20 Things You Can Do to Help Beat Plastic Pollution

In March 2022, the UN Environmental Assembly gathered in Nairobi, Kenya, and 175 nations agreed to develop an international, legally binding agreement by the end of 2024 to end plastic pollution. Spurred on in part by the growing global awareness of the catastrophic impact that plastic waste is having on the environment, especially the oceans, this historic day also highlighted the importance of us rapidly shifting to a circular economy.

With the UN’s agreement set to come into effect at the end of this year and this year’s Earth Day theme being  Planet vs Plastics, we are sharing 20 actions that anyone, anywhere can take to help tackle plastic pollution. 

This is a complex topic, one I have written about in the past. I’ve explored how recycling is broken and asked, Will Global Plastic Bans Work? 

In 2018 we launched a campaign for a post-disposable future, as one of the main drivers of plastic waste has been the rapid transition from reusable to disposable items in everything from food service ware to sanitary items.

The big changes we need to see will take all of us contributing in different ways, and one person’s actions can help make a difference, especially if those actions help create a movement.

If you want to see more everyday actions you can take to make a positive impact, check out the UN collaboration we did called the Anatomy of Action. 

20 WAYS to beat plastic pollution

SWAPS:  Opt for reusable as often as possible and get creative with trading in your local community

• Swap from single-use to reusable: This can be done across many areas, from how you get water when you’re out and about to what you choose for your office lunch. Swapping out a single-use to reusable can include bringing your own container or vessel, or finding the time and place to use the reusable options provided. 

• Rethink food storage: Eliminate plastic baggies and wrap by swapping to reusable containers and beeswax wraps to store food at home. 

• Ditch single-use period products and opt for new reusable ones: The silicone cups are life-changing! Reusable for years and very effective to use, one cup can save thousands of tampons from being used. The many new period underwear products are also helping save women money and reducing a bunch of plastic, so check out what’s on offer for you and switch out the plastic in your monthly cycle. 

• Have a clothing swap with friends! Not only will you save your old clothes from the landfill, but you'll also get new outfits for free and have some fun social time. Many clothes are filled with plastic, so in general, try to always opt for second-hand or locally designed and made garments. 

• Find some freecycle or like-minded communities in your area: Depending on your city, these swap-based communities trade goods and services with the caveat that it’s free. 

SERVICES: Utilize services that are designed for and support the circular economy

• Use a clothing or tool library: If you have these in your city, you can borrow, rent or lease anything from drills and exercise equipment to a fancy outfit you only need for one night. 

• Food waste delivery services: Many cities have companies that save food from waste (usually due to overstock or minor aesthetic issues), and you can often get a lot of great produce and meals at a discounted price. Check out the Too Good to Go App to see if it’s active in your area. 

• Subscribe to a low-packaging service: This is common now for things like personal care and cleaning products; they often come in tablet form so you are not paying for all that water, and you can use the tablet in a reusable bottle. 

• Compost! If you don’t have space at your home, your neighborhood or city collection might have a green waste pickup service. Many places have community gardens that will accept it as well. You can buy small-scale worm farms to have mess-free, odor-free vermicompost right in your home, which takes up a very small footprint.

• If you have a little one, look for a nappy/diaper washing service: These product-service-system models will lease you the clean reusable diapers and take away and bulk wash the dirty ones (this is key to making them more sustainable, as the bulk washing saves water and energy).

STAY CREATIVE: Embrace DIY & activated agency by making your own items and speaking up in support of preventing plastic waste.

• Make your own! This is a great solution for many household cleaning products and food items like non-dairy milks (almond and oat milk are very quick and easy to make — check out out Hero Veg Cookbook for recipes on how to make these!).  You can even make your own deodorant, toothpaste, lip gloss, eyeliner and many other items with a few basic materials, and the internet has tons of instructions on how to do these. 

• Take your own: A simple but powerful option is to ask a shop to fill your own vessel when getting takeout or to-go food. You may get rejected, but it's worth asking and raising awareness of this need. Lots of really cool reusable food container services are popping up all over the world, and they might already be in your community! Check out the Dabba Drop in London as an example. 

• Actively refuse single-use items when offered and make a point as to why: This could be when you are in a sit-down cafe and they bring you a drink in a disposable plastic cup; when ordering, check first what the item will come in and make sure to ask for a reusable option.

• Don't be afraid to ask: Be it at your local cafe or your kids' school, ask for reusable options and explain why. The more people who request this, the more likely it is to become normalized and adopted.

