Staying Hopeful and Engaged in Organizing for the Elections

The climate crisis and U.S. elections are causing many people to feel discouraged, anxious, angry, and hopeless.   While understandable, these feelings can interfere with us taking the actions that we want to take to have the impact we want in the world.  For us to stay engaged, it helps to be hopeful. Feelings of despair and hopelessness can confuse us and cloud our thinking. Of course, we can act whether we feel hopeful or not—and it makes sense to do so—but when we are hopeful, we have more access to our minds, can think better, and can better help others to see the possibilities.  Most people, if they are to act, need hope for the future. If we have a hopeful perspective, we can bring people along with us. While the climate crisis is expected to get worse for many years, we want to help people stay engaged when the news is bad. Many people react to the climate crisis by either going numb or feeling overwhelmed by

the enormity of the problem. Something similar happens with elections. We want to have an accurate picture of what is happening without being immobilized by how we feel. We want to have perspectives that help us move forward, no matter how daunting the challenges. And we want to have practices or tools that we can utilize to help us gain these more useful perspectives.

In this workshop we will:

-       Create safe spaces to talk, listen and support each other

-       Openly face the current situation that can cause discouragement, anxiety,

anger, and hopelessness

-       Share perspectives that we have developed and learned that have helped

us to maintain a sense of hope and possibility

-       Introduce some practices or tools that all participants can choose to use

going forward that may help us maintain hope no matter how upsetting the daily

news cycle

Our situation is difficult, but we have reasons to be hopeful: We live on a beautiful

planet. Millions of lifeforms exist with us, and our human lifeforms are precious and unique. We have the capacity to love one another across any barrier, cooperate to meet huge challenges, think our way through complex situations, and celebrate our many accomplishments and relationships. Billions of acts of kindness, caring, support, intelligence, and courage are happening every day.

We can do hard things. We can face whatever needs to be faced. We are part of a global network of people working to end the climate emergency and win elections. We have made tremendous progress toward our goals. our vision will take us to a world where all life is sustained, and no people are oppressed or exploited.

Host or Publisher Diane Shisk