Introduction
This collection of case studies offers the most comprehensive look at climate conversation programs insights from across Australia. The case studies were collected by the Advocacy Research Network.
In the fight against climate disinformation and the urgent need to engage communities in meaningful climate action, conversation programs have emerged as a promising approach for creating lasting attitude change.
Unlike traditional advocacy methods that can rely on information sharing and one-way communication, these programs prioritise genuine listening, values-based dialogue, and peer-to-peer connection to overcome climate scepticism and build grassroots momentum.
Across Australia, diverse organisations have run a number of innovative conversation programs. These range from hyperlocal place-based campaigns in rural Queensland to national election mobilisation efforts.
Various advocacy groups have developed both formal structured programs and organic grassroots approaches, each showing different aspects of conversation program design, implementation challenges, and innovative solutions for effective climate justice conversations.
The evidence from these programs demonstrates that climate conversations work best when they are grounded in shared values, rooted in local concerns, and facilitated through trusted relationships. They succeed not through confrontation or fact-dumping, but by creating safe spaces for people to process their concerns about climate change and explore solutions together.
Most importantly, these programs show that regional and rural Australians do care deeply about climate issues when conversations are framed around their lived experiences and community values.
The following case studies represent the most comprehensive collection of climate conversation program insights from across Australia.
Each program offers unique lessons about overcoming different barriers to climate engagement, from reaching fossil fuel workers in the Hunter Valley to mobilising young voters through deep canvassing techniques. Together, they provide a roadmap for scaling effective climate conversations across Australia’s diverse communities and political landscapes.
Case Studies
Below is an introduction to each climate conversation program. Click on Read more to explore the program in more depth. Each case study documents the following:
- Approach
- Conversational Tools
- Volunteers and Scaling
- Program Scale and Outcomes
- Key elements of success
- Challenges
- Footnotes
350.org
350.org Australia’s 2025 federal election conversation program achieved remarkable volunteer growth, tripling their core volunteer base from 20 to 57 people while conducting over 2,100 conversations across five local groups. Their approach blended door knocking, market stalls, and phone banking with hyper-local knowledge, allowing scripts to be adapted based on each area’s demographics and political leanings.
The program’s visibility and persistence created what organisers called a “rumble” effect, generating political pressure through sustained community presence. Their success lay in combining collective reflection and celebration with practical conversation skills, treating each interaction as both an advocacy opportunity and movement-building activity.
However, reaching genuinely undecided voters remained challenging, with many conversations occurring among already climate-concerned community members.
Australian Conservation Foundation ACF
ACF’s ambitious 2025 federal election campaign aimed for one million conversations about stopping climate damage through a comprehensive “wraparound” strategy combining door knocking, market stalls, yard signs, and digital outreach.
The program successfully reached hundreds of thousands of conversations across key electorates but revealed fundamental challenges in scaling volunteer-led conversation programs. While the multi-channel approach created sustained media attention and demonstrated the potential for large-scale mobilisation, ACF fell short of their million-conversation target, highlighting the difficulty of building autonomous local groups capable of independent action.
The program’s strength lay in its adaptive design and value-led approach, particularly effective in communities not traditionally aligned with climate messaging by framing conversations around local impacts and voting power.
Australian Youth Climate Coalition AYCC
AYCC’s “Youth Decide” program for the 2022 federal election used deep canvassing techniques to build what they called “a generation-wide movement to solve the climate crisis.” Over 100 volunteers participated in the 12-week program, conducting conversations across multiple channels from face-to-face meetings to social media engagement.
The program’s success stemmed from embedding conversations into the core identity and culture of their youth volunteers, who saw these interactions as pathways to leadership and community.
AYCC’s structured yet flexible “4Cs” framework (Connection, Context, Commitment, and Catapult) helped volunteers start personally and build confidence through practice, avoiding confrontational debates in favour of emotional connection and shared values. However, retention proved challenging as youth volunteers faced life instability and economic pressures, requiring constant adaptation of training and support systems.