• Know your local recycling options and optimize for them: Most places still don't accept soft plastics, but every local waste service is different. Do a quick Google search to learn about your local pick-up and recycling options, and when you’re shopping, select items that can easily be recaptured.

SHOP SMARTER: Be extra choosy about where and how you spend your consumer power

• Seek out zero waste shopping solutions: For example, the ZeroWasteStore app enables you to get pantry items without the plastic. 

• Buy bigger: Another great option for pantries, especially when it comes to soft plastic for household staples like rice, is to look for bulk options that will reduce the amount of plastic you purchase. This often saves you money as well when you buy in bulk, seek out specialty stores that offer bulk purchasing. 

• Support shops and stores that are offering zero waste and plastic-free shopping: The key is to reuse packaging, not just swap to a different type of material that is disposable. So find stores that are actively reducing their plastic use and support them — it makes a difference! 

• Find a local farmer to shop from: Many communities have farmer subscription services where a box of farm fresh food can be delivered to your home plastic-free. This will not only save you money and reduce the amount of plastic you get on your fruit and veg, but it also helps support local farmers (who are heroes in my mind).

• Invest in start-ups and services that are creating post-disposable products and services: The best way to see more services available is to invest in them, and early adopters can often bear the financial load. But if you can’t afford it, and want to see more of it, then seek out and invest (by becoming a customer) in zero waste and sustainable services.

HUNGRY FOR MORE?

If you want to explore more things you can do, explore circular business models in our free Circular Business ReDesign Kit, download our free Superpower Activation Kit, or take on a post-disposable design challenge by downloading our free Post-Disposable Kit. 

The UnSchool also offers a lot of free content, email micro courses, professional programs and accredited online certification tracks to help you be a more activated participant in solving global social and environmental issues.

The Rising Peak of Climate and Eco-Anxiety

This is Part 1 of a 3 part series on this topic by Leyla Acaroglu

Have you ever felt overwhelmed or even depressed by the global climate and nature crises?

I know I have. Despite having a very optimistic future-focused perspective, I can often feel distressed by the constant compounding disasters; floods, fires, famine — the consequences of our nature-destructive tendencies are all over the news and often present in our daily lives.

Now moreso than ever, these issues are being directly attributed to climate change, which reinforces the need for action. But when you don’t see the action happening, it can create an even deeper sense of anxiety and despair.

The resulting stress and pessimism felt by the awareness of environmental issues is called climate or eco-anxiety, and we recently took some time to look into the science behind this. What we found was really concerning. This appears to be widespread with the emotional and psychological toll of inaction affecting people’s mental health, life choices and productivity across all age groups.

I wanted to share some of the high-level things we learned through our research, which also prompted us to create a survey about eco-anxiety to understand more about how this is affecting people in our community so we can develop some creative change-making tools to support people experiencing this. If you have a few moments to spare, please take it ⬇️

Over the next couple of months I will share a series of articles on what we have found out, report on what you share with us via the survey, and develop a toolkit for tackling this issue in a creative way.

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What’s going on?

Climate-related emotions are becoming more prevalent as the awareness of the severity and the urgency to act on climate change has become more mainstream.

There has been an increase in the number of people expressing their experience of negative emotions, such as climate anxiety and distress about the future, as a result.

The concept of anxiety brought about as a result of experiencing environmental issues was first mentioned in the general media in the 90s to address citizen concerns about pollution in the Chesapeake Bay in the US. It started gaining more mainstream discussion in 2007, with the work of individual scholars like the Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht leading the conversation into the early 2010s.

However, eco-anxiety did not begin to garner as much widespread attention and research as we see today until 2017 when the American Psychological Association partnered with ecoAmerica and Climate for Health to deliver the report Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Implications, and Guidance.

This report delivered a working definition of eco-anxiety as “a chronic fear of environmental doom.” This identified a host of emotional and physiological experiences ranging from anxiety and depression to fear and “doomism” as part of the suite of emotional states felt by people in response to environmental disasters and threats. The report points out “that uncertainty, unpredictability, and uncontrollability seem to be important factors in eco-anxiety. Most forms of eco-anxiety appear to be non-clinical, but cases of ‘pathological’ eco-anxiety are also discussed.”

