Quick heads up: The next Personal Climate Strategy Workshop begins on Tuesday at 12pm Pacific. Enrollment closes on Monday, and there are only three spots left! Scroll down for details.
Two weeks ago, the Sunday New York Times published a feature on the Personal Climate Strategy Workshop: “Lessons in How to Cope With Climate Change: A virtual classroom could help you prepare for any disruptions that global warming may create.”
Reporter Hilary Howard took the course, attended the sessions, talked with alumni, and wrote a thoughtful article about her experience. The response has been fantastic — and revealing.
The real story here isn’t the Personal Climate Strategy Workshop itself. It's the wave that's driving more and more people to seek real answers as planetary disruption crashes into their lives.
Across the country and around the world, people are waking up to a hard truth: the institutions they count on to secure their futures don’t have any real plan to help them. Even the best governments are not keeping pace with the rate of change. Disasters are battering our cities. Insurance markets are straining. Infrastructure is failing in unexpected ways. And the people whose lives and prospects are on the line are done waiting.
So they’re seeking out their own answers. And they’re doing it with a seriousness that would have been unimaginable ten years ago.
Howard spots this trend beautifully. J.P. Morgan has created a dedicated climate advisory role. The Climate Psychology Alliance has grown from a handful of practitioners to more than 700. Community resilience clubs are forming. Real estate brokers are trying to steer clients toward safety. Climate risk mapping companies are booming. Financial advisors are fielding questions they were never trained to answer. The demand for structured, strategic climate guidance (as opposed to crisis reporting, ideological solidarity or emotional support) is exploding.
They want strategies, not slogans.
That practicality is what I see in every Workshop cohort. What unites the participants in the Personal Climate Strategy Workshop is a big-picture seriousness about the decisions that will shape their next decade.
Workshop alumni have included climate and sustainability professionals, investors, academics, scientists, elected officials, doctors, therapists and architects. Participants who work professionally in risk management, climate policy, and institutional strategy have told me repeatedly that the system holds up against the tools they use in their own work — and that it often reveals dimensions they hadn’t considered.
As one alumnus — bestselling author and business thinker Tiago Forte — puts it, you could completely disbelieve that climate change is happening and still find the Workshop transformational, because its focus is on preparing for disruption and compound risk of any kind.
My Personal Climate Strategy Workshop is one response to this wave — and I hope a genuinely helpful one. But I’m just one part of a much larger shift. The real story is that millions of people are starting to take their climate futures into their own hands, because no one else is going to do it for them. My sense is we’re still in the early days of a major movement.
This wave isn’t going away. It’s going to keep building, because the climate crisis is now the context for every important decision we make — where to live, what to invest in, which career bets to place, when to move, what to hold onto and what to let go.
This is a grim moment. But I now see more and more people rising to the occasion with practical planning and intelligent optimism.
We may be on our own, but we’re not alone.
Alex
If you want more information about the Workshop:
https://alexsteffen.thinkific.com/courses/Personal-Climate-Strategy-Workshop.
Questions? Email us at alison@alexsteffen.com.
NEW: You can read a new review of the Workshop here: Alex Steffen’s climate workshop: a review.