Cairns and Far North Environment Centre CAFNEC
The Cairns and Far North Environment Centre’s conversation work began as a community listening program challenging assumptions that regional Queenslanders don’t care about climate change. From 2021-2024, they evolved from door-to-door conversations to innovative “table talks” following major climate disasters like Cyclone Jasper. Their most successful conversations occurred when they provided clear, safe containers for community members to process shared traumatic experiences from climate impacts, particularly flooding.
CAFNEC’s place-based credibility, built over decades of environmental advocacy in Far North Queensland, enabled them to convene conversations and directly link insights to policy advocacy by inviting local candidates to respond to survivor concerns. The program demonstrated that conversations work best when grounded in immediate, lived climate impacts rather than abstract future threats.
Climate for Change
Climate for Change pioneered the “kitchen table conversations” model in Australia, adapting the Tupperware party format to climate engagement.
Their highly structured approach involves 6-8 participants in intimate home settings, using carefully designed conversation guides that move from problem recognition through solution identification to collective action.
The program has facilitated over 2,500 conversations reaching more than 10,000 people across Australia, successfully creating deeper engagement than traditional door-knocking while building ongoing community connections.
Participants often describe the conversations as transformative, helping them articulate their climate concerns and identify concrete actions. However, the model faces significant scaling challenges due to the intensive logistical support required from hosts and facilitators, with high attrition rates when attempting to create the pyramidal growth structure where participants become future hosts.
Gasfield Free Communities
Beginning in 2012 in the Northern Rivers, the Gasfield Free Communities movement created one of Australia’s most successful place-based organising models, eventually reaching over 480 communities across the country.
The program used a combination of community hall meetings, street-by-street surveys, and peer mentoring to achieve democratic consensus against gas development.
Their success stemmed from positive framing (“gasfield free” rather than opposition), building on existing rural networks and social cohesion, and using visual prompts that made the threat tangible and immediate.
The program’s strength was its non-partisan framing and local ownership, enabling it to resonate even in conservative heartlands. However, the model proved difficult to transfer to contexts lacking immediate visible threats, and required constant mentoring and adaptation to maintain effectiveness across diverse communities.
Hunter Community Alliance
The Hunter region’s conversation work addressed one of Australia’s most challenging contexts: engaging communities economically dependent on coal mining in discussions about energy transition.
The Hunter Jobs Alliance and Hunter Community Alliance used facilitated small-group conversations to surface community visions for economic diversification, focusing on jobs and regional future rather than environmental messaging.
Their success came from honouring local concerns about employment and not leading with climate messaging, instead allowing transition conversations to emerge organically from economic development discussions.
The programs used curated prompts and role-playing exercises to help participants practice difficult conversations and build confidence in discussing complex issues. However, engaging actual coal workers proved difficult, with most participation coming through churches and service groups rather than unions or direct industry channels.
Independents Election Campaign
The 2022 federal election saw unprecedented success for independent candidates, with conversation programs playing a crucial role in challenging traditional two-party dominance. Independent candidates’ conversation work was grounded in community organising models emphasising Kitchen Table Conversations, community forums, and extensive door-knocking campaigns that reached massive scale (55,000 doors in Kooyong alone).
The approach varied significantly between urban and regional contexts, with climate naturally emerging as a priority in inner-city areas while regional candidates focused on economic concerns and job security. Success came from open-ended, empathetic conversations tailored to local realities, with volunteers trained as community members rather than political operatives.
The peer-to-peer model where locals spoke to locals was critical for legitimacy, particularly in regional communities, though the election-focused timing meant valuable momentum often dissipated post-election.
Powerhouse Museum – 100 Climate Conversations
100 Climate Conversations was Australia’s most ambitious climate-focused cultural project, profiling 100 visionary Australians taking effective action to respond to climate change. Presented by the Powerhouse Museum from 2022-2023, the program featured weekly conversations recorded live, hosted by respected journalists and featuring scientists, tech CEOs, architects, politicians, Aboriginal elders, and community leaders.
Unlike traditional conversation programs focused on behaviour change or community organising, this initiative centred on storytelling and narrative sharing through professionally produced interviews.