Despite this increase in research and mainstream discourse, climate or eco-anxiety is still widely misunderstood as a concept, with this 2021 systematic literature review concluding:

“Eco-anxiety is a concept used for understanding the link between climate change and anxiety associated with perceptions about the negative impacts of climate change. The evidence suggests that further clarity and theoretical development of the concept is required to advance conceptual understanding of eco-anxiety. Our review also showed that most of the evidence comes from the Western countries, and more research is needed in other parts of the world. Indigenous peoples, children and young people are identified as vulnerable where their lived experiences of eco-anxiety are unclear and require further research.” — Understanding Eco-anxiety: A Systematic Scoping Review of Current Literature and Identified Knowledge Gaps

Meanwhile, as academia works to come to a consensus and further develop an understanding of eco-anxiety, those who experience and live with the effects are left to navigate it with limited support while it impacts their daily functioning, life decisions, perspective of the future and productivity at work.

The Lived Experience

We live in an information overload age whereby it’s hard to switch off from content that can cause all sorts of distress and anxiety. But when you combine this with the lived experience of changing weather, fires, floods, the increased severity of weather events like cyclones and hurricanes, when you witness firsthand the devastation that environmental disasters, deforestation, and chronic air pollution have, the effects can be visceral and confronting.

Some of the emotional responses to these experiences are anger, fear, frustration, hopelessness, avoidance, anxiety, depression, lack of energy and guilt or shame. These can lead to sleeplessness, changes to appetite and difficulty concentrating.

Have you experienced any of these effects? Some people who struggle with eco-anxiety have reported difficulty with concentrating at work and can’t decide if they want to have a family with the potential for a climate-ravaged future. In an interesting juxtaposition, some share that they avoid absorbing any media that reminds them of the impending climate doom, while others sometimes even seek it out in what’s been called “doom scrolling.”

I’ve worked in sustainability for over 20 years, and I absolutely choose to switch off to avoid certain portrayals of climate change. I’ve long felt that the negativity framing doesn’t work to engage people, as I myself become riddled with fear, which makes me shut down. It certainly doesn’t inspire creativity or action.

Understanding eco-anxiety has the potential to shed light on a range of eco-emotions that reflect our interconnectedness with all life and systems on Earth. Eco-emotions can illuminate our relational ties, encourage us to reflect on what we truly value, and remind us of our fundamental dependency on complex ecological systems so we are moved to protect and nurture the Earth.

So perhaps the fact that so many people are feeling some sort of pain associated with the crises in nature demonstrates the deep interconnection that we humans have with the natural world and innate desire to resolve this. And these feelings can be transformed from a negative ones of loss to proactive action.

Let’s dive into how the definition of eco-anxiety has come to spread across three distinct contexts and how it’s affecting us.

The Contexts of Eco-Anxiety

There are numerous definitions of eco-anxiety that have emerged as the arena has gained more researchers focusing on it. There are inconsistencies in the use of the term and debate in the medical community around its definition. Still, there is a consensus that eco-anxiety is fueled by uncertainty and uncontrollability (similar to other anxiety disorders).

The two commonly cited definitions include the APA’s 2017 version previously mentioned, “a chronic fear of environmental doom,” and The Climate Psychology Alliance’s version: “heightened emotional, mental or somatic distress in response to dangerous changes in the climate system,” in which somatic refers to the physical embodiment of stress.

“The grief felt in relation to experienced or anticipated ecological losses, including the loss of species, ecosystems and meaningful landscapes due to acute or chronic environmental change. We contend that ecological grief is a natural response to ecological losses, particularly for people who retain close living, working and cultural relationships to the natural environment, and one that has the potential to be felt more strongly and by a growing number of people as we move deeper into the Anthropocene.” Cunsolo, A. & Ellis, N.

Professor Albrecht, who has been at the forefront of this research, suggests that chronic stress on ecosystems is likely to result in “psychoterratic” or Earth-related mental health syndromes, including eco-angst, eco-nostalgia, solastalgia, eco-guilt, eco-paralysis, ecological grief and environmental distress.

But this is not a one-size-fits-all situation. The context in which the person experiencing the emotions lives, the threats they experience directly or indirectly and their socio-economic situation will all affect the way eco-anxiety is experienced (a systems thinking perspective can greatly assist in better understanding these nuances).

For example, a person living in a climate-affected area will have a very different threat level than a person living in an area that has not yet experienced any significant climate-related impacts. There is also the issue of climate injustice, where young people are likely to experience the greatest mental burden from climate change that older generations have caused and where countries that have not benefited from the rapid industrial growth of the West suffer the worst of the climate and nature crises.

