Lived Experience Guide to Climate Campaigning

Introduction

The Lived Experience Guide to Climate Campaigning provides guidance to organisations seeking to campaign with people with lived experience of climate impacts.

This guide aims to introduce concepts, practices and guidelines that can be used by organisations when they work with people with lived experience and when designing communications and campaigns. It was developed with input from climate-impacted people as well as advocates, psychologists and campaigners with experience in supporting people with lived experience to be storytellers and change agents.

As we experience escalating disasters and extreme weather we are yet again reminded that Australia is on the front line of climate change. Climate impacted people are experts in how climate change has impacted them/us and their/our communities and can be powerful advocates for change and action. In supporting people with lived experience of climate change, there are a range of important considerations that lead to better outcomes while minimising harm.

Access the full Lived Experience Guide to Climate Campaigning on the Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action website.

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What is ‘lived experience’ in the context of climate change?

Lived experience can be defined as “personal knowledge about the world gained through direct, first-hand involvement in everyday events rather than through representations constructed by other people”. (Source)

In the context of climate change it refers to people with direct experience of climate impacts e.g. bushfires, floods, heat impacts, sea-level rise, storms, drought, pollution etc.

People with lived experience of climate change may include:

• people who have suffered personal losses as a result of climate-fueled disasters e.g. fire and flood survivors
• people deeply impacted by the effects of climate-fueled disasters on their communities
• people whose entire communities are threatened by sea-level rise or something else
• people living in regions hardest hit by heat
• people whose health, land, water, culture and communities are threatened by fossil fuel expansion or pollution
• emergency service workers responding to the dangerous impacts of climate change health care professionals who treat and witness the health impacts of climate change
• people whose experience of climate-fueled disasters has impacted their mental health and sense of safety and wellbeing
• family members and friends of someone harmed, traumatised or killed by climate events
• people with family or friends overseas who are experiencing climate impacts in their home country
• people who may have all of the above experiences, or not, and were part of community-led preparedness, response and recovery efforts to climate-related impacts such as floods, bushfires or drought.

What is Trauma?

In this context trauma is a deeply disturbing event that infringes upon an individual’s sense of control and may reduce their capacity to integrate the situation or circumstances into their current reality. (Source) Trauma can also result from ongoing or repeated smaller events resulting in similar impacts. Trauma has been linked to exposure to war, combat, natural disasters, physical or sexual abuse, terrorism, and catastrophic accidents.

Vicarious trauma is indirect exposure to other people’s trauma, including through repeated exposure to written or visual details of traumatic events, can also have the same harmful effects. (Source)

People working in the climate movement and especially those involved in disaster and recovery responses can be subject to this type of trauma. Unfortunately vicarious trauma can be created when well-meaning events or campaigns result in unsafe sharing of traumatic stories from impacted people.

There are work practices (such as supervision) that can help to minimise, identify and treat vicarious trauma in the workplace.

In his book Preventing and Healing Climate Traumas Bob Depelts points out that the climate emergency is likely to directly and indirectly cause psychological, emotional and spiritual impacts that mental health professionals currently define as trauma.

Trauma can go beyond individual trauma to include community trauma (where events or conditions impact a geographic area or a group with shared identity) or societal trauma (events that go beyond communities and affect cultures, countries or humanity itself, eg the COVID19 pandemic).

What Does it Mean to be ‘Trauma-Informed’?

The concept of being trauma-informed has evolved over the last 30 years across a variety of sources, predominantly in the field of mental health.

Being ‘trauma-informed’ or bringing a ‘trauma-informed approach’ to your work means operating in a way that acknowledges that any of the people you come across in your work might carry trauma (not limited to climate trauma), and doing things in a way that minimises risk of harm and builds strengths. – Source

In the field of mental health building strength may mean healing. It certainly includes empowerment and supporting the development of a person’s own choice and voice. In the climate movement it can include building the capacity of people to share their story, to advocate, to contribute to policy setting and to step into leadership roles.

