2.3.1 Glasgow Meeting House
In Glasgow, Doreen Osborne and Mary Troup are part of a group who founded a climate café after welcoming visitors and providing a refreshments area at COP26. These quotes come from an interview with Kathy Chandler for Open University course materials.
Doreen comments on the benefits of a climate café:
One is it reduces the sense of isolation when you’re sitting there at home worrying about climate change. What am I going to do? How am I going to affect this because it’s really important. So, it gives you somewhere to share those concerns. It also gives you somewhere to share information and find out things that other people are doing.
The climate café meetings are blended, with some people arriving at the meeting house to chat informally and sharing food first and others joining online for the later part of the meeting, when there are often small group discussions.
Mary explains the value in bringing people together:
Individually, I think we can all have a sense of powerlessness but coming together there’s a real sense of empowerment and building of self-belief, self-confidence. We’re bringing leadership skills. There’s a real sense of value in what each person brings, working together with a sense of integrity, truth and courage to make a difference and having a vision for future generations. We really have a responsibility to try in whatever way we can, to make a positive difference and the climate cafés give us a place where we can do that, where we don’t feel alone, where we can encourage each other.
Mary has also worked with a local primary school to support the children in setting up their own climate café.