How is this experienced?

The human brain is wired to respond to threats. As humans we have negativity and optimism biases that help us hone in on threats that may negatively impact our ability to survive, and conversely, have the ability to imagine a positive future for ourselves so that we can still function in everyday life (check out our course on Cognitive Science and Biases to learn more about this).

The research indicates there are loosely three climate-related contexts for “ecological grief”, which is a subset of eco-anxiety:

1. Grief associated with physical ecological losses: Refers to anxiety from the physical disappearance or degradation of species, ecosystems and landscapes, which can emerge due to gradual changes over time. This is also sometimes referred to as “slow violence,” in which harmful impacts play out over the course of many years or decades.

2. Grief associated with the loss of environmental knowledge and identity: Refers to the grief experienced by those who have strong relational ties to the natural world and whose personal and collective understandings of identity are created in relation to the land (this is often referenced by Indigenous groups and identified as a core grief in the fight to communicate this to non-Indigenous peoples).

3. Grief associated with the anticipated future losses: Refers to the future and anticipated losses to culture, livelihoods, and ways of life based on the changes already experienced and those projected to occur.

These three contexts can be felt both simultaneously and on a spectrum. For instance, someone who has experienced a climate-related disaster can be anxious about the physical losses of their local environment while also being worried about the future anticipated losses.

The symptoms of eco-anxiety

Many of the symptoms of eco-anxiety are similar to that of general anxiety disorder. Like all emotions, the symptoms and their intensity can range and are influenced by personality traits, cultural notions of value (i.e. a greater value attributed to ecological loss can result in greater climate anxiety), and personal experiences (e.g. experiences of climate-related disasters).

Research into other eco-emotions is emerging and reveals the complex and often competing feelings that fluctuate and can occur simultaneously.

It’s not specifically anxiety that people feel; in fact, the research states that people have a constellation of emotions with common symptoms of eco-anxiety including:

• Worry

• Fear

• Anger or frustration (e.g. due to the inaction of governments, large organizations and industries; self-directed anger; anger as a result of concern for younger generations and feeling unable to to cause systemic change)

• Grief

• Shame and guilt (i.e. their environmental impact or lack of effort in the past)

• Irritability

• Hopelessness/ powerlessness

• Existential dread/ fatalistic thinking

• Obsessive thoughts about climate change

• Depression and sadness

• Shock

• Stupor

• Overwhelm

• Stress

• Physical impacts include: headaches, stomach aches, chest pain, sleeplessness/insomnia, panic attacks, loss of appetite

Experiencing intense feelings of eco-anxiety or being a survivor of climate-related disasters can lead to a state of eco-paralysis that manifests as apathy or fatalistic thinking, PTSD, suicidal ideation, and maladaptive coping strategies like substance misuse.

Furthermore, research is beginning to uncover complex forms of climate anxiety and trauma and their intergenerational effects, such as when environmental damage causes the loss of personal or cultural identity, ways of life and knowing. For Indigenous and First Nations People, this is a deeply embodied experience whereby the loss of nature, land and culture is deeply connected to the colonial severing and stealing that led to the nature-disconnect we live in today (where we moved from human-nature relations that were based on reciprocity to one of dominance and exploitation that has fueled the eco-crises we face). So, in this case, the term eco-anxiety could be seen as a privileged position connected to the difference between those who can afford to feel anxiety about the situation versus those who are living the losses in real time.

It’s important not to dismiss that positive emotions can also result from eco-anxiety, particularly when the feelings are acknowledged and navigated effectively. They can be a source of motivation for active engagement, hope, resilience, empowerment, and connection, particularly when participating in co-designing initiatives for collective action. The negative feelings are often the stated motivation for people getting involved in taking action, from tech solutions, young activists through to CEOs deciding to make the needed changes to their businesses.

This is often where the hope lies, in being able to feel through the complex emotional states that fear and grief generate for us and transitioning these from paralysis to action. Or at the very least, having a collective dialogue about the felt realities so those experiencing them don’t suffer in silence.

We are eager to understand more about these experiences so that we can develop an action-oriented toolkit to support people experiencing eco-anxiety — which is why we developed a survey to capture people’s thoughts, experiences and emotions about eco-anxiety.

Our survey is designed to help you reflect on these experiences as much as help us understand more about how people are navigating eco-anxiety. The science on how to address climate anxiety is out there, so please help us in creating a tool for making change by taking the survey.

