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Climate Courage campaign

94% of us will talk about the weather today. How many will speak about the climate?

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A new film. The same silence. And why we still need your help.

In January, we launched The Hardest Lesson – a short film that sits with a teacher as he goes through the motions of a lesson he's not been trained to deliver, while his students' reactions and his own conscience pull in a very different direction. It doesn't resolve neatly. Until, finally, something opens up: "It is scary. So let's talk about it. Together." The relief of that line is the whole point.

This week, we're sharing something that asks why that same relief is as hard to find outside the classroom.

​You Told Us To Talk About the Weather is a five-minute film narrated by Michael Sheen – part poetry, part folk horror, part provocation. It closes with a fact worth sitting with: 94% of Brits talked about the weather in the past six hours. In the past five years, nearly 7,000 were arrested for talking about the climate. That gap – between the small talk we make all the time, and the bigger conversation we keep avoiding – is what the film is about.

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We didn't make this film. But we're very proud to partner with it.

Writer Emma-Louise Howell and director Harry Tomlin came to us. They wanted to support Climate Courage Schools. They wanted their film – shot on a rewilded Norfolk farm, developed in workshops with young farmers and climate activists, and told through the eyes of a child – to help teachers and students find the words they've been missing.

The BBC covered the launch and it reached people well beyond our usual orbit. But more is needed!

Two films, two angles on the same dissonance. One ends with a teacher finally saying the quiet part out loud. The other asks why we're all still staying quiet.

We still need your help

I won't dress this up: we've only hit 10% of our £30,000 crowdfunding target. I'm telling you this because the momentum is real and the money isn't matching it yet – and because with crowdfunders, whatever we raise we keep, so every contribution counts, even if we don't hit the total!

On a shoestring, we've built a 1000+ educator network, made a film, published nine case studies, and secured endorsements from 21 organisations. The culture is starting to catch up – a multi award-winning playwright came to us wanting to partner, the BBC ran the story.

What's missing is the funding to meet the moment: to get teacher and student voices into the national press, to build the directory connecting schools with mental health and adaptation experts, and to hire the fundraising support that makes this into something lasting rather than something lean.

Please do give if you can – and forward this to anyone you think gets it.

A personal note

I’m sad to say that this will be my last newsletter as Campaign Manager for Climate Courage Schools. I'm leaving to have a baby.

Doing this work while pregnant has been its own kind of education. The question of which schools will meet my child with honesty about the world they're inheriting – not papering over it, not catastrophising, but actually holding the space and encouraging real engagement, joy even – has felt very real, and even got me wondering whether we should move to Oxford, Thetford, Yorkshire, Hove or Harrow!

You'll hear from the team in the next few weeks about what comes next. The work continues, it just won't be me writing to you.

If you'd like to stay in touch with me – or have something interesting for me in a year or so – you can reach me at lethbridge.josephine@gmail.com.

From our network

​Inner Climate Mondays · Take the Jump · Online, Monday evenings

Both films in this newsletter ask why we find it so hard to speak about what we feel. Inner Climate Mondays is a weekly 90-minute online space offered by Take the Jump to do exactly that – exploring the emotional, spiritual and cultural weight of the climate crisis with others who get it. No need to book, just turn up.

​Climate Staffroom​ · Online, multiple dates and times

A similar space, dedicated to those in education. Come along to a confidential and non-judgmental space for educators to process their own emotions with respect to the climate and ecological crisis, in a community of teachers that "get it". Reserve a place here.

​Mobilising Silent Majorities: Report Launch · Online, Tuesday 31 March, 5:30–7pm

Both films ask why so many of us stay quiet about the climate. This new report from the Climate Majority Project maps six overlapping groups who are ready for change but feel too isolated to speak – and identifies what it would take to shift that. Join author Liam Kavanagh for the online launch.

What we're reading

• This new report from the University of Reading and partners proposes a ten-point plan to deliver climate education.
• The Climate Majority Project has just launched a new report: We Need a Plan B: Engaging with the Realities of Catastrophic Climate Risk. If the films in this newsletter ask why we can't talk about the climate, this report asks what happens when we do — and what serious national preparation might actually look like. Read it here.
• We've been publishing a new Climate Courage profile every week. If you've missed any, catch up with the four we didn't have time to feature in this newsletter: the primary school leaders building a curriculum of hope; the teacher who made emotional literacy the foundation of climate learning; the headteacher who learned children need conversation to process climate change; the school where everyone pauses to breathe – three times a day.

All the best!

Josephine