A facilitated gathering where people share fears, grief, and hopes about the state of the world. Not a workshop. Not activism. A place to be heard.
The first time someone asked me what a Climate Cafe was, I told her it was a place to say out loud what you have been carrying alone. She started crying before I could finish the sentence.
That is the function of a Climate Cafe in one image. Not a workshop. Not activism. Not group therapy. A small, facilitated circle where adults sit together and say true things about what it is like to live through the largest threshold this culture has ever asked any of us to cross.
Where the idea came from
The Climate Cafe began in Scotland in 2015, in a community center kitchen, with a psychotherapist and a small group of neighbors who had stopped being able to read the news. It was modeled, deliberately, on the Death Cafe movement that had been running since 2011. The structure was simple. A facilitator. A circle. Tea. A single question: how is the state of the world sitting with you today?
The Death Cafe had taught its founders that a culture which cannot speak of its own mortality grows quietly afraid. The Climate Cafe took the same insight and turned it toward a different unspeakable. The point was never to fix anyone. It was to thin the loneliness.
What actually happens
A Climate Cafe is small. Usually six to twelve people. Always with food and warm drinks. The facilitator opens with an agreement about how the time will work: every person speaks if they want to, no one is required to, no one fixes anyone else, and what is said in the circle stays in the circle. Then there is a long pause. Someone says something. Someone else says something. The conversation finds its own shape.
People come for very different reasons. A mother who has stopped sleeping after reading about an aquifer her town depends on. A scientist who works on climate models for a living and cannot tell her family what she actually thinks. A college student who is grieving a future she had not yet had. An older man who feels he has nothing useful to say but cannot stay home anymore.
The conversation will go places that surprise people. Anger, often. Grief, almost always. Awkward laughter. Long quiet. Practical questions about whether to have a child. Memories of a particular forest, a particular winter, a particular bird that was always at the feeder and is not anymore. Sometimes nothing seems to happen and people leave feeling slightly lighter and cannot say why.
What it is not
It is not a planning meeting. There is no agenda for action. The facilitator does not ask "and what will you do about that this week?"
It is not a therapy group. It is not led by a clinician acting in the role of clinician, even when I am the one facilitating. The frame is community, not treatment. The aim is honest company, not symptom relief.
It is not optimistic. Anyone who shows up promising the group that everything will be fine has misunderstood what the room is for. The agreement is to look at what is real together. That is the source of the relief, not a positive reframe.
It is not pessimistic either. A room of people willing to say the truest thing they know about a situation this large is, in its own quiet way, a room full of love.
Why I host them
I came to Ithaca, in part, because I was tired of carrying my own grief about the world in a city that did not have anywhere to put it. The decision to leave the San Francisco Bay Area was a values decision, and it cost us a great deal. I knew when I arrived that I wanted to make space for other people to say similar things in their own way.
In my therapy practice, I work with people one at a time, often through the same questions a Climate Cafe is built around. But there is a particular kind of company that only happens in a group. Hearing someone you have never met name something you thought you were the only one to feel. Watching a stranger, who arrived rigid and self-protective, soften over the course of an hour because nobody is pretending. That softening is not something a therapist can manufacture for a client. It happens in the field.
Who comes
The cafes I host in Ithaca draw a mix that surprises me every time. Cornell faculty who study climate and Cornell undergraduates who want nothing to do with the subject academically. Therapists. Farmers. People who work for the city. Parents and grandparents. People who knew each other before, and people who came alone for the first time. The only thing the room has in common is a willingness to sit with what is real without rushing to fix it.
If you are thinking about coming
You do not need to know what you think yet. You do not need to have read the right book or watched the right documentary. You do not need to have figured out how to feel about flying, eating meat, having children, what color to vote, or what to do with the rest of your life.
You only need to come willing to sit with the question.
If you are someone whose work or family role requires you to be the steady one — the parent, the doctor, the organizer, the boss — a Climate Cafe may be one of the few rooms in your life where you do not have to be the steady one. You are allowed to arrive however you arrive.
If you are someone who has gone quiet about climate because the people in your daily life cannot hear it, a Climate Cafe is a room where you can speak the sentences you have been keeping inside and have them met with recognition.
If you are someone who has been steadily afraid for years and would like to stop being alone with it, this is for you too.
Where ours fit in
The Climate Cafes I host in Ithaca run a few times a year, usually with cohorts of six to ten. They are part of a small constellation of meaning-based groups I facilitate alongside individual therapy. Other groups in that constellation include Grief and the Wild, which is an outdoor grief circle held in the gorges and state parks around Ithaca, and Befriending Uncertainty, which is a meditation and existential-psychology circle for people who want a deeper relationship with not-knowing.
You can add your name to the interest list at the Groups page. I write to people when the next cohort opens.
The work of Climate Cafes, like the work of any grief practice, is not to make the grief smaller. It is to make the circle around the grief larger. We carry what is unbearable better in company than we carry it alone.