or economic phenomenon, but a climate-driven issue as well, how do we respond to migration that occurs in response to environmental disasters, pollution, and the degradation of land? It's an increasingly pressing issue, and it's one that isn't just affecting communities in the Global South.

Hannah: Migration is often framed in terms of crisis, as if people have no other option but to move. But migration, in many ways, is a form of adaptation. People are responding to environmental changes and moving is indeed adaptive, but these changes are also the result of a long history of exploitation of people and their territories.

Dami: And this is where the concept of "sacrifice zones" comes into play. Areas heavily affected by pollution or environmental degradation often become dumping grounds for industry, with little regard for the health and well-being of the people living there. Yet, when these communities migrate, whether internally or across borders, labelled as ‘climate refugees’, they are likely to face continued environmental harm, including exposure to air pollution or mouldy housing.

Hannah: Yes, and I think the language of climate refugees can be really problematic here. It’s often used in a way that dehumanises people and turns them into a problem to be solved - or a threat - rather than recognising the structural forces that are pushing people to migrate. When we talk about climate migration, we need to understand that these people aren't just fleeing environmental disasters, they're often fleeing the systems and violences that created those disasters in the first place. The idea that people are migrating because of climate change (flooding, drought, heatwaves) can obscure the underlying causes, like colonialism, exploitation, or economic systems that make certain populations vulnerable. Plus, the term "climate refugee" is often used to evoke fear, which can fuel anti-immigrant sentiment and dehumanise those affected. We need to reframe the conversation around migration and climate in a way that acknowledges the broader structural injustices at play and gives people agency rather than presenting them as solely victims of a natural disaster.

Dami: Absolutely, the language we use can have a huge impact on how people are perceived and treated. How do you think narratives around climate migration could better humanise the experience of displaced people?

Hannah: The first step is to focus on the human stories behind the migration. Instead of viewing climate migration as faceless and en masse (language such as ‘influx’ or ‘wave’) we need to understand the experiences and struggles that lead people to move. It’s about acknowledging that migration is not an easily made choice, but a survival strategy in response to environmental destruction and systemic injustices. By focusing on the lived experiences of people, their contexts and histories, we can shift the narrative away from one of fear and threat to one of resilience and agency. We need to move away from language that portrays displaced people as a political problem to be solved, and instead see them as people with their own stories, struggles, and strengths.

Dami: So to truly address the root causes of climate migration, we need to move beyond labels and understand the structural forces at play, such as colonialism, industrialisation, and environmental degradation, and humanise the experience of those affected. What do you think cities of the future can do to recognise this truth, and truly design with climate change, migration and health in mind?

Hannah: I used to work in city-level climate action, supporting the development of climate adaptation and mitigation plans. However, I’ve come to realise that there’s so much more to creating a resilient city than just adding green spaces or sustainable urban drainage systems. A city can have all the green space in the world, but if people don’t have time to spend in it, or if they’re working long hours in stressful conditions, then it’s not going to make a meaningful difference to their health. I think what’s more important is creating environments where people feel safe and are dignified, where they have time to connect with their environments and each other. It’s not just about designing beautiful cities; it’s about designing systems that ensures people can actually experience these spaces in a way that improves their well-being. For cities to truly support health, migration and climate justice, they need to be designed around the lived experiences of the people who inhabit them.

Dami: So it’s about creating spaces that support not just physical health, but emotional and social well-being too. Spaces that allow people to feel safe, to feel connected to each other, and to nature. So - a call to prioritise well-being over productivity, and connection over efficiency - that feels like a fitting pause in our conversation. Thank you so much Hannah for joining us.

To learn more about Centric Lab’s work: https://www.thecentriclab.com/

If you’d like to go deeper into conversation about the intersections of climate, migration, racial justice, health, education, housing, economic justice and more, do sign up on our website for our peer learning series kicking off in October: Climate Migration Collaborative.

This programme of peer learning is for people who:

• either work in climate or migration justice, work in other spaces - from housing to health to education to democracy - but have climate or migration as a key part of their focus

• are not already working deeply at the intersections between climate and migration justice

• have scope for influence in their organisation’s work on climate and/or migration

• are able and willing to commit to learning together over several months, and bringing colleagues to a sharing event in person in February.

We are inviting people to learn alongside us as we explore:

• What does more cross-sector collaboration look like, and how can it catalyse more holistic, justice-oriented strategy and action?

• How could more cross-sector collaboration improve the decisions we make, so that our work towards one kind of justice doesn’t perpetuate other injustices?

Why peer learning?

We want to build better individual and collective understanding of how climate and migration justice intersect, and for people working in these spaces to have more confidence to incorporate these combined justice-oriented perspectives into their work.

We aren’t qualified to do that through training - there are people out there who are doing brilliant work at these intersections (see our Substack!). Instead, we are coming at this as a group of collaborators who want to hold space for people to explore, question, and connect over the complexities of making sure that working towards one form of justice doesn’t hold back pursuit of another.

Theodora Cadbury, an experienced peer learning facilitator, will be holding the space for the duration of the programme - with input and guests who bring different kinds of expertise.

What will it look like?

This is a new offering that we are trialling, that we are able to offer for free thanks to funding from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. That means we can experiment and learn together, and see if this is something we might want to repeat.

For this pilot version, we will bring together up to 10 people for:

• 5 online peer learning sessions

• 1 in-person event, which participants will be asked to invite a colleague to share some of the learning more widely in their organisation

When will the sessions take place?

We have set aside the following days and times, however we are open to changing some of these if needed once we have gathered a cohort.

Tuesday mornings 10am - 12 noon, on Zoom:

• 21st Oct

• 18th Nov

• 9th Dec

• 13th Jan

• 24th March

In person event in London: w/c 23rd Feb (exact date tbc)

If you want to take part, but will have difficulty with any of the dates, please still get in touch.

If you're curious about how to bring these perspectives into your work, and perhaps spark collaboration across sectors, we hope you'll join us!

This is especially for practitioners working across sectors, where we’ll gather to learn together, creating connections and finding entry points into this space.

