Sip, Snack, and Feel with Climate Cafe NYC

Have you been losing sleep over what will happen to our planet? Well, you’re not alone. At Climate Cafe NYC, you’ll be given a baked good in one hand, coffee in the other, and, most importantly, a space to share all your feelings about climate change.

Gianna Lum is one of the founders of Climate Cafe NYC. A professional tech writer, she devotes her free time to Climate Cafe. Gianna’s voice is warm and clear as she explains where it all began—a key quality of a great meditation leader.

“When I was in fourth grade, I had a teacher—Ms. Meuser. She taught us science for a day. She walked in with the printed outlines of Earth and gave us each a pack of markers to colour them. I love purple. I almost coloured the entire Earth purple. But I was like, no, Earth is beautiful the way it is with the green and the blue.”

I chuckle at the thought of the entirely purple earth.

“We were admiring each other's finished artwork, and then she handed students scissors and said, ‘Now, cut them in little pieces.’” Shocked and confused, the ten-year-olds reluctantly shredded all their best-coloured Earths.

“She said that this is what humans do to the planet. And we can piece our world back together by doing something good for the planet, like walking to school or putting aerators on our shower. And she asked, ‘Would you tell your children or grandchildren that you did nothing to piece the world back together?’”

This vivid experience put Gianna on a path to piece her planet together. At first, Gianna wanted to do it all. In college, Gianna studied earth system science and urban studies. She wanted to learn and teach the science of the relationship between human structures and the environment to get people to care about the environment. “Back then, not many people were talking about climate change,” she says.

She spent most of her free time trying to awaken the people around her. She even developed her own climate science curriculum for those who couldn’t attend college.

It wasn’t until years later when she joined the Sunrise Movement NYC, where she also met her fellow co-founder Jon Kirsch, that she realised she was crashing. “It was exhausting. We'd been activists for almost a decade. And we noticed that others were feeling burnt out too, especially during the pandemic.”

Gianna and Jon started tabling at parks around New York City, having coffee and conversing with people about the climate crisis. They wanted to figure out what people needed to overcome the exhaustion.

“People were generally anxious about our changing planet. And they wanted a sense of community. They were feeling kind of lost.” I nod as I recall my college years participating in organising, remembering how much difference it made to find my “community.”

In the Fall of 2022, the pair set up snacks and coffee at Jon’s place in Williamsburg. The makeshift “cafe”  became a space where climate activists and people of all backgrounds with eco-anxiety could come and share their feelings freely without judgment.

Today,  Climate Cafe NYC combines activities to help process the complex emotions caused by climate change and workshops offered by skilled volunteers. For the next few months, the cafe will also be holding weekly sessions at the Climate Imaginarium through the Governors Island Arts’ annual Organizations in Residence Program. All are welcome to come by and share snacks and their feelings about climate change.

The word “feeling” is prominent with Climate Cafe NYC.

“Our guidelines state this is a space for emotions because a lot of times we’re not taking stock of our mental health while participating in activism, trying to figure out the solution.”

The first hour of the gathering includes meditation and a grounding activity, followed by whichever workshop or program is set up for that day. Like at any actual cafe, people hang out after the event, socialise, and share resources. “The focus is on how you feel about the climate crisis and how those feelings may be affecting your ability to take action or the types of action you want to take,” Gianna notes.

Climate Cafe NYC often collaborates with other mental health organisations that work with eco-anxious individuals. “We collaborated with the Climate Mental Health Network with therapists co-facilitating the event with us, where we encouraged the kids to colour out their emotions. For many kids, this was their first time expressing these feelings. It was a powerful experience.”

Gianna shares that what she saw in the work of the young people aged 12-18 was bleak, showing how deeply eco-anxiety has permeated all generations of humanity. For many, there is no escaping an environmentally-ravaged future, one where our lives are fundamentally different. For many, there’s only processing.

These are the feelings that Climate Cafe NYC is determined to address - to turn fear and helplessness into community and action.  As Gianna explains, there is no such thing as ‘bad feelings’; rather, “all feelings coexist within you as a human being,” she says.

“The anger, anxiety, hopelessness—that's human. What you do with those feelings will make a difference.”

A Haiku from one of the members, Ryan Ramos, sums it up perfectly.

Heavy feelings feel
Lighter in a safe space, true 
Power of people