We ran a Climate Fresk workshop at St Mary’s Church in Hornsey Rise, N19 on an April Saturday afternoon with 2 teams of St Mary’s folk, including Tamsin their vicar and Poppy, an XR Grandparent. There was a great mix of people, probably each and everyone from a different walk of life. We launched straight into the game and only stopped after 2 hours for tea and cakes – compulsory for church fresks, in my experience.
There was obviously a lot of science but the Fresk brings it across easily. There were, after the game during the switch from head to heart, quite a lot of emotions expressed, from sadness, anger and fear to irritation and impatience to move on and get to the solutions and empowerment stage. Here are the Charts of Fear I used, with data bang up-to-date.
Here are the final, graffiti’d, coloured, titled Fresks.
Finally for the action session, as ever with a mix of people, there were several people who didn’t know what more they could do, a number who didn’t know what they could do at all, and a couple of activists who knew the score already so we had useful conversation about the basics, as given in the world’s favourite infographic, a Hundred Things from Small Works.
We collated everyone’s pledges and promised to get together again to discuss more on the action front. Once your group is energised to take action, it has to come back together to keep the motivation going. There’s not only a lot of personal action that everyone can look into alongside their chosen take-away action item, there are also several further game-based workshops for people to join in and learn more about how society can adapt to the crises our world is facing.
It also came up that the church can take action itself by looking at its own carbon footprint (which St Mary’s has done) and aim to qualify for the La Rocha Eco Church bronze, silver or gold certificate.
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