To meet the moment, GreenFaith is making a renewed investment in equipping diverse faith leaders to strengthen a moral movement for climate justice.
Across the country, communities are experiencing intensifying climate change impacts alongside deep economic inequality, threats to the social safety net, and democracy strained to the breaking point. The US is losing the opportunity to create good clean-energy jobs, lower energy costs and pollution, and build a healthier future.
Spiritual leaders and people of faith have a vital role to play – now!
The GreenFaith Leadership Initiative is a five-month, onboarding experience for people of faith, who together form a community of learning and practice, turning their values into effective action. Together we’ll analyze the present moment and sharpen our organizing, campaigning and communications skills. We’ll build relationships across spiritual traditions, and launch or strengthen campaigning in our local communities.
Participants explore the experiences, relationships, values, faith, and spiritual traditions that ground their commitment to justice. Through storytelling and reflection, they connect their own calling to the stories of their communities and to the urgency of this moment.
Participants will practice organizing in their own communities while learning alongside a national cohort of other emerging and experienced leaders. You will try a skill with real people, reflect on what happened, adapt your approach, and try again. Together we develop a community of practice.
Throughout the experience, participants will receive mentorship and coaching while learning with a cohort of peers who are facing many of the same real-world questions and challenges.
Participants (or small groups) organizing in their own communities, engage a distributed leadership approach where knowledge and work are shared rather than concentrated in one or two people. You will develop a core team of approximately 8–10 volunteer leaders who can take meaningful responsibility for the work alongside you.
The result is not simply a trained individual. It is a team of capable organizers that can continue organizing.
That might include meeting with an elected official, offering public testimony, organizing a delegation to a decision-maker, bringing faith communities together, organizing a public witness, mobilizing people around a campaign, generating local media attention, or another action grounded in the needs and opportunities of their community.
The Institute culminates with participants and the teams they have developed taking collective action together. But the action is not the end.
The deeper goal is to develop spiritually grounded organizers who can bring people together, develop new leaders, build collective power, and sustain action over time.
Participants will continue developing their teams and integrating their work into a larger ecosystem of faith leaders, climate organizers, congregations, and partner organizations. They will have opportunities to participate in locally led and GreenFaith-supported campaigns, including the Covenant for Our Future, and to continue growing as leaders beyond the Institute.
The goal is 40 leaders capable of developing hundreds more.
with the relationships, skills, courage, and staying power to meet this moment and what comes next.
We are looking for people of faith and spirit who care deeply about climate justice and the common good and are ready to turn that commitment into sustained, effective action.
