For SPEC’s Elder Learning Circle ~ March 2026

I want to start with a confession.

Just this week I was invited to a meeting with climate activists of all ages. My inner voice said: you’re not ready, your thinking isn’t clear enough. But I was flattered. So I went. And when they asked me to speak, I spoke — too long, and without the clarity I’d hoped to bring.

I tell you this not to be self-deprecating, but because it’s an honest place to begin. We carry weight as elders that we sometimes forget we’re carrying. And learning to carry it well — that’s what I want to talk about today.

I am going to spend some time talking about my interactions with young people, in particular young climate activists, what they have taught me about how they find hope and while I draw them close they also want to belong.

Then I will talk about some of my other work which is also always cross generational but less obviously so as a way of telling stories about some of the practical ways I have built my own sense of hope and belonging.

Part One: Who Are These Young People?

I spend a good deal of my time with young climate leaders — as a mentor, as a writer profiling them for Canada’s National Observer, as a teacher, and as something like a chosen parent or auntie.

What I’ve found, pretty universally, is this: Many are anxious. And they want us to show up. Not to fix things.

Not to lecture. To show up. To stand with, behind and for them. They want to belong. 

But before I say what that means, let me say something I see as important about how differently they see the world.

Many of these generations don’t read newspapers. They may hear about a major news event several days after it happened — from a friend, or a social media feed. They don’t seek out immediate news because, frankly, they don’t expect to have much agency over what happens. They’ve grown up being told the planet is in crisis. They’ve grown up with that understanding the way I grew up knowing the Beatles or Joan Baez as a soundtrack in my life or knowing that marijuana both existed and was nonsensically illegal. The climate emergency isn’t a news flash for them — it’s the air they breathe.

They trust their own experience, and the experience of their peers, far more than institutions, credentials, or established texts. The stories that shaped my generation — the Globe and Mail, Viktor Frankl, the New Testament — may mean nothing to them.

Leading pollsters tell us we in Canada live with a feeling of precarity. But our experience of it is very different. When I was young I was working out how to achieve security about how I contributed, where I live, about my ability to feed myself. Being young today requires one to live knowing all this is up for grabs.

And here’s something I’ve trained myself not to miss: Far too many of them are experiencing climate grief. And they feel alone either because they only talk about it with a small group or because they don’t talk about it at all. They don’t hear us — their elders, and our institutions which they are quite clear run the world — talk about it at all.  So when I am in classrooms I approach the topic knowing that while they may have shared on TikTok many have never once talked about it out loud and almost never with an older person.  When I believe something is fearful but think no-one else sees it, I feel like an outsider. They, like us, very often feel alone.

What “Showing Up” Actually Looks Like

So what do they want from us?

We do not serve them when we issue dire warnings. They mostly know it already. They want encouragement. They want support. They want hope.

Showing up is a deceptively simple phrase for something I often find quite demanding.

Showing up for me has meant doing my own inner work first. Understanding my own experience, my gifts, my blind spots. Listening to feedback and being willing to integrate it. And then doing it again.

Then it means waiting. Staying present and patient until they trust me enough to tell me what they actually need.

Sometimes it’s taking them to breakfast with no agenda of my own. Teaching them how to grocery shop. Watching their children. Going to the meeting or attending the webinar even if you’re not sure you have anything useful to say and being quiet if you don’t. Making an introduction. Often it means reflecting their stories back to them and the wider world in a way that feels respectful.

I’ve helped design financial pathways between the work someone is doing and the work they want to do. I’ve picked up children from daycare twice a week so a young activist could work a longer day or go for a run. My husband and I identify young people we think are potentially exceptional and seek them out. We are not people of great independent wealth — but I have been repeatedly astonished by how far a small amount of money, given with trust, can go.

And here’s something else: I ask for something in return. Not in a transactional way. But always in a way that signals: you are a whole human being, not an instrument of my agenda. Sometimes what I ask for is their stories. Sometimes it’s political gossip. Sometimes it’s just a check-in every few months. Always, it’s a relationship. I want to belong.