In the next part of this series, I will dive further into how eco-anxiety is currently impacting citizens across the globe, so stay tuned for more.

If you need support, please contact your local mental health support service, there is a global list provided here, or seek support from a qualified healthcare professional. Additionally, the Climate Council offers these resources.

Activating your Systems Thinking Superpower

Did you know that ​thinking about the full system of chocolate chip cookies​ gave Dr. Leyla Acaroglu the inspiration to start The UnSchool? It’s true!

We believe 110% that thinking in systems is a critical tool for positive change, and in this journal post, we’re excited to dive further into the superpower that is systems thinking!

What is Systems Thinking?

Systems thinking is the ability to see the whole before the parts, and it's fundamental to the ​Disruptive Design Method​.

The world is full of big messy complex social, political, and environmental problems, which are all part of bigger systems at play. In order to help disrupt the underlying issues, we need to first understood what is going on.

From ​climate change​ to the rise in racism, homelessness, child exploitation, global politics and ocean plastic waste, these problems are all part of complex interconnected systems.

Taking ​a systems approach ​enables you to develop a more dynamic and intimate understanding of the elements and agents at play within the problem arena, so you can identify ​opportunities for intervention​.

This is our simple 6-step flow to making change from a systems standpoint

Tools such as ​systems mapping​ are critical to overcoming the reductive mindset we were all taught in school — a mindset that teaches us to break the world down into individual and manageable parts, rather than see the complex, interconnected whole. (Leyla wrote more ​about the education systems failures here​, if you want to dive in!)

From Linear to Circular

Reductive thinking is what has led to the exploitative economy. In order to get to a ​circular economy​, we need systems thinking.

“Problems are just unaddressed opportunities waiting for creative minds to tackle them. ”

— Leyla Acaroglu

By taking a systems approach, we can each undo the linear and rigid mindsets that helped create the problems to begin with.

Thankfully, humans naturally have a curious and intuitive understanding of ​complex, dynamic, and interconnected systems​. So, it’s really not that hard to rewire our thinking systems from linear to expanded, from 1-dimensional to 3-dimensional thinking.

UnSchool Kuching Fellowship participants engage in a​ systems mapping ​exercise during one of their sessions

Our​ Systems Thinking online course​ is one of our most popular classes for a reason: systems thinking is a superpower that anyone can access to make change.

We also have a handy 10 Day Email Micro Course, Systems Thinking 101, that is just $19 USD and is the perfect entry point for anyone beginning their systems journey!

If you've already taken our Systems Thinking course, or have expertise in this area, then take a look at our advanced​ Systems Interventions course​ to learn to see critical relationships, understand feedback loops, and conduct consequence analyses. You will also establish causal relationships and gain radical insights into ​systems dynamics​.

Want more change-making superpowers? Download our free ​Superpower Activation Toolkit​ for others like Problem Loving, Future Focus and more!

Questions or suggestions? Reach out to us via programs@unschools.co

A New Way to UnLearn: Introducing 10 day email micro courses

This is hard for us to believe, but… we have been building courses for people to advance their skills in systems, sustainability, and design for a decade this year!

In working with so many incredible creative change-makers around the world through the past 10 years, we know that people learn in different ways and have different accessibility considerations for investing in upskilling.

With the undeniable need for as many change-makers activated as possible right now, one of our goals is to always find new approaches to delivering content that supports personal and professional transformation.

As such, The UnSchool is now offering 10-Day Email Micro Courses that are packed with activities and knowledge, sent directly to your inbox, for just $19 USD!

Choose from:

Agency & Activation 💥

Co-Design 🤝

Systems Thinking 101 🌐

We currently have 3 different Micro Courses to choose from:

• Agency & Activation 💥 Need a fast track to get shit done, take action and move your change-making initiatives forward? Here it is.

• Co-Design 🤝 Want a road map to equitable engagement, better collabs & improved design outcomes? You found it!

• Systems Thinking 101 🌐 Ready to get your feet wet with all things systems to make positive change? Think of this like Systems Thinking 101.

If you’re a busy professional with limited time but you’re keen to learn how to make change, this is the perfect format for you! You'll also have access to the course material as long as you need so you can refer back to it as you build your change-making skills. Perks include:

• Convenient delivery: All course material goes straight to your inbox through a daily email for 10 days

• Accessible, robust material: Written in a format that's easy to digest and apply, you'll get videos, downloadable worksheets & extra resources along the way

• Efficient daily practice: Expect to budget just 10-20 minutes daily to read and do the mind-boosting activities

Questions or suggestions? Reach out to us via programs@unschools.co

Enjoy!

