BEYOND FEAR OR OPTIMISM: Towards Sustainable Ecological Activism

About the Workshop

"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

On behalf of Courage of Care and The Health and Environmental Funders Network (HEFN), we warmly invite you to our day-long resourcing retreat on Sunday, September 21 from 10a-4pm.

The event will be hosted at a community house and event space in Ridgewood, NY (on the border of Brooklyn and Queens), that offers us space to gather, reflect, and build connections.

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 at 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.

About Your Hosts

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.

The Health and Environmental Funders Network is the place funders go to connect, collaborate and learn about environmental health and justice issues facing frontline communities and how they can take collective action to make a greater impact in their giving. It’s the only funders network focused exclusively on environmental health and justice and their intersection with other critical issues facing frontline communities today.

About the Facilitators

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.

Monika L. Son, Ph.D., (she/her/ella) is a consultant, certified Embodied Leadership Coach and trauma informed facilitator. As a trained psychologist and expert facilitator with a twenty-year career in teaching on issues of access, opportunity and justice, she is skilled at supporting and building containers that examine issues around identity, oppression, power and privilege. In that time, Dr. Son has found that embodied, contemplative based skills and practices are what seed and ground sustainable transformative change. Her deep passion is to support change leaders who choose to bring fierce loving radical love and compassion to the spaces they impact. Ultimately, her joy is to cultivate healing and facilitate the increasing presence of light in humanity. Monika is a student in the Buddhist Soto Zen lineage and graduate of the Upaya Chaplaincy program. She holds a practice of meditation, yoga and somatic practices for more than a decade. She is daughter of Dominican immigrants, a parent of two mixed raced boys, and enjoys planting, gardens and dancing bachata and travel adventures with her husband John.

Ansje Miller (she/her/ella) is the Executive Director of the Health and Environmental Funders Network (HEFN). With over 30 years of experience in nonprofit leadership, Ansje has helped shape field-wide strategies to advance environmental justice, climate solutions, and protections for public health. Her work spans coalition-building, policy advocacy, and long-term infrastructure support for movements advancing a healthier future for all. In addition to her leadership in the philanthropic sector, Ansje is a dedicated practitioner in Buddhist and African-based ancestral traditions. She brings a deep spiritual grounding to her approach, fostering spaces where grief, resilience, and visionary action can co-exist. Ansje lives in North Carolina at the edge of forest and city, where the everyday interplay of human culture and the living world reminds her what it means to belong, and to begin again.