Climate Cafés are gentle, open spaces where people gather to talk honestly about the climate crisis, to share how we are really feeling about living through this moment in time. They hold space for lived experiences, making room for vulnerability, uncertainty, and multiple truths to sit side by side.
They are a living practice of radical trust and hope.
When I stepped into my facilitator training, it felt like stepping into a shared sky. Everyone arrived carrying their own weather: some with the warm glow of sunlight, others with low, heavy clouds, a few with restless winds still searching for direction. And somehow, without forcing or extracting, these individual climates began to meet, swirl, and reshape into something collective; a developmental naturalism where growth emerged like a gentle change in season.
Even my own realisation that I was ready to step into facilitation was more of a slow, patient clearing of fog, naturally emanating from radical hope. It revealed itself in relationship with others also learning, like morning light shifting so gradually you don’t notice until suddenly the world is in full colour.
I loved how the structure of the café was deceptively simple, yet held so much, like a wide-open landscape that gives the weather room to move. One thing I have been reflecting on is how naming uncertainty, even as a facilitator, is not only okay but encouraged. It is like acknowledging the shifting clouds on the horizon instead of pretending the sky is always clear. That honesty creates trust. There is something radical about not knowing and still showing up, radical trust in the forecast we are inherently co-creating together.
The training deepened my sense that a facilitator is not a distant weather forecaster pointing at patterns from afar, but a co-weatherer: someone who feels the rain, tends the shared landscape, and holds the horizon while standing in the same weather as everyone else. We embody the values we speak of, not just in principle, but in the way our presence shapes the climate of the space.
What I valued most was seeing how much beauty can emerge when people bring their full weather, the bright, the stormy the still, into a space where all of it is welcome. In this time of polycrisis, when the storms can feel overwhelming, perhaps the real work of a facilitator is simply this: to help people recognise that even in uncertainty, we can co-create climates of care, resilience and possibility.
