Workshop Opportunity: Facing Eco-Anxiety and Building Resilience with Active Hope

We are always looking to provide opportunities to strengthen relationships and build a more caring community as we know that this is essential for sustaining a resilient and lasting movement for change. With this in mind, we’re planning a workshop on Saturday, the 30th of March, titled 'Facing Eco-Anxiety and Building Resilience with Active Hope', that will explore how we can face eco-anxiety and build resilience with active hope. 

As Joanna Macy said,

“Active Hope is not wishful thinking. Active Hope is waking up to the beauty of life on whose behalf we can act.” 

Facilitated by Oana Sânziana Marian and Claudia Tormey, co-founders of the Active Hope Ireland Network, this workshop will invite you to reflect on and share your inner emotions and feelings in a safe space with others who mirror your feelings and concerns. You will also be invited to take part in creative experiential practices for seeking wisdom from nature, ancestors and future generations that will support and guide you on your own active hope journey with renewed strength and resilience.

Sign up to join our Active Hope Workshop

Where: Carmelite Community Centre, 56 Aungier St, Dublin 2, D02 T258, Ireland

When: Saturday 30 March ~ 11am - 4pm 

Note: We will be providing teas/ coffees but would ask that all participants bring a packed lunch for the day if possible. 

This workshop is aimed at people who are deeply concerned about the social and ecological crises we are faced with in the world today - both seasoned activists as well as those who would like to begin their journey into activism for a better world are welcome.

Drawing on Joanna Macy's ‘Work that Reconnects’, Active Hope explores deepening our sense of gratitude, honouring our feelings of pain for the world and people’s suffering, seeing with new eyes or different perspectives and going forth with renewed energy and sense of purpose. Active Hope is about discovering how each of us can contribute to the healing of our world and finding the tools to help us in meeting these challenges. 

Many of us are moved to act when we recognise injustice and experience grief in response to what is unfolding in our world. But how do we sustain our activism and remain hopeful as we bear witness to ecological collapse and social injustice across the world, when bad news becomes overwhelming and we struggle to balance our call to activism with other life demands?

Active Hope provides tools to build and maintain strength, resilience and compassion in a time of crisis through a process of reconnecting with the self, others and nature.

Join our Active Hope workshop 

 

About our facilitators:

Oana Sânziana Marian is a migrant woman, a writer, an artist, and a Quaker. She holds a PhD in theology (with a focus on feminist theology) and contemporary Irish poetry from Trinity College Dublin and a Master of Divinity from Yale Divinity School. She is currently training as an ecumenical/interfaith hospital chaplain, and a Compassionate Inquiry mentor (a therapeutic framework developed by Gabor Maté and Sat Dharam Kaur). She also works as a creative neurodiversity consultant. Oana’s work focuses primarily on holding space for grief with diverse groups. She underwent Work That Reconnects facilitator training in 2019 and co-founded the Active Hope Network with Claudia Tormey. 

Claudia Tormey is an ecofeminist, activist, budding kitchen gardener, dreamer and mother. Claudia first came across the work of Joanna Macy when grappling with her own despair and burnout in 2017. After taking part in an Active Hope workshop at a Young Friends of the Earth gathering at Cloughjordan Ecovillage, she immediately felt called to do this work. In 2018, Claudia completed a Work That Reconnects facilitator training in the UK with resilience expert Chris Johnstone, who wrote the book Active Hope with Joanna Macy. She co-founded the Active Hope Ireland Network and has collaborated with others in delivering workshops to various groups with the intention of inspiring more people with active hope. Claudia’s day job is working as part of the Friends of the Earth Ireland team and she is guided by the teachings of Active Hope from deep ecology to systems thinking in all that she does.

 

Image Credit: The dandelion artwork used above was created by Dori Midnight