Alumni Becky Querido: Curating Systems Change experiences

Can you give us an introduction to yourself and your work?

I am a collaborative and creative Learning & Leadership Development professional that enables people to discover, experience and explore their potential, and cultivates in them positive lasting change. I utilize my strengths in connecting people, ideas and perspectives, creatively conveying vision and concepts, and finding opportunity in complexity in pursuit of growth and transformation.

I find powerful dynamic ways for people to interact with content to turn information into insight and knowledge into experience. My passion for cultivating learning in others has evolved in my 20 years of practice in human resources, change management, and project management. This combination of experience has given me a unique gift in curating powerful learning experiences. My work has included designing change and learning programs and systems for higher education, healthcare and utilities organizations.

What motivates you to do the work that you do?

I am motivated by inspiring others to live a more enriching life that minimizes our environmental impact, and by helping people move from survival mode to thriving in their work and personal lives. My mission is to activate agency in others to be a force for regenerative leadership and renovate their workplaces, lifestyles and communities in sustainable ways.

How did you find out about the UnSchool, and what motivated you to come?

I discovered and started following Unschool in 2019 and was inspired by how the message of positive system disruption. I was curious to learn more about design thinking and how to apply systems thinking to make a difference to our global environmental challenges. (UnSchool team note: Becky completed our online Practitioner Certification Track!)

What was your experience at the UnSchool like?

Being an independent learner was difficult but I really connected with Leyla’s message and some of the concepts, such as gamification and social change theory. While it took me longer to complete than planned, I enjoyed the challenges which pushed me outside of my comfort zone and into taking action.  

What was the main take away you had from coming to the UnSchool?

The most important thing I can do is to take action. I have all the knowledge I need to act, and just need to put myself out there, have fun, and continue prototyping.

Tell us more about your initiative(s), and how is it all going?

I plan to continue to do workshops and bring people together to make micro changes to their daily home and workplace practices to think and act differently about their consumption and disposal choices.

How did the UnSchool help you start/evolve it?

The points challenges were key to getting me out of planning and into acting. The reflections and exercises helped me to generate ideas that got me motivated and ready for action. 

How have you amplified this change you do in the world?

My neighbours and friends have been influenced and impacted by my projects. They have integrated small changes into their lives to conserve resources. 

How can people engage with, support, or follow your work?

Website → www.querida.ca

LinkedIn → Becky Querido

Alumni Julie Beretta: Creating Space

Can you give us an introduction to yourself and your work?

Hello! I’m Julie, a yoga teacher, sustainability consultant, and writer (@thesustainablemag, @dinnerconfidential and I just completed my first book). With French-American origins, I was raised in Italy, but after spending several years working abroad and volunteering around the world on different projects tied to sustainability, I moved back to Rome in 2020, right before the pandemic hit.  

Craving deeper talks, I became an active member of Dinner Confidential, where I facilitate monthly conversations around taboo topics through vulnerability and active listening. This feeds my passion for human relations, which also led me to get trained in the 7 steps and enroll in Gabor Maté’s Compassionate Inquiry approach. Using these tools, I help people uncover the unconscious dynamics that run their lives and prepare them for difficult conversations with themselves and others.

All of the pieces of my work come together for me in my personal project, We Bloom (I plan to launch my website at the beginning of November). With this, my purpose is to create spaces for us to reconnect to our essence, communities and environment.

What words, sensations and feelings arise when you think of sustainability? We started our introspective journey with a breathing exercise and then each shared our answers in this space free of judgement. The COVID restrictions only allowed for 6 people to take part and that actually made this moment intimate and memorable - photo taken in October 2020 In Sabina, Italy.

What motivates you to do the work that you do?

From a technological standpoint, we’ve never been as wired as we are now. Yet I often have the feeling that we are more disconnected than ever before; from our true selves, from our bodies, from others, from nature, etc. We got so deeply trapped into dynamics of separation, but everything is interconnected. What got us to forget that? 

The work that I do results from a personal necessity I had to reconnect. I have the need to be in touch with my feelings, to move my body, to slow down, spend time in nature, share deep talks —  and I know I’m not the only one.  

So, opening a space for people to talk about how they relate to certain topics, like the one of sustainability, and getting them to share how they really feel about it, was an important first step for me. What motivates me now (and what I wish to do with We Bloom) is to create a bridge between people who are passionate about this topic and others who are less naturally drawn to it.