To express your interest, fill out the Expression of Interest form before 30th September: Expression of Interest

As facilitators, strategists and communicators, we aren’t technical policy specialists nor are we experts by experience. When we paused to think about what is ours to do within this complex ecosystem, our role as peers, sense-making, network weaving and catalysing collaborations, made most sense to us as a way to build in this field.

So we are now working on three offerings:

1. Peer learning Climate-linked migration is a complex and nuanced topic; migration as a form of adaptation to climate change is already happening and it's set to significantly shape how we live in the decades ahead. Anticipating, preparing for and welcoming people displaced or choosing to move due to climate change is a whole of society challenge and a core part of a just transition to a green and fair economy. It’s definitely not just for people working in the climate or migration sectors! And yet, it can be tricky to understand or talk about in ways that centre justice. We are exploring interest in creating a short peer learning series where we’ll come together to discuss the issues and learn together, creating connections and finding entry points into this space. We’d really like to hear from you on this - what type of learning spaces you’d like to join, what you’d like to explore, and what you’d hope to get out of it. If you’d like to help us think this through, have ideas, or simply to join our pilot cohort waitlist, contact Julia. Our learning work will be funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, so there is no financial cost to participating.

2. Storytelling One of the reasons for starting this project was to amplify the voices of people with lived experience of climate-linked migration, creating a platform for people to tell their stories and share their insights. We see this as a way to bring a more human lens - and agency - to huge, existential questions that can feel overwhelming. Whilst members of our collaborative bring lived experience of different dimensions of these intersectional injustices, we know that storytelling specifically around climate-linked migration will be a powerful tool to build understanding and catalyse action. Mindful to centre dignity, care and trauma-informed approaches in our work, we’re now exploring the idea of curating an anthology of stories offering insights and entry points to people learning about the issues whilst centring the voices of directly impacted folk. As we start to develop the concept, we’re seeking partners to travel alongside - please reach out if you work with people directly impacted by different dimensions of climate change and migration and would be interested to talk. And, if you recognise climate change as a dimension to your own migration story, and you’d like to explore sharing it with others, do get in touch. Olivia is leading for the collaborative on this strand of work - get in touch Olivia here.

3. Organising framework Systems mapping work was one of the starting points for this project. Following a real-time collaboration on the map through a convening in January, this has now evolved into a co-created organising framework. We’re progressing this framework with the aim of publishing it later this year after further rounds of testing with friends and partners. We see this framework as an offering to the wider field as we identify and spotlight leverage points in the system where we can start to demonstrate models and practices across diverse domains that anticipate, prepare for and welcome people who migrate due to climate change. If you would be interested to join a small group offering diverse individual and organisational perspectives on how our framing lands with you, and how you could imagine using the framework to activate others, contact Julia. The total time commitment would be no more than 1-2 hours.

Whilst more detailed invitations to engage in these projects will follow, do drop us a line if you are interested to play a part in any of these projects. The theme of Refugee Week is “Community As A Superpower” which feels very resonant to us - our core organising circle is small and we can’t do it alone, we hope that you - our community - will come along with us!

As we build these projects, we’ll also continue to learn out loud. We think that sharing what we know, what we don’t know, and what is emerging is a meaningful way to show that you don’t have to be an expert to learn together, to express solidarity, take action, spotlight injustices, and come together to find new ways of being in community, locally and globally.

Olivia: I would love to hear a little bit about your work and Radical Ecology. How did it all start?

Ashish: I have been a racial justice activist for as long as I can remember. In my mid-20s, I did a lot of work in Palestine and I was involved in setting up a project called the Freedom Theatre, whilst working as a university lecturer. In 2014-16, I made a feature documentary about the war on terror through the testimony of a former Guantanamo detainee. So that’s just a little bit of background.

I think there has always been a kind of anti- or de-colonial basis to what I do, but in the last 10 years that became really explicit in my work. If our movements aren't rooted in anti-colonial solidarity between racialized peoples then we are contained within a kind of ethnic nationalism and we will struggle to move forward and create something new.

By about 2019, I was a member of a grassroots collective called Wretched of the Earth, focusing on engaging communities of colour and young people around the climate crisis. This is around the time when there was a sudden, global mainstream interest in climate change precipitated by Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg and also by big capitalist organizations like BlackRock and investment banks where all these entities were coming forward with their net-zero pledges. I found myself holding a ball at that time that was much in demand: climate justice.

Radical Ecology emerged out of the aftermath of all that. As I was doing more work on climate justice, I recognised that infrastructures for a kind of white environmentalism were being developed very fast, while there was relatively little infrastructure for climate justice. It became harder to keep advocating for the role of racial justice within that, so Radical Ecology is what came next for me and the hope that it could become a kind of house for climate justice, which I felt was and still feel is very much needed.

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Olivia: I'm curious about your relationship with the existing environmentalist infrastructures in the UK. How do you work with or navigate those very white environmentalist spaces you reference?

Ashish: There always has to be a diversity of tactics, and there has to be an element of collaboration too. Radical Ecology was established in December 2021 and, in a lot of ways, it was about collaboration from the outset.

I instigated a research project with one of the UK's leading climate scientists at the University of Exeter. We did great research that also became a project of participatory public engagement with questions coming out of the climate science that we had been working on together, where we had been utilising a racial justice lens to look at the extent to which models around climate economics had been historically devaluing the lives of black and brown people.

We were able to offer alternative models that pointed to very different kinds of data. Shocking data that revealed the likelihood of 2 billion people - 1/5 of the human population - being displaced outside of a zone on the earth that humans have historically been able to survive in. These are people who are, by and large, black and brown, racialized people.

Those numbers ended up being reported in Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, The Times of India and about 160 publications around the world.

So, that process of collaboration… I really believe in it, but it is exhausting. There's always a point when you realize, even in spite of success, that the community you're collaborating with - the climate science sector, museums, heritage organisations… They do have different priorities. They’re dipping their toes in racial justice, but it’s not what drives them and you pull apart. It makes you want to walk away. And sometimes you have to. Like in a relationship. But there has to be an openness; you've got to be ready to come back, even if that’s at risk of being hurt again. It’s the price you pay for commitment to creating something new. Then as you do come back into it, you have to stand for something more. There has to be strategy for increased autonomy, increased independence. Your goal has got to be systemic transformation, the creation of a new world, nothing less. Right?