One more thing about mistakes. I sometimes forget the weight I carry. I share my experience before it’s asked for. I assume the past, present, and future look the same to them as they do to me. I’m working on all of it. That work never really ends.

Where I Find Belonging: Four Spheres

Now I want to get practical. Because hope — not naive optimism but informed hope and belonging — real belonging turn out to be two sides of the same coin and neither happen by accident. I want to talk about three places I have deliberately built it.

First some stories of young people:

  • Sierra Club panel — university enviro club now national — cofounding LeadNow.
  • An Irish civil society leader — weekly coaching for ten years!
  • Musician
  • Profiling
  • Making introductions
  • Draw into own project so it becomes student led
  • Community organizing integrated into major ENGO
  • Strategic planning, coaching, Board development, appreciative inquiry, networking, mediation, inviting nuance, funding, finding interns, doing dishes cleaning kitchens, making or buying coffee, dinner or breakfast, watching their children, staying present during conflict and insisting on the relationship, moderating its nature depending on the moment, writing minutes of meetings, writing letters, pointing to options, asking questions, listening listening listening.

My Faith Congregation

I helped introduce a culture of talking about it at my church. They described themselves as Fierce Agents of Hope. I persuaded a number of them to give testimonials to share testimonials about their own experience of climate hope. This was powerful because it broke us out of one of the most important climate myths of our time-  A loose group formed — we jokingly call ourselves the “climate whisperers.” Earth Day Sundays became a sharing of our relationship with the natural world. And then, quietly, the theme wove itself through congregational life: a book study, slow fashion shows, Sunday school children leading the regeneration of the garden, the potential that the men’s group may teach us to build homemade air filters. The Thrift Store found renewed energy. We’re now thinking about mutual aid networks for heat and flood.

It began by showing the congregation to itself. Everyone is worried. No-one is talking. That’s often where it starts.

My Street

With another neighbour who I had met over a shared fence building project organized a potluck. Closed off the street. Wore name tags that included something about our interests or skills. From that one afternoon, we discovered a shared, unnamed worry about climate — and found a nurse on our block who is a climate champ in nursing and  because of her profession, carries real social authority as a caregiver and has become an anchor of our informal network. Had people into each other’s homes. After Trump threatened the invasion of Canada, I invited us to gather simply to worry together and share stories. We now know who has a long garden hose in a heat emergency. Who has earthquake equipment in their shed. We made a point of telling people we cut down trees that were a fire hazard to the whole neighbourhood on the Whatsapp channel we now all use to exchange news and ask for help.

Community doesn’t need to be built around climate. It builds itself toward climate when you give people the chance to see and care for each other.

Politics

I find climate champions running for office, or people working to elect them. I make friends by doing what they ask — canvassing, speech writing, company, hosting community suppers. Then I invite a conversation about their actual intentions around climate policy. From there I decide how deep to go.

In one case, that led to being asked to build an accountability structure to hold a decision-maker to climate commitments after their election — some of the richest climate conversations I’ve ever had. In another, it led to being flown to Ottawa to educate parliamentarians about proportional representation.

I’ve learned I don’t have to start big. I do have to start.

Closing

Let me leave you with some data.

Most people are worried about climate change. Most of us think we are more worried than anyone else. Most of us feel alone with it. Most of us believe we have no real agency — but we want our lives to mean something. Most of us want decision-makers to do more.

All of that is well-supported by data.

But we don’t engage based on what we know. We approach each other based on the dominant story, which is: no one else is as worried as I am.

That story is a lie. It is designed to make us feel like outsiders. And our job — perhaps the most important job we have as elders with time, experience, and a few hard-won relationships — is to help people discover that they are not alone. The message that we care is best delivered with actions. That we care for them.

We can guide. We can anchor. We should not underestimate those gifts.

We can’t design the future. That belongs to the young people sitting across from us. But we can feed their imaginations, protect their stories, and stay present — even when we feel like strangers, even when we feel rebuffed.

That’s the work. And it turns out for me it’s been a path to resilience and the antidote to my own despair.

Thank you.

And now it’s time for your thoughts and voices. Do you feel life is more precarious? Where do you find hope and belonging? How does this ease the sense of precarity?

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