How are products made? I assigned a product to two teams of two. Each team went through the 5 key stages (extraction of raw materials, manufacturing, packaging and distribution, use, end of life). Isabel and Flavio analyzed the life story of jeans - photo taken in October 2020 In Sabina, Italy.

How did you find out about the UnSchool, and what motivated you to come?

I found out about the UnSchool through a friend of a friend. I was looking for simple tools to add to my experience, so that I could demystify sustainability for those who manifested an interest in it yet didn’t know where to get started.  After I heard Leyla’s TED talk, I checked out the UnSchool webpage: finally I’d found somebody who made sustainability look cool and exciting!

What was your experience at the UnSchool like?

I did a one month Masterclass in Circular Systems Design at the UnSchool. My experience was rather short but intense. I acquired a lot of knowledge (keeping up with the amount of content was in fact quite a challenge!) and many practical tools and activities (i.e. life cycle thinking, systems mapping, theory of change etc.) to gain clarity and come up with realistic solutions to integrate sustainability into our lives.  

What was the main take away you had from coming to the UnSchool?

I knew that everything was interconnected, but I didn’t realize how interconnected everything actually was.  That was my main takeaway from coming to the UnSchool.

Tell us more about your initiative(s), and how is it all going?

Thanks to the Unschool Masterclass, I spent a month getting curious about the following questions:

• How do people relate to sustainability? 

• Why do those who’d like to take action don’t do so?

• What stops them? 

What I found out was that many of us wish to make changes in our lives. Yet often, the sensations, words and emotions associated with sustainability are so uncomfortable that they make us want to look away instead of digging deeper. 

So I came up with a simple idea to respond to that problem, and opened non-judgemental spaces - both physical and virtual - for people to share their feelings, sensations and beliefs about sustainability. I used elements of my yoga practice, my facilitation skills, and some of Leyla’s tools to give people an opportunity to explore new ways of relating to this topic.

I ran this workshop - The Sustainable Practice - in the fall of 2020 and plan to have it again very soon, both in person and online. Stay tuned!

We ended this beautiful day with a round of "Take Home Message". Each participant shared what they got from The Sustainable Practice and how they intend to relate to it from now on. - photo taken in October 2020 In Sabina, Italy.

How did the UnSchool help you start/evolve it?

The UnSchool helped me mine the problem and gave me the tools I needed to offer easy and practical activities for people to understand sustainability differently. 

How have you amplified this change you do in the world?

No matter what I do, I try to remind myself and others that WE ARE thanks to nature.   

I also try to spread what I’m learning in the various languages I speak (English, Italian, French and Spanish) to assist as many people as I can on their journey to sustainability.

How can people engage with, support, or follow your work?

I’m launching my website at the end of the month, for now you can follow me on:

Linkedin → Julie Beretta

Instagram → Julie Beretta

Any other thoughts you want to share?

My interest in human behavior is what inspires me to expand our collective knowledge of our interconnectedness with the Earth. Sustainability isn’t a passion for me, it’s a duty.  And even if what I’m putting forward  is rather simple, I believe it’s an important first step all of us can take to start living  with more intention and respect for our environment.

UnSchool Birthday Celebrations and Our Latest Video!

WE ARE 6 YEARS OLD!

Hard to believe that the UnSchool has been around for six whole years! In this short time, we are so elated to have initiated programs all over the world, have supported and connected with thousands of creative changemakers from all walks of life and been at the forefront of positively disrupting the status quo to help design a sustainable and regenerative future for all!

In this week’s journal, we take a look at our programs and accomplishments, reflect on what we have collectively achieved and get excited about what positive mischief we will get up to next.

The first UnSchool Fellowship, in New York City in 2015!

The UnSchool started in New York with our very first Fellowship of 16 brave first-timers who came with us on an experiential learning adventure in the energetic city. Since then, there have been 10 incredible Fellowships, dozens of Masterclasses and workshops both in-person and online, around the world and at the CO Project Farm. We developed and grew our online learning lab, as well as created tons of resources and tools, many for free, to support creative changemakers around the world.

Every few weeks, we feature our incredible alumni in the journal, highlighting the inspiring and adventurous projects they are working on, exploring how the UnSchool has helped them move their initiatives and career forward. We don’t measure our success on activating change based on vanity metrics like social shares or likes, but instead focus on the change that our alumni are making out in the world, taking action and participating in their communities at large. We see conversations changing and communities taking action and feel proud to be a part of this global shift toward sustainability and systems change.

