BEYOND FEAR OR OPTIMISM: Towards Sustainable Ecological Activism

"Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act...Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists adopt the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It is the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterwards either, but they matter all the same..." —Rebecca Solnit

We warmly invite you to join to us in-person at a community house in Ridgewood, NY (on the border of Bushwick, Brooklyn and Queens) on Saturday, September 20th from 10a-4pm for a day-long resourcing retreat with practices that help us sustain, address burnout and despair, and imagine grounded pathways forward.

Together, we will engage practices that help us:

• resource and strengthen our resilience and felt sense of relationality or interconnection;
• address climate anxiety, overwhelm, and burnout;
• find ways of slowing down and sensing without succumbing to toxic urgency;
• envision and embrace complexity and multiple futures; and
• embody a stance of courage and risk to carry forward with grounded, wise hope.

This retreat is scheduled right before the start of Climate Week 2025 in NYC and is open to any and all engaged in climate and environmental justice work. No prior experience necessary; if you feel called to a day of reflection, practice, and community, please join us!

The event includes a vegetarian lunch at our community house and garden.

Courage of Care (www.courageofcare.org), a non-profit that nurtures a global network of relational facilitators, organizers, and community leaders working at the forefront of our social, economic, ecological, and land justice movements. Over the last ten years, our team has helped individuals and teams strengthen their relational connections; address the impacts of trauma and colonization; heal from the patterns of toxic culture; imagine alernatives to the status quo and embrace pluriversal practice; embrace complexity and emergence; and access sustainable, and often spiritual, resource for ongoing engagement with the work of our time.

Learn more about Courage of Care's framework CourageRISE, as well as our lineage and community practice agreements here.

Monika L. Son, Ph.D., (she/her/ella) is a Contemplative Practice and Thought Leader, Healer, Scholar, Life Transitions Guide, Embodied Leadership Coach, Trauma-Informed Facilitator, and a student of Soto Zen Buddhism and Chaplaincy. Monika is known for her courage in embracing the edges of discomfort and uncertainty. Guided by heart-spirit, the ancestors, and deep connection to suffering in the world, her scholarship on identity is inspired by a central question: “How do I help others reclaim their whole selves, despite the projections of oppression, social rank and status, lineage and colonization?”

Brooke D. Lavelle, Ph.D. (she/her) is the co-founder of Courage of Care, the Editor in Chief of The Arrow Journal, and the Co-Director of The Wyckoff, a community house and urban garden in Brooklyn, NY. Brooke holds a Ph.D. in Tibetan Buddhism and Embodied Cognition, and is committed to helping communities develop compassionate, counter-oppressive, healing-centered, pluriversal and visionary cultures of practice to support healing and liberation. Brooke regularly trains relational facilitators and consults to organizations working on various social, ecological, and spiritual crises. She has experience leading national and international political, educational, and climate projects, and co-developed a climate justice course, Balancing Hope and Fear, through a grant from the Mind and Life Institute. Through her work at Courage, Brooke understands the challenges of trying to build alternatives to the status quo, and remains steadfastly convinced that another way is possible.

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