Creative Climate Cafe Programme Launch Event

Event: Creative Climate Cafe Programme Launch Event

Date/Time: Friday 20 Oct 2023, 6pm – 8pm

Venue: Rampion Visitor Centre, 76, Kings Road Arches, Brighton BN1 2FN

Contact: Heather McKnight, Project Manager, 

Magnetic Ideals, heather@magneticideals.org

Creative Climate Cafe Programme Launch Event – Combatting Eco-Anxiety and Promoting Affordable Sustainable Living

The launch of the Brighton and Hove Creative Climate Cafe Programme 2023/24 will take place on 20 Oct at the Rampion Windfarm Visitor Centre. The Creative Climate Cafe initiative will help address fuel poverty and fuel conservation for vulnerable groups by running ten intergenerational, family-friendly Creative Climate Cafes that also address the cost of living crisis. These workshops will be hosted by experienced facilitators and community leaders with backgrounds in sustainability, mental health, eco-anxiety and community empowerment. 

At these creative climate cafes, people will engage in healing artistic pursuits, and build community while learning to save money sustainably in the cost of living crisis. Each cafe will address a different cost of living issue, from home fuel use, water use, food, social life and connections, sustainable purchasing, and empowering people to ask for change.

This approach builds on the Climate Psychology Association model of Climate Cafes as open, inclusive spaces for discussing climate change. Cafes allow a forum that can encourage action and educate in cost saving. Research indicates that these collective experiences can lead to better mental health outcomes and be better for the planet, as people move from anxiety to action.

The project will improve support and awareness of marine ecology, nature conservation and environmental improvements through community outreach. Sessions will run in the Rampion Visitor Centre and others at the Cornerstone Community Centre.

The launch event will feature talks for project partners gluten-free and vegan, refreshments. 

Entertainment will be provided by award-winning comedian Lorelei Mathias (from comedy collective Melon Comedy) and Phil Johnstone, a songwriter and musician in the Bedford Celts. Lorelei is a resident mermaid protestor in Brighton, has made comedy shorts about the plastic crisis in our oceans and has been featured in the Guardian and the BBC. There will also be a soundscape from Remember Glaciers, a project that aims to recover stories of glaciers from the past like bubbles of air trapped in ice cores and to share them as fragments of memory echoing and fading into glacially slow generative ambient soundscapes. 

Booking is available via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/creative-climate-cafe-programme-launch-event-the-rampion-visitor-centre-tickets-718457494707

This project is funded through The Rampion Community Benefit Fund at Sussex Community Foundation and is a partnership between Magnetic Ideals, Arts for Life, Ecotopia Now! and the Rampion Windfarm Visitor Centre.

Arts for life