Olivia: Can you say a little bit more about the role of art or the practice of storytelling in bringing people into these complicated, nuanced conversations of politics?

Ashish: My work's always been about self expression as a tool for the self empowerment of marginalized communities. It has always been about a form of advocacy: voice, witness, representation. But then I think that something new has started too.

I think we’re often encouraged to think of the climate crisis as a technical problem as opposed to a political problem. There’s been a lot of distrust in the mainstream climate movements about the climate justice movement - that we're making it all about race when it's all about carbon. But I think that it's useful to understand both the climate crisis - and the failure of all human beings today to do anything effective about the climate crisis - as outcomes of culture.

They are the outcomes of hundreds and thousands of years of culture evolving in a particular way. And you get to a point where you're stuck, because, actually, you embody that culture. You inhabit that culture. It's all of our lives; it's what holds it all together. There's no such thing as a technical problem or a political problem that is not, fundamentally, also a cultural problem.

So, for me, I think one of the discoveries of Radical Ecology, in terms of practice and methodology, has been that realization that actually it's only through culture that we can address these issues.

It's only at the point that an alternative culture - one that knows a different way of living in relation to global warming & racial inequality - emerges that we can become unstuck. A big part of my process or reflection or research has been to consider that question: Where did this culture come from? How does a culture emerge?

And it becomes really clear to me that in this process artists are such crucial actors. And it might not always be very apparent, and it might not appear to be the solution that is required by this particular problem at this particular moment, but I really believe in the place of artists as these key instigators of world-making. I think artists are already, in lots of ways, creating new worlds that are the response to these inherited histories of empire and industrialized, carbon-intensive civilization.

I believe that, actually, if we were able to better understand the possibility of our artistic infrastructure for making new worlds, then we could create the structures that allow artists to recognize that impulse in themselves. We can shift away from this capitalist inclination to create art because it sells, and instead evolve and develop these alternative infrastructures.

I think that's what Radical Ecology is attempting. In a tiny way, because we're tiny, but it's the case that we're constantly trying to make. We attempt to create these treasured spaces where you can actually be yourself in alignment with a kind of sustainable and liveable future. We’re always thinking strategically about the conditions for growth, like gardeners: how do we bring these things together and allow them to grow and survive? I always imagine what we’re doing as a decolonial model that stands in contrast to this dominant, white supremacist culture. If we plant a seed and leave it, then it will just be subsumed within the greater cultural ecosystem that surrounds it, but if we nurture it over time, it might actually become the stronger ecosystem.

Olivia: You said so many good things. I don't know where to start. It feels like we're in this moment where art and the role of art is so at risk. I feel like there is this presumed supremacy of science and statistics, and we see this devaluing of arts and humanities and culture everywhere. It's just so refreshing to hear this deep consideration of how we need to reinvest in art and different ways of knowing. I would love to hear about your exhibition, Sensing the Planet, that explores these intersections of climate and racial justice you’ve been talking about.

Ashish: If Radical Ecology has been one pole, then Sensing the Planet reflects the other twin pole of my engagement over the last 3-4 years in response to these questions of What is Art? and How do we do it in ways that will lead us towards sustainable and liveable futures? There's a very personal journey that is revealed through the works in the exhibition.

So back in 2021, I co-curated a symposium in South Devon, also called Sensing the Planet, in response to COP26. At Wretched of the Earth, I had been working as a political strategy lead for the Civil Society Coalition for COP26, but in the end I decided not to go; it felt like we were amplifying the circus of a big intergovernmental pageant. I didn’t think we were asking let alone answering the right question. The symposium was my response to that. The estate where the symposium was hosted was owned in the 16th century by the uncle of Walter Raleigh. From nearby Plymouth, the first slave ship was commissioned by John Hawkins, and the first plantations in North America were established from boats that went out from this region of Southwest England.

This current exhibition has emerged from this ongoing reflection of England’s colonization of the new world and its shaping of place, this place - southwest England. It explores questions of decolonization, these questions of seed and cultivation and the possibility of nurturing a new ecosystem from here, in the historic heartland of European empire, of white supremacy, and of climate breakdown.

Back in 2021, we brought together activists, artists and thinkers to really dig into that and ask the question: how does a new world come into being? The community that we've cultivated since - the artists that we work with in Radical Ecology - are now so much a part of the fabric of the work and the place.

Seeing it all together in one place, there was a real sense of achievement, and I think there was also the realisation that this is all very, very personal. I hadn't quite realized that. My voice is in a lot of it: it narrates. My grandmother's portrait is in it; the secrets of her Gujarati dal recipe, which I was taught by my father, is in it. The death of my father is a story that's told there.

But it dovetails with histories like the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya, and the arrival of refugees from Uganda in the 1970s, and stories of villages subsiding into the sea on the South Devon coast in 1917. Some people that know me quite well mentioned that the exhibition also features a photo-diary of my daily walk - pictures I’ve taken, on that loop that I do every day. Those works - pictures of Himalayan Balsam ripped out of the ground - are about that walk, and on seeing the exhibition I suddenly had this real sense of the topography that informs the exhibition. The immediate topography that I open my front door out onto looks up towards the granite tors of Dartmoor, which were once connected to the landmass of Africa on the equator. They were these volcanic eruptions that were just oozing lava for hundreds of millions of years, and eventually disconnected from the African continent and started to drift. I see it every day. That story offers this real connection that we have to geological time and a scale that we inhabit that's very, very different from our daily timeline.

Olivia: I have a question about the local and the global, and the personal and the public. Your use of local archival footage, your community work, your deeply personal experiences in the region, even your daily walk is represented in this exhibition. You take these highly localised pieces and expand them outward to the world and the climate. I think this is always a question in the work of any social movement regarding scale: Is the local work more impactful? Should we work on the regional scale? These aren’t isolated systems, they are all interconnected, but I'm curious if you can reflect a little bit on the role of art in being able to connect the local and the global?

Ashish: This is such a good question. Both within Radical Ecology and my personal practice, this has been a central question that has driven the work. I believe that the great obstacle to climate justice, or environmental justice, is that we perceive the local and the global to be opposed, and a lot of my work really picks up on that perceived tension.