The program’s strength lay in its institutional backing, which gave climate conversations cultural legitimacy and elevated climate stories to historical significance as part of Australia’s permanent cultural record. However, its one-way communication model limited opportunities for audience participation beyond consuming content.
Psychology for a Safe Climate
Psychology for a Safe Climate (PSC) operates on the principle that the climate emergency creates significant psychological impacts that must be addressed to enable effective climate action. Founded in Melbourne in 2010, PSC has developed a national network of Climate Aware Practitioners and runs various conversation-based programs including Climate Cafés, professional development workshops, and community conversations. Their flagship Climate Café program provides monthly online community spaces where participants can share thoughts and feelings about the climate crisis without pressure to take specific actions.
PSC’s success lies in addressing a largely unmet need for emotional support around climate issues, particularly for climate activists and professionals who experience vicarious trauma and burnout. However, the focus on processing difficult emotions may not directly translate to increased climate action among participants.
South Australia Community Climate Conversations
South Australia’s Community Climate Conversations represented the largest climate conversation program ever undertaken in Australia, engaging over 750 people across 114 conversations statewide in 2023.
Sponsored by the state government and facilitated by deliberative democracy specialists, the program used a two-stage process beginning with a representative Community Climate Panel whose insights informed a structured conversation guide for broader community use.
The program achieved remarkable scale through existing organisational networks and community partnerships rather than traditional volunteer recruitment. Participants provided extraordinarily thoughtful responses that balanced complex climate challenges with holistic solutions, demonstrating the potential of well-designed deliberative processes. However, ensuring genuine diversity beyond already climate-engaged networks remained challenging, and the time-limited nature of the program may have restricted deeper community engagement.
Final Thoughts
These case studies collectively demonstrate that effective climate conversations require more than good intentions and compelling facts.
They succeed when organisations create genuine avenues to talk about community concerns, build on existing relationships and values, and provide clear pathways from conversation to action. The most successful programs adapt their approaches to local contexts while maintaining focus on authentic listening and shared problem-solving.
The diversity of these approaches—from PSC’s therapeutic climate cafés to ACF’s million-conversation campaign—shows there is no single formula for effective climate engagement. Instead, success depends on matching program design to community context, organisational capacity, and strategic objectives while maintaining the core principles of values-based dialogue, genuine listening, and respect for community expertise.
As Australia continues to grapple with climate misinformation and political polarisation, these programs offer hope and practical guidance for building the broad-based community engagement essential for effective climate action. This extensive experience among organisers provides a foundation for scaling climate conversations across the diverse landscapes of Australian democracy.
Related Research Resources
Explore more resources related to this article and 2025 research project conducted by the Advocacy Research Network, in partnership with the Climate Justice Coalition.
- Effective Climate Justice Conversations: Guidance and Tactical Tools
- Beyond Headcounts: Evaluating Climate Conversations for Real Impact
- Talking Change: How Climate Conversations can Shift Public Attitudes and Help Build Movements
- From First Chat to Long-Term Changemaker: How to Grow and Sustain Volunteers in Climate Conversations
- Fighting Fire with Listening: How Climate Conversations can help Tackle Misinformation
Explore Further
- Door Knocking: A Case Study in Moving People to Take Action
- Persuasive Conversation Campaigns Guide
- Climate Organizing Shorts Podcast: Conversations with Climate Organizers
- Talking About the Bushfire Crisis and Climate Change
- How Powerful Conversations Won Abortion Rights in Ireland
- Tools for Canvassing and Door Knocking
- Conversation Tips for Stalls, Events & Door Knocking
- Tips for Phonebanking or Calling Volunteers
- How to Have a Persuasive Conversation, GetUp
- Structured Conversations on Campaigns, Amnesty Australia
- How to Have a Persuasive Conversation, GetUp [The Four C’s]
- Circles of Commitment: A Model of Engagement
- Deep Canvassing Scripts and Examples
- Deep Canvassing to Shift Hearts, Mind and Votes
- First Nations and Multicultural Voices from the Climate Movement
- Climate Activism: Start Here
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