Sustaining All Life: Tools for Organizers and Activists
Outline for Sustaining all Life Class
Marya Axner
Introduction:
In order to limit the effects of human-caused climate change we need to build a massive movement, spanning the globe, of people from every background. We believe there are current barriers to building a sufficiently large and powerful movement that we need to address. They include:
(1) longstanding divisions (usually based in oppression) between nations and between groups of people within nations,
(2) widespread feelings of discouragement and powerlessness among the populations of many countries,
(3) denial of or failure to engage with the environmental crisis, and
(4) difficulties in effectively addressing the connections between the environmental crisis and the failures of capitalism. The tools of Sustaining All Life are useful in addressing these issues and others.
In this class we will examine these barriers and learn how we can each work to overcome them.
Outline of 4-week class:
Class One:
- Overview of the four-week class
- Start to get to know each other
- Learn about the importance of healing from personal damage
- Learn about listening and being listened to
Learning basic listening skills: People will learn to listen to another person without giving advice, without judgement and with respect and caring. Each person will also experience what it is like to be listened to without someone judging them or interrupting them. We will have a chance to follow our minds as we talk, and remember relevant times in our lives.
In these exercises, people are encouraged to talk about personal experiences: We learn that we can heal from hurtful experiences if someone listens to us attentively and allows and encourage us release grief, fear, and other painful emotions. People will be expected to agree on confidentiality during certain exercises .
Class Two:
- Continue to learn listening skills and practice talking about hurtful experiences: how to heal from them, in order to be more powerful.
- Discuss how climate change targets people of color, poor people, and indigenous people disproportionately.
- Learn about the role of oppression in our own lives. We will talk about how we personally have been targeted by oppression. For example, we will talk about how we have been targeted for being Jewish, for being a woman, for being a person of color, for being LGBTQ or other oppressions. We will address how oppression divides and disempowers people.
Class Three:
- Continue practicing listening and talking about hurtful experiences and healing from them, in order to be more powerful.
- Continue talking about how oppression affects our lives.
- Explore how we each were unwittingly pushed into the role of oppressing others and begin to heal from being in those roles. We work with the assumption that no one wants to be oppress others. We also assume that people can change and take a stand against oppression.
Class Four:
- Continue learning listening skills and practicing talking about hurtful experiences and how to heal from them, in order to be more powerful.
- Talk about connections between the environmental crisis and the failures of capitalism and what else might be possible in a transformed economic system.
- Talk about how we can be most effective in moving climate issues forward and set goals for doing that.
- Explore continuing in a listening partnerships to support our work.
*Sustaining All Life (SAL) is an international grassroots organization working to end the climate emergency within the context of ending all divisions among people. SAL is a project of and uses tools of Re-evaluation Counseling. You can visit: https://www.sustainingalllife.org/ for more information.