Years ago, before his death, I had the opportunity to speak with James Lovelock - a theorist that formulated the Gaia hypothesis. We discussed this. That one of the problems around climate action right now is that we perceive the planet in the abstract, as though its totality is something that only astronauts and satellites could ever interact with. So, how do we culturally move beyond the idea of this distinction between the planetary and the local?

I feel like I've been sitting on that question for four years. I think the first stage is the realization that the planet is all around us, above us, underneath us. But what is the difference between the planet that we perceive locally and the local that provincializes? In my piece, Can You Tell the Time of a Running River?, the action was as simple as me getting into a river, but it's framed in a way that's designed to give you a sense that the river is a being in itself, that it’s existing on an entirely different temporality from the temporality of a human body.

Olivia: I love that. I think we, as a culture, need to be more humbled by what we're surrounded by every day. This idea that I will never be as old as this mountain; this river will run long after I’m gone. I think the world would be better if more people felt that. And artists play a critical role in determining how we can shift away from a dominant culture of exploitation and extraction.

Ashish: I think it's one of the arguments of the exhibition. If we can start to perceive the planet as all around us, as embedded in the local, we can then start to perceive geographical distance in ways that are part of this great unity. We're actually very connected.

Sensing the Planet is currently open and runs until 26 April 2025 at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery in East Devon.

“I really came away a bit blown away by the role we can each play in this work. It provided some extra dots to connect up our work that I didn’t even realise were missing. A different lens to see how we can create links between local community action and big systems thinking ideas”

Event participant working in neighbourhood transformation

A space for collective learning and action

In her work on fractals, adrienne maree brown reminds us that “what we practice at a small scale can reverberate to the largest scale”1. It is with this spirit that we convened a group of almost forty folk in an online session in January, to both participate in and help shape a map of the systems at the intersections of climate and migration.

This first gathering was not about showcasing expertise but about learning together through connection and exploration. We are deeply grateful not only to our speakers Noora Firaq, Denis Kierans and Yumna Kamel, whose lightning talks offered insights and provocation, but to everyone who joined us, shared their perspectives, and participated in the mapping and shaping of this collective effort.

Why a shift from map to framework?

We chose to begin our journey with a systems map as a way of sense-making across complexity, plotting out the different sectors, institutions and types of infrastructure that reinforce - but can potentially also disrupt and reimagine - peoples’ experience of climate justice, migrant justice and racial justice. It was also a way of creating some boundaries around our enquiry which has the potential to be limitless. There is after all already excellent work happening at the climate-migration nexus in the policy and advocacy space at the international level as well as emergent work in-country and in-region around the world.

So our enquiry is almost a foresight practice, inviting an exploration of what a society that centres justice in its approach to climate and migration might look like in the UK. It starts from an understanding that we have a moral, historical, economic, ecological and social duty to anticipate patterns of climate-linked migration, to prepare and to welcome. We believe that to do this well, we need to start organising, building and creating models, precedents, proof of possibility in the here and now. Beyond the theoretical and into the messy space of working together across sectors, siloes and even across divergent world-views.

And still, as we engaged deeper in conversation, our hunch that we needed to evolve from a systems map to a form of organising framework was reinforced. Rather than attempting to map whole complex systems in their overlapping entirety, a framework allows people to see for themselves clear entry points that align with their work. Entry points that might be in grassroots organising, in pioneering new forms of civic infrastructure or in exploring the possibilities that applying a climate-migration lens to your work might unlock together with others.

We know that any transformative, collaborative action is built on relationships and trust cultivated over time. Creating a framework, then, is no silver bullet, but rather an invitation to engage in the work, a tool to weave connections, and a way to link intersecting efforts.

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Key themes emerging from the convening

We noticed several key themes surfacing from our discussions. These will shape how we continue to refine and communicate our framework:

1. Climate Justice = Migrant Justice = Racial Justice

There was strong consensus on the centring of climate justice, migrant justice, and racial justice as interwoven struggles. This approach resonated widely and reinforced the thinking and analysis that has gone before us and which we had used as a start point for our mapping.

2. Acknowledging multiple forms of intersectionality

Participants also highlighted the importance of ensuring that all forms of injustice and marginalization are represented, including gender, sexuality, feminism, patriarchy, and disability. These intersections have been implicit in our approach, and we’re now thinking about how we might make these explicit.

3. Recognizing power dynamics and decolonising our approach

We are, alongside many others, working towards a decolonial practice, calling us to address power dynamics within our organizing, recognising the inherent conflict in doing this work whilst working in a fundamentally colonial context. We hold this tension as we engage with existing structures and realities in the here and now. As we seek ways to bridge between current and future systems, we want to be intentional and explicit about what we can learn about climate and migration intersections from all existing forms of knowledge, including ancestral and indigenous knowledge, and lived and living experience. For us this means not only rejecting hegemony, binaries and separation in favour of collaborative complexity, or living in ways that are in balance with our ecology, but also recognising migration as natural adaptation practiced across the planet and all its inhabitants. So, what we are saying is not new, and the insights we surface are built on the wisdom of those who have gone before us. But we need more people to come into dialogue with these ideas. So whilst this work is partly about field-building at these nascent intersections, let’s not intellectualize or professionalize but rather seek to unlearn, learn and re-learn together as we bring together an ever wider group of people, outside of our existing echo chambers.

4. A safe and reciprocal approach to centering the voices of people with lived experience

There was wide agreement on the importance of people with lived experience of intersecting injustices being central to shaping understanding and action in this work. There was also a recognition that this must be done in ways that are safe, reciprocal and meaningful. Our growing platform, including this Substack, affords us the opportunity to share the stories of people with lived experience of overlapping climate, migration, and racial injustices. Ensuring a real clarity of purpose in this work will ensure that we do this in a reciprocal way, ensuring that these lived experiences shape the work rather than tokenize individuals, whilst bringing first-hand insights to new audiences.

5. Mapping themes without reinforcing siloes

As we continue to develop this framework in a way that is accessible and meaningful, especially to those not already engaged in this work, we’re reflecting on whether domain mapping - articulating the potential role of the housing sector, the healthcare sector and so on - risks reinforcing existing silos. Are there alternative ways to represent the work that would feel more inclusive? We want this framework to be an entry point for people across different movements and sectors. Part of our work ahead is figuring out how to communicate these intersections effectively—ensuring the framework is useful to those within the climate and migration sectors, but also to those working in areas that may not yet see their connection to this work.