Being a nomadic school means we have been invited to many beautiful and inspiring places around the world, with Fellowships in New York, Mexico City, Melbourne, São Paulo, Berlin, Christchurch, San Francisco, Mumbai, Cape Town and most recently, Kuching! We have videos of all our Fellowships on the website, and we are so happy to release the newest one here!

Explore the UnSchool's Disruptive Design method and approach to experiential education through a mini doco of our 2019 fellowship in Kuching, Malasia with a ...

Throughout the years, we have had participants join us from all around the world, with a strong equity access policy of a minimum of 20% access and free content from our own projects and the ones we are commissioned to do.

So far, we have given away over 250k USD in scholarships to people in over 35 countries around the world. We have an open scholarship form where you can apply anytime, so if you want to join us but need some support, let us know! We also have an extensive free resources section you can access here.

With such a diverse alumni group, we are always looking to expand our language access, and are happy to be able to offer the Change Makers Lab Cards in bilingual Thai and English, the Design Play Cards in Spanish and English, and the Circular Classroom in Swedish, Finnish and English. It’s on our list of things to do to keep adding more translations!

WHAT’S NEXT AT THE UNSCHOOL

Like everyone, we have been rapidly adapting and changing to the post-Covid world. We are every day more grateful that we launched our online learning platform several years ago, with around 60 classes, certifications, games, toolkits, handbooks and other resources for people like you, looking to make change and gain the tools to do so.

We’ve been busy building new offerings that include a very exciting suite of Sustainability in Business programs, both live online (join us in October!) and self-paced (coming soon!!), along with a youth program (ages 12+).

We also somehow found the time to release a cookbook of all your favourite (and more!) UnSchool plant-based meals.

And… we are releasing an UnSchool App!

In other exciting new ventures, we are building an app! We have listened and heard from so many of our alumni about the desire to be able to more easily connect with other UnSchoolers (although you do seem to pop up with collaborations quite often!) and we finally have some time to make it happen.

Watch out in the near future as we beta test an app designed to connect you to each other in a non-social media way, where we can have our own space to share, take on challenges, find each other, and connect in new and exciting ways. We’ve never designed an app before, so it will be a fun and rapidly changing experiment in which we have a great group of beta volunteers to test out and help us refine to be the best experience we can make.

We are also brainstorming ways to stay connected in the time of reduced travel, so watch out for new launches, workshops, collaborations and other ways of continuing the UnSchool adventure. Stay tuned for more info!

OUR BIRTHDAY PRESENT TO YOU!

In celebration of our birthday, we are having a 48-hour flash sale on all things UnSchool!* Use the code BIRTHDAY50 for the next 48 hours to get all things UnSchool half off and celebrate another year of making change with us!

*Subscription products will have the discount applied to the first instalment

UnSchool Youth Activation 4 Week Sustainability and Make Change Sprint

To celebrate our newest online learning challenge, the Youth Activation 4 Week Sustainability and Make Change Sprint, we are sharing some highlights of the content with you in this week’s UnSchool Journal.

Designed for 12-18 year-olds wanting to gain the tools for making positive change in the world around them, the content is all about agency activation, systems thinking, sustainability sciences, cognitive science and ideation. The program is jam-packed with daily activities and brain expanding content perfect for any young changemaker.

Designed as a 4-week sprint, the format has daily content with quizzes at the end of each week to unlock the following week’s content.

Who is the program for?

This program is designed for young people interested in activating themselves to become leaders for social and environmental change. 

We believe young people are critical to designing a positive future, and we also know that much of the mainstream education system doesn't give us tools to dissect the complex systems around us all and then activate our agency in order to effect change. 

Everyone has the capacity to make a positive impact, and we are committed to helping people all over the world uncover and activate their capacity to help design a future that works better than today. 

You will get a lot out of this program if you are: 

• between the ages of 12 and 18 

• have a deep desire to be a positive force on the world around you 

• get frustrated by inaction and want to gain the tools to create change 

• want to understand how the world and the human mind works 

• love to read, learn and think differently (or want to be challenged to develop these skills!)

Parents, if you are keen to support your young changemaker, then this program is for you, too. There are lots of great learning experiences that will support you and your young person to develop tools for effecting positive change. We have made this content easy to digest, without taking away from the complexity of the world. If anything, