The Listening Fields
A facilitated exploration bringing movements, regrantors, and funders together to make sense of climate justice differently.
What happens when we finally listen?
There are many conversations happening about climate justice.
Important insights and ideas are exchanged. Strategies and frameworks shared. Resources moved.
Across the climate justice ecosystem, people are working with care, urgency, and intention.
But very often, deeper tensions remain just beneath the surface.
Climate justice recognizes that the communities least responsible for climate change are often the ones experiencing its worst impacts.
These communities often hold deep, lived knowledge of systemic change – from preserving carbon sinks, responsible water protection, or mutual aid systems that enable community resilience to climate shocks.
Meanwhile, those stewarding climate resources hold a wider view of how change is supported and sustained over time.
Both perspectives matter – but they are not always seen or heard with the same weight.
When one narrative is repeatedly heard more than the other, the story of climate justice becomes incomplete.
So what if the room changed?
What if movements could speak from what the work actually requires?
What iff funders could honestly surface how decisions are being made?
What if we could truly listen across roles, power, and lived realities?
The Listening Fields are an experiment to explore what becomes possible when...
Our realities meet without needing to be simplified, translated, or resolved too quickly.
We can voice difficult truths – and stay present when conversations become uncomfortable.
We aren't expected to arrive with answers, and instead believe relationships come first.
Your voice belongs here if you...
work with a movement, regrantor, or funder on climate-related issues, and...
are asking how you can listen with more integrity, care, and wonder, and...
deeply want to shift climate philanthropy – but struggle with the how...
...if that sounds like you, then we invite you – to bring your questions. your humility. your experiences. your doubts.
What the Listening Fields Enable...
The listening fields create a new infrastructure that helps us build a deeper, more honest understanding of what is shaping climate justice work.
Over time, we believe this is the only way we can truly influence how and where funding flows.
The listening fields will:
1
Collect and uplift diverse stories that connect to realities behind the work – which become treated as evidence of impact
2
Show us how our experiences connect – and help us weave language that forms a collective narrative for climate justice
3
Begin to reframe what is recognized as change – and what feels possible to fund, support, and prioritize
Join intentionally designed spaces to...
Challenge assumptions with curiosity
Allow uncertainty to exist, recognizing that understanding grows slowly
Openly share without needing to persuade or defend
Surface patterns, connections, and points of difference
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There’s so much we are doing on the ground...stories help us communicate to a wider audience.
Adelaide Mazwarira,
Urgent Action Fund
Every meaningful change begins the same way...
someone decides to listen.