6. Naming the need to reimagine our economic systems

We’ve touched on the injustices embedded in our current economic systems in previous blogs, but our framework doesn’t yet explicitly name the need to reimagine this system. Until now, we’ve seen these as implicit in our analysis. As we refine this framework, we must explicitly name new forms of economic system, concepts like ‘solidarity economy’2, that prioritise collective well-being over profit, which we must draw on as we all step up to play our part in a justice-centred approach to climate and migration in the years and decades ahead.

What’s Next?

We think the coming months will involve refining the framework further based on our learning so far, exploring and developing engagement pathways to understand how different groups want to connect with us, each other and to this work, and finding ways to do that, rooted in relational practices that build trust as an essential building block towards catalysing new forms of collaboration. Part of this work will include writing and storytelling that helps people both within and beyond the climate and migration sectors see how these issues intersect with their own work and lives.

This work is evolving, and, as ever, we invite you to be part of shaping it. If you have thoughts on any of these themes, or this piece has sparked an idea for a collaboration, do reach out us via Substack, on our LinkedIn page or directly to Julia.

“Whilst immediate actions to adapt to the impacts of global temperature rises remain necessary, the focus on this alone risks only dealing with climate breakdown on a symptomatic level, and creating new industries of growth and extraction.”1

CIVIC SQUARE

Climate-linked migration is already happening - within and across borders - and will without doubt happen on a larger scale in the coming decades. Given that even best-case scenarios forecast significant further global heating, we must respond to these patterns while also taking action to mitigate against the inevitability of such devastating climatic shifts.

So what might these patterns of migration look like?

In response to these climatic shifts, many people move a short distance, within home countries or into neighbouring countries, just far enough to escape immediate peril. This is particularly the case during sudden on-set events such as flooding, with the intention of returning home if possible. Some people don’t move at all, either trapped in place or making impossible decisions at great risk to their own safety.

Other times, more complex migrations patterns are established, often in contexts where decent livelihoods and hope for a secure future are gradually diminishing. This is particularly the case for those experiencing slow on-set climate changes such as drought, desertification or sea level rises which can often also exacerbate conflict and loss of livelihoods2. Movement across borders, in these cases, are often attributed to a complex array of interconnected risks including climate, conflict, access to work or education, or put simply, the search for a better life.

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Climate justice is migrant justice is racial justice

We support the right to stay as much as the right to move3, and stand in solidarity with those working to mitigate against climate change such that people are able to stay in their homelands and are not forcibly displaced.

We also recognise that movement in response to a changing environment is why humanity exists today. There are in fact long, historical precedents for this4. What’s more, in the UK, Britain’s colonial legacies continue to play out with many seeking sanctuary in a place with a shared heritage, language and family networks, despite the empire’s violent underpinnings5.

Yet, as more than a decade of a ‘hostile environment’ for migrants has shown, with its impacts surfacing clearly in the racist riots this summer, people seeking sanctuary have been made to feel unwelcome, unsafe and, in many cases, traumatised, in the UK.

At the same time, we also recognise the UK’s historical, disproportionate and ongoing role in contributing to global heating and see the welcoming of people seeking sanctuary as a form of reparative justice. In the wider context of a planet that has been deeply harmed by industrial economies, the effects are felt most acutely by racialised Majority World communities who played far less part in creating those harms.

We must “challenge the narratives that try to sanitise or whitewash the root causes of displacement”6

Migrant Rights Network

This is why we believe that climate justice, migrant justice and racial justice are irrevocably interconnected and can only be fully redressed when recognised as such.

Mapping the system to meet the challenges of our times

Our initial response and first step in thinking about this complex, nuanced set of interconnections has been to map out the ecosystem around us. That means much more than thinking about how the migration sector or the climate sector might respond. Climate-linked migration is a whole-of-society issue that need only be a crisis if we continue to accept hostile narratives, if we fail to tell different stories, and if we ignore the emerging practices of those demonstrating alternative ways of living in the 21st century through ecological housing and civic infrastructure. Fundamentally, we’ll need nothing less than the rebuilding of the social fabric of our country founded on principles of justice and equity.

“The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free”

Maya Angelou

This initial process of systems mapping centres climate, migrant and racial justice, but has also brought other dimensions to the fore.

• Migrant Justice: Establishing the right to move (or stay) for people living in climate-impacted environments.

• Climate Justice: Reframing migration as adaptation not risk

• Racial Justice: Challenging systemic racism that upholds inequitable responses to climate change and migration

Underpinned by:

• Storytelling and Narrative Building: Understanding migration as a well-rehearsed adaptation strategy with collective benefits for us all

• Citizen-Led Democracy: Deliberative democracy and demonstrating public support to influence policy

• Civic Infrastructure: Anticipating and demonstrating new forms of civic and social infrastructure and ownership

• Housing: Models for inclusive and accessible high-density / low carbon housing

• Health: Equitable access to healthy environments

An Invitation to Shape A Systems Framework

Are we describing a conceptual framework, a network map, an organising concept? We aren’t sure yet what this moment requires, or what we might call what emerges, but we know that we are seeking to identify how we might collaborate across this system to put justice at the heart of society’s response to climate change and migration. Through an online event in January, we will be sharing this early stage framework and inviting you to help us shape it, enriching it and deepening it with your diverse perspectives.

We see microcosms of a more just future world in the here and now. We see our work as weaving connections between these pockets of hope, catalysing collaborations and unlocking new possibilities. In illustrating and spotlighting the different actors across our ecosystem, we offer the framework as a starting point to each understand our own role in building towards a different future that anticipates how people will move, prepares for it, and welcomes people who migrate in search of a better life as we navigate the impacts of climate change.

We warmly welcome you to join us for this online event on 20th January 1330-1500 (GMT). Get in touch with Julia for joining details. If you’re simply curious to hear more about this work, subscribe to get all the latest news in your inbox through our occasional blogs.

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Gaia: This challenge is real, both in the context of climate change and migration. Alarmism can backfire, as catastrophizing can drive people away from action and feed negative sentiment. But at the same time, I also think we have to be totally honest about the scale of the challenge. You know, we’re in 2024 now and we're seeing major disasters frequently, even in places that haven’t really seen such extreme weather events in the past – from Europe, where Italy and Spain have seen cars bobbing in floodwaters, to the United States, which is in many ways becoming a climate catastrophe zone. That’s the world’s richest country. People are moving, and its directly because of climate change, but also, of course, climate change feeds into so many other things, it’s not just about people fleeing disasters. Climate change exacerbates conflict, and makes people much more vulnerable to extremist messaging, especially when governments struggle to provide basic needs, it really impacts everything from food security to political stability. You see this in many places around the world right now, Sudan, Somalia, there are many other examples.

So it’s not about not worrying people about the scale of it, it’s more that message needs to be different. Human movement in and of itself is not something to fear. What’s needed is preparation and management so that it doesn’t become a crisis. We need to deliver a very different narrative to the populist one that has been on the rise. We need to stress that migration is normal. But it is going up. The numbers are going up. They’re only going to increase. And we can’t hide, pretend that’s not happening. We have to deal with it in a way that is much more positive, and that’s about narrative. It’s about having different types of conversation. And when it doesn't work, it's not that it’s not working because of the types of people that are coming, or because of where they're coming from, or even the numbers. Really, it's due to poor planning and policymaking. In the UK, we're a really rich nation. We shouldn't have homelessness. We shouldn't have people using food banks. These are policy failures, and they're not the result of immigration. And yet, of course, that's weaponised against people who migrate.

Julia: You present some deeply hopeful and pragmatic solutions to migration driven by climate change, but you also recognise that some people are better resourced to adapt, migrate or otherwise thrive in their current homes than others. Some have more agency and choice than others, and indeed those with least agency are often the least responsible for the effects of climate change that they are now living with. How might this inequity impact the types of welcome that we need to imagine in countries that can expect to receive new arrivals in the decades ahead? 

Gaia: Yes, these inequities exist both globally and locally. In any country, it’s often the poorest who bear the worst impacts of climate change. Its the people whose classrooms, hospitals and workplaces are over-heated, unbearably hot, for example, or they're living in overcrowded conditions and least able to cope with the impacts of climate change, and they are generally the lowest paid too. And it’s very often the case that people who have contributed the least to climate change face the harshest consequences.

First of all, we have the ability to help people who want to stay through adaptation. Migration isn’t a bad thing but forced migration is obviously a tragedy, and we should do everything that we can to avoid that. But there will be places within our own country as well as everywhere else, where we have to abandon. You know, it's just not possible to shore things up everywhere. We're already seeing extreme conditions in 2024. So by 2040, 2060, these are going to be much more pressing, and we can't afford to rebuild everywhere.

So in terms of helping people move with agency, we must find ways to ensure that everyone, not just the well-resourced, have the opportunity to move with dignity.

One way to foster this is to focus on a particular demographic—people in their late teens to mid-thirties, an age when migration is already a natural life step for reasons like education, work, or family. We could develop programs that provide education or employment opportunities in safe locations for young people in vulnerable areas, allowing them to establish new networks. This creates a foundation for others in their communities to join later in a more fluid, less disruptive way. It also supports back-and-forth movement, where these individuals can remain connected to their origins and support family members back home while building stability in new places. Ukrainian migrants were able to lean on the Ukrainian diaspora in Europe to a certain extent, and this made things easier and allowed for a smoother transition.

But this fluid movement is not really that well understood by the general public, who are made to feel that there is this onerous burden of people flowing into the country that we need to be afraid of. But this fluidity is how migration actually occurs, seasonally, with community gradually building in safer regions or countries, and people building knowledge of how things work in new places. You start to be able to get information back and forth about what’s happening, and you get more agency essentially over what’s going on.

We should lean into this fluidity much more, make it much easier, because our economies need seasonal migration, from agriculture to tourism and hospitality. What we need to do is make sure that we don't go down the route of exploitation, and which is what's happened to workers in places like the Middle East and Malaysia, where a lot of it is actually climate migration, because things have become impossible where they are. But now they’re being hugely exploited in these situations. This needs to be much better understood and better regulated and we need to learn from this.

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Julia: Coming to the heart of the Climate Migration Collaborative’s enquiry, we know the challenge is systemic, requiring partnerships that bridge sectors and foster cross-disciplinary conversations. It's a whole-of-society approach that will need new collaborations to test new ideas, and that will require organisations to reach beyond their day-to-day remits to cultivate new connections and narratives that drive change. Based on everything you’ve learnt from your research in this space, how might we do the work of catalysing collaboration across sectors to build a welcoming and just society?

Gaia: There’s no question that cross-sector collaboration is essential. While many organizations already do important work in this area, they tend to work within their own sectors, creating duplication and inefficiencies. Local governance could play a major role here, and I believe city mayors especially could lead efforts to integrate these sectors. City leaders have a deep understanding of migration’s impact; after all, cities are built on migration, both internally and from other countries. In cities, local government can create efficiencies and coordinate resources across various agencies, so support is comprehensive. City leaders who understand the economic and social value of migration can advocate effectively for these collaborative, cross-sector efforts, enabling communities to thrive as they grow and change.

And, you know, if you if you look at the number of refugees around the world it comes to, I think, the population of Japan. And of course, they’re not citizens of a country in the same way but they are a substantial group in most countries and they should have advocates, there should be an MP representing the rights and interests of refugees. At the moment, various little organizations are trying to fill the gaps, and that's a very inefficient way of doing it, and it could be so much better. We need to look across whole systems and work out who needs to be collaborating with who to get things moving.

Julia: You mention city mayors as critical players in shaping migration policy. We’re sitting discussing this in the UK where we’ve been living for more than a decade with a very hostile environment for migrants and we know that far-right parties are gaining momentum across Europe. What might give us cause for optimism, since you published Nomad Century in 2022? Are there particular places where you see hopeful examples of pro-migration policies, even if they’re driven more by pragmatism than justice?

Gaia: It’s kind of dark times, isn’t it? But it’s true—city mayors tend to understand migration on a practical level, They’re generally more pragmatic and often lead the way in embracing the benefits of migration. Its noticeable that Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, for instance, has been pro-immigration, has championed anti-racist initiatives and has reached out to other cities around the world to strengthen links in a way that was not happening before.

Some countries are also taking innovative steps. Canada, for instance, has built its immigration policy around the benefits newcomers bring to the economy, even though it’s a pragmatic approach rather than purely humanitarian. And Spain’s current leader has taken a public stance to support immigration and change border policies, despite facing strong political opposition. It’s encouraging to see, especially when centrist parties in Europe often avoid these issues for fear of backlash.

But we’ve got to be honest. Migration will increase, it will come in different waves according to conflict and according to how well resourced people are to adapt to their changing environments and what that means for their livelihoods. But we know it is happening. So how do we make it work for our cities and our countries? And that’s really where the debate should be. Is it better to, you know, build new housing in cities where there are already lots of immigrants? Or is it better to develop entirely new cities where the most of the population is white? It should be about that sort of policy choice and the pros and cons of these choices. Not about what the minimum or maximum number of immigrants that we’re going to have each year should be. That’s ridiculous.  

Actually, wouldn't it be nice to have a visionary leader who was capable of standing up and saying honestly, look, you know, immigration is happening. Actually, it's got lots and lots of benefits. Actually, our health services are run entirely by immigrants. This is what we need, but it's not going to work if we don't invest in housing, or transport, or social infrastructure. So you know, in order to reap the benefits as a society we need to do this right. And the same with climate change. You know we are decarbonizing, whether you like it or not, and most people are fine with it. So let’s have some bravery and let’s be honest.

Julia: How about smaller-scale initiatives that are demonstrating and pioneering new pathways that create win-win solutions at this intersection of climate change and migration, often by thinking outside of their own siloes? Where should we be looking for inspiration as we build connections across sectors to fundamentally reimagine where and how we live in the years to come?

Gaia: I think you will know about this more than me, but there are so many brilliant, brilliant organizations that feel very isolated and feel that they're working completely alone. And that's crazy because they're doing great work. But that work can be maximized and optimized by being more connected to wider networks. And at a global scale, I’m noticing the International Organisation for Migration being more proactive on this whole subject.

We need to start seeing this as an opportunity to actually rethink everything – that means bringing different organisations and sectors together – actually in the UK we’re going to have to re-make a lot of our infrastructure in our cities to be resilient for a different climate. And while we're doing that, we can also bear in mind changing demographics. We’re looking at a population which should be declining massively based on birth rates, but will actually be growing because of immigration.

If we plan and adapt properly, you know, rather than sort of pretend it's not happening, we can do it in a way that benefits everyone. We need to build that honest pragmatism into all of it.

Julia: On that galvanising note, we are going to wrap up but I know the conversations it will spark are just beginning. Thank you so much for your time and insights, Gaia.

To read more about Gaia’s work, head over to https://wanderinggaia.com/

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“As our climate drastically shifts, and people migrate - both by choice and through displacement - how might we catalyse collaboration across sectors to put justice at the centre of society’s approach to climate change and migration?” 

In this second blog, we’d like to explore with you how we think the Climate Migration Collaborative might work towards answering that question, and share a little more about the emerging group who are guiding this project. 

Navigating Intersections and the Liminal Spaces Between

We know that the interplay between climate change and migration is complex and nuanced, and the global challenges that will arise from a changing climate and shifting migration patterns are systemic. We also know that the current neoliberal, capitalist, postcolonial institutions, structures and narratives that shape our economy as they currently stand are unlikely to provide the environment needed to centre justice in all its forms as we navigate climatic shifts and changing patterns of migration.

We will need to forge partnerships that bridge sectors and foster cross-disciplinary conversations to imagine different ways of doing things, reaching beyond our day-to-day remits to cultivate new connections and narratives that drive change towards a just future. We know this doesn’t always come easily.

So we’re seeking to shine a light on the gaps and cracks at the intersections - or liminal spaces between - climate, migration and the just transition to a sustainable economy, cutting through complexity to generate understanding at these intersections, amplifying diverse narratives through storytelling and deliberative democracy, and platforming models for social infrastructure that connect and disrupt as we transition to a just and green economy.

In doing so, we’re seeking to adopt the role of cultivator of connections and convenor of ideas and people, and see where this curiosity takes us in terms of partnerships, projects and co-creation. We do this with a deep respect for the work that has gone before, and continues (read about the lineage of our work below). 

First Steps

Specifically, we expect that our early steps will include:

• Co-creating and testing a cross-sectoral / systems framework as a route to building understanding around the complex intersections of climate change and migration in the UK context. A version 1.0 exists and we would like to invite others to bring their diverse perspectives and expertise to this framework, deepening and enriching it as a kind of organising framework around which to gather and work. We’ll talk more about what we hope this framework could be, and how it can serve us collectively, in our next blog. 

• Exploring the idea of a network that brings together partners who each do brilliant work in their own sector, bridging the gaps between them and brokering new insights into how their collective contributions make up a holistic rights-based response to evolving patterns of migration, underpinned by climate justice and racial justice. 

Overall, our focus is on centring justice as we anticipate, prepare for and welcome people migrating within and into the UK - though we expect that any learning generated from the collaborative could be applied globally. 

We want to start building and demonstrating now, responding to hostile narratives with hopeful action and creating momentum and energy around new ideas.

This is likely to involve:

• Field-building at climate / migration / new economy intersection

• Creating understanding of inter-connected themes from the ground-up, unlocking intersectional collaborations and celebrating pioneering ideas

• Catalysing action in policy and practice at these intersections

At this point, we are relatively open-minded as to the tangible outputs of this project and are exploring a range of possibilities, including a co-authored blog series, podcast, events, action research, citizen’s assemblies and storytelling. 

We invite friends and collaborators to join us and contribute in ways that are aligned with their wider work. We are embracing emergence rather than fixing on a narrowly defined impact at this stage. This feels right in the context of such large-scale societal challenges, and speaks to our desire to go where we find energy and allies in this emerging field. Do reach out to us with your ideas.

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Who We Are

We are a growing collective. 

I ,Julia, am the lead initiator of this project. As a child, I was lucky to live in three different continents before I was ten years old and as a result, I understood from an early age the difference between an ‘expat’ and a ‘migrant’. My white skin afforded me the privileged label of expat whilst those racialised as black or brown were consigned the decidedly less privileged label of migrant. The sense of injustice and dissonance arising from these very early experiences led me to working internationally, mainly in the charity/NGO sector and most recently as CEO of a social enterprise working with refugees globally. Yet I sat with growing discomfort at the white saviorism complex at the heart of the sector. So in 2022, I founded a consultancy practice, Pragmatic Radicals, re-focusing on projects closer to home in the UK, hoping that freelance work would eventually give me the space to explore this emergent project, combining my generalist skills spotting patterns and ‘connecting of dots’ across systems with a passion for catalysing transformative partnerships. 

I’m joined by a small group of curious, passionate collaborators offering their expertise, constructive challenge and support. 

Dami is a community organiser and expert advisor to the migration sector. She is the Co-Founder of We Belong, an organisation that fights for the rights of young migrants in the UK, where she won major national campaigns. She’s an Eisenhower Youth Fellow and has spoken out worldwide against the UK’s hostile environment towards migrants. She left We Belong in 2021 to complete her undergraduate degree in psychology and plans to pursue further studies, with an interest in climate, migration and mental health.

Theo is a learning facilitator and participation consultant, working with organisations to embed more participatory ways of working, informed by lived experience, into their culture and structure. Her work spans co-developing resources, training, peer learning and explorations of structural power dynamics. She founded renowned grassroots organisation Xenia, which brings together women from different backgrounds to connect, share and learn, and was also the initiator of ACT! A Festival for Social Change. 

Rita is an activist physician, humanitarian and academic working to empower community-led action on the intersects of climate change, migration, health and justice.  Having led the UCL Institute for Global Health work stream on the intersections of climate change, migration and health in partnership with Lancet Migration, she is now a Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholar at UEA as part of the Critical Decade programme. Rita was awarded the London Mayor’s Sustainable City Award “Public Sector Changemaker of the Year 2022”. Rita is founder of Doctors for Extinction Rebellion as well as Planetary.Health.

Amira is a researcher and evaluator, having previously worked at NCVO and The Social Innovation Partnership. She has a keen interest in both climate and migration and is currently training as a Work that Reconnects facilitator. Amira also has some experience in systems mapping and systems change theory which she hopes to bring to the work. 

Our group is still forming and growing. We warmly welcome expressions of interest from others who would like to explore these questions with us. Get in touch with us via the message button below or drop a line to Julia.

Lineage and Inspiration

There is a growing academic field exploring climate and migration intersections. There is equally some pioneering international work testing climate-linked migration pathways underway, climate mitigation efforts and extensive work negotiating loss and damage deals around the world. 

Focus on this climate-migration intersection and what it means for British society is relatively emergent, but is not without precedent. Climate Outreach and the Climate and Migration Coalition which they incubated, the Climate Justice Coalition, Migrants Organise and CIVIC SQUARE have been particular sources of inspiration to the Collaborative. 

We feel particularly indebted to Gaia Vince, author of Nomad Century, who showed us how we can show up and work towards a more just, equitable and regenerative world in ways that are both practical and deeply hopeful.

Join Us

Please reach out via our Substack or LinkedIn pages if you are interested in playing an active part in our work, or message us directly. As a small group of freelancers, this is currently our ‘soulful side project’ but we dream of growing it to something more. If you have time, expertise, passion or resources that you think we should know about, we would love to hear from you. Next time, we’ll be writing with specific invitations to join us in exploring the possibilities that this project might unlock further.

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“The planetary nature of humanity’s crisis can feel overwhelming, and our situation hopeless. It is not… Uncertainty stops us planning, preparing, and even looking too far into the future… [We must find] the courage to envision a different way of being human”

Gaia Vince, Nomad Century

It is abundantly clear that humans (particularly those living in industrial economies) have caused huge harm to Earth, and we are already experiencing significant climatic and societal shifts as a result. This will have - and indeed is already having - significant implications for how and where all of Earth’s inhabitants are able to survive and thrive. 

One of the most well-established strategies we have had throughout our history as humans to deal with such crises is to migrate. This inextricable link, between climate change and migration, is at the core of the emergent work of the Climate Migration Collaborative. Taking such a long-term, holistic, global perspective is important. This is why we are sharing some of the thinking that led us to this point; we hope you’ll help shape our next steps. By subscribing to this Substack, you’ll be first to hear what we’re up to and how you can join the conversation.

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We’ll write more, in future posts, on how and why climate-linked migration happens, and the historic precedents shaping it, drawing on a wealth of insights from migrants’ rights perspectives, racial justice movements, climate science commentators and more. For now, let’s say we are clear that climate justice, migrant justice and racial justice are irrevocably interconnected. Working across these intersections is the only way to navigate a just transition to a better world, and we are committed to continuing to learn, explore and educate ourselves around this. 

We dream of a society that recognises our shared right to live in a safe climate and in healthy environments alongside our right to migrate, this being a crucial adaptation strategy in the face of climate change. By catalysing transformative cross-sector action, amplifying diverse narratives and spotlighting models of social infrastructure that connect and disrupt, we seek to build equitable and welcoming communities that embrace people who have migrated while promoting sustainable, just, and inclusive policies and practices for all. 

As we embark on this journey, we invite you to be a part of it. Whether you are a community leader, researcher, activist, or just someone passionate about creating a better world, your voice and perspective matter. 

The question that underpins this project is: As our climate drastically shifts, and people migrate - both by choice and through displacement - how might we catalyse collaboration across sectors to put justice at the centre of society’s approach to climate change and migration?

We hope that this project will evolve into a collaborative enquiry, drawing people and organisations in across a wide range of sectors and disciplines, and we’re excited to know that some of those who we’ve imagined around the table with us are already keen to be involved (more on that to come later). 

For now, thank you for taking the time to explore our vision and join this conversation. We’ll share more updates, invite feedback, and highlight emerging collaborations in the coming weeks. We encourage you to stay connected, share your thoughts, and consider joining future events or projects we may be working on. Your ideas and insights are crucial as we refine our approach and build momentum.

Thank you so much for coming on this journey with us - and please do keep in touch by subscribing to this Substack!