Minimising risk of harm is the ethical approach, but it isn’t always obvious how to do that. What causes harm for one person might be perfectly OK for another – therefore your own perception of what is psychologically safe isn’t sufficient and it is important to plan using existing guidelines and principles.

Not everyone with lived experience is carrying trauma – however, like accessibility, promoting diversity and cultural safety, being trauma-informed is good practice that benefits everyone and is a requirement for achieving climate justice.

Ultimately taking a trauma-informed approach when working with people and communities with lived experience of climate impacts is respectful, it minimises risk of causing harm and it is also more likely to result in beneficial outcomes for all involved.

Going a step further and taking a trauma-informed approach to all of our work has the benefit of making the workplace safer for all staff. It is a proactive approach to psychological safety that takes into account that anyone can carry trauma from past experiences or current emotional and psychological challenges (including mental illness). This approach aligns with the Safe Work Australia code of practice that requires workplaces to eliminate or minimise psychosocial risks so far as is reasonably practicable (each state may have its own requirements).

Practical Approaches to Being Trauma-Informed

A simple example is this Checklist for running a trauma-informed event that plans and prepares for an event by providing a safe accessible space, welcomes support people, a quiet separate space is available, an opportunity to pre-brief and debrief, a clear transparent agenda and safety and content warnings.

Providing content (or trigger) warnings is a simple practice that increases safety and accessibility of content. Content warnings are verbal or written notices preceding sensitive content that could potentially disturb some people. While straightforward, this practice requires us to be conscious and intentional about informing people what they are about to see, hear or experience.

Whether it’s for a workshop, social media post, meeting or conversation, a content warning should allow time for individuals to determine whether or how they will engage in the material.

Some practical principles of being trauma-informed are outlined below (Source):

• Safety: Ensuring physical and psychological safety. Safety does not always mean that everything will feel easy or comfortable (e.g. doing media interviews), and it can be useful to make this distinction at times.E.g. providing a content or trigger warning at the beginning of an event or preceding an article or social media post.
• Trustworthiness and Transparency: Keeping promises, being reliable and demonstrating this clearly. Failure to follow up or acknowledge contributions undermines trustworthiness. Transparency helps people better understand your priorities and intentions and know where they stand with you or your organisation.
• Collaboration and Mutuality: Who wields power and how can this be addressed? Rather than just imposing your organisation’s goals, seeking collaboration with those with lived experience and impacted communities, and seeking mutual goals, is more trauma-informed.
• Empowerment, Voice and Choice: Continues to expand on this idea by further emphasising the need to actively encourage people to use their power and voice. People with lived experience have often been disempowered through their experiences, particularly by bureaucracies. Ensure that your organisation doesn’t repeat that experience, but supports genuine empowerment.
• Understanding the Cultural, Historical, and Gender Issues that impact the people in your world are also essential to being trauma-informed. Paying attention to culture can help us see strengths, social connections, core values, and resources that might otherwise go ignored. Understanding intersectionality is incredibly valuable to being more trauma-informed.
• Providing opportunities for Peer Support can help people with lived experience of trauma learn and grow together. Helping peers come together also enhances the likelihood that people will feel safe due to the stronger sense of belonging that comes with having peers. Bringing peers together can also support empowerment, as it’s often easier to speak up as a group than as an individual.

Working with People with Lived Experience

In addition to the advice collected above about being trauma-informed, there are a few other
points to make about working with people with lived experience of climate impacts.

• Support people’s own agency to choose how to present themselves. If in doubt: ask. This is especially useful when preparing to interview someone on a panel – Eg “If at any point you get upset while answering, what would you like me to do? Go to the next question, or just give you a moment to collect yourself?”
• Check your own response – before responding to a survivor offer them space to tell their story in their own words. By listening deeply you will learn the terms they wish to use, what is helpful and what is unhelpful. Offer prompts if you need more information or they are not sure how to begin. People with lived experience don’t want your pity and they may not want to be called an inspiration or resilient either. Resist the temptation to say ‘sorry’ or ‘I know how you feel’. – Eg “How do you prefer to be described? Are there any terms that you prefer to avoid?”
• Be mindful of what assumptions you are making about the person and/or situation, about how they are feeling and coping. Rather, let go of assumptions, be curious and collaborative.
• Invite people with lived experience to contribute in other ways beyond telling their stories. Involve them in advising on your campaign plans, they are particularly useful advisors on messaging and imagery – consider a panel of lived experience advisors.
• People with lived experience are best placed to say what they need in their communities and should be included in policy setting.
• For people who are telling their stories in the media or elsewhere, agree on how they would like to be supported, which may include an offer for supervision, debriefing or a simple check in conversation. Consider providing access to psychological support for people who are regularly telling their stories. (Search for a climate aware practitioner through the directory provided by Psychology for a Safe Climate)
• Repeatedly telling a traumatic story can become increasingly difficult over time. Ensure that storytellers know they can step back from telling their stories whenever they choose. Offer other meaningful work/volunteering opportunities if they wish to remain involved.
• Avoid extractivism. People with lived experience deserve to be recognised as more than ‘just’ a survivor or a witness. Being swept into a media or campaigning whirlwind then dumped once usefulness has receded damages trust and diminishes a person’s self-worth.

Working with Grassroots Orgs

Grassroots organisations that work with people with lived experience put enormous effort into recruiting, training and supporting spokespeople. They are experts in the breadth and depth of the lived experience their spokes can offer.

They have developed (often over years) protocols and processes to support their spokes to share their stories, while remaining as safe as possible.

Before asking a grassroots organisation to provide a spokesperson(s) for your campaign, you should consider:

• Do you have established trauma-informed practices that would shape and apply to this opportunity? This should become the norm for events and campaigns that involve spokes with lived experience.
• Have people with lived experience been involved in co-designing this opportunity? Experience shows that involving people with lived experience in co-designing campaigns and events results in safer, more effective and more insightful experiences with better outcomes.
• Is this opportunity one that the grassroots organisation might benefit from being a partner on, rather than just a supplier of talent? Grassroots organisations often live and breathe this work – for some it might represent their main reason for being. Is there a way that you can boost their work by partnering with them on the campaign/event to achieve your mutual aims?
• Rather than request spokes for talent – does the grassroots organisation have their own campaign that you can boost alongside yours, sharing stories they have already published? This is a great option to amplify lived experience and grassroots organisations without them having to do much extra work. However please do ask first and be prepared to give a full and clear picture of the proposed collaboration and get their informed consent before going ahead.
• Be mindful that grassroots organisations often run on shoestring budgets and have limited and stretched capacity. For that reason alone they may decline to be involved.

Imagery Guidelines from People with Lived Experience

Imagery is a powerful tool for the climate movement and in any campaign. While imagery can be effective in attracting attention and support it can have the opposite effect and create fear, despair and cause the viewer to reject or turn away from the message.

For people with lived experience – or even those who watch climate impacts with growing eco-grief – some imagery can be triggering, leading to despair, anger and/or anxiety. Imagery can also exclude through limited choice of subjects and creating a bias (eg only showing happy people at a beach during a heatwave).

These are recommendations based on the experiences of survivors, impacted people and others who have been deeply affected by climate disasters. We understand in some circumstances these images serve a purpose.

Avoid:

• Don’t show raging out-of-control bushfires
• Don’t show homes burning – be aware of not sharing news articles that frequently show these images during ongoing fires
• Don’t show destroyed homes without the express permission of the property owner (e.g. in a story the person has fully consented to appearing in).
• Don’t show injured or dead animals
• If possible don’t use monocultural images only

Try to:

• Show images that shows people organising in response to disasters and helping each other
• Show emergency personnel responding to emergencies
• Show diversity of cultures, geographies, ages, genders and lifestyles
• Show a damaged home if you have the express permission of the property owner and it is intrinsic to telling a story/illustrating a campaign

Messaging and Language

Volumes have been published on messaging – we seek to point to just a couple of issues to be mindful of in relation to lived experience.

• Use strengths based language where possible
  • Survivors not victims
  • Disproportionately impacted not vulnerable
• Don’t use language that excludes the experience of many
  • Dangerous not unliveable* (these regions will remain populated even as conditions worsen)
• Don’t compare disasters – either past or future – in a way that undermines or minimises the experiences of those impacted already
• Be aware of language that privileges the impacts to the upper and middle classes – eg focusing on impacts to holidays and lifestyles – unless that is a specific focus of the campaign.
• Impacted communities are very tired of the words resilience and ‘recovery journey’ – these words have often been poorly used to put the onus back on individuals in spite of the real causes of the problems. Be guided by the language they use.
• Be mindful that as humans we respond very differently to stories about people ‘like us’ and people who are ‘other’. Our biases can lead to us preferencing certain narratives and certain people when building stories about struggle, trauma, disasters and recovery. Avoid reinforcing stereotypes wherever possible.

See the Sweltering Cities Media Guide for excellent tips and guidelines.

Some Tips if you are Planning to Share your Narrative

(Borrowed and adapted from Mental health lived experience narratives; recommendations for avoiding misuses and adopting good practice, Institute of Mental Health: Nottingham, UK. 2023.)

We have prepared a few tips for those who may want to share their narrative, some of which come from some previous research (Costa et al., 2012).

• Remember that your participation is voluntary and you can always say no
• Ask yourself, who benefits from you telling your story in this way?
• Consider what purpose does sharing your personal story serve?
• Make sure you have an opportunity to proof-read and edit the final version of your story before it is published / broadcast / posted online.
• Ask about withdrawal and update procedures.
• Ask how large organisations use stories to make material change?
• Think of story-telling as an exercise of labour/work and consider asking if you will get paid. This is particularly relevant the longer your time commitment.
• Remember that the internet lasts forever and because of the technology available today, your interview or story will likely be accessible to the public for a very long time, including people you may not wish to see it in future, e.g. future employers or landlords.
• As part of their work role, those who are soliciting stories to fulfil their job obligations may not be considering, or may not be aware of, the long term consequences of your public storytelling.
• You do not have to share your real name and could use a pseudonym if you wish.

Tips for Sharing your Story with the Media

Most journalists do not want to upset you or do any further harm, and want to tell your story in a way that you are comfortable with.

• Many of them don’t have training in trauma but are very open to learning more and
  doing the right thing
• Even if a journalist asks you directly or has already started asking you questions, you
  do not have to agree to an interview
• You can ask for some time to decide whether you do an interview or not
• You can change your mind after agreeing to an interview
• You can put conditions on accepting an interview, such as the kinds of questions and/or topics you can answer, where and how you will do an interview, who will be present (most journalists will do what they can to make an interview happen, especially for survivors and laypeople)
• They may not agree, but if it is a print interview you can ask the journalist to show you the quotes they will attribute to you before they publish their story
• When deciding whether to do an interview, consider the effort, energy and emotion that might go into an interview. Will the payoff in sharing your story and key messages at this time with this media outlet be worth it?

Download Resource

Lived Experience Guide to Climate Campaigning

Authors and Acknowledgements

Authors: Serena Joyner (Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action), Jo Dodds (Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action), Bronwyn Gresham (Psychology for a Safe Climate), Kathryn McCallum (CANA), Emily Watkins (Climate Media Centre).

Acknowledgements: the support and insights of the Climate Disaster Solidarity emergent conversations network in late 2023 including Maddy Braddon, Charlie Wood, Tim Hollo, Jai Allison, Ruchira Talukdar and Aleesha Hanczakowski.

Explore Further

• Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action
• Navigating Trauma in Disaster Relief
• Resources for Disaster Relief and Recovery
• Climate Resistance Handbook Or, I was part of a climate action. Now what?
• Lost Voices: A toolkit for Digital Campaigners
• ChangeMaker Chat with Danielle Celemajer: How Changemakers can walk with crisis and harness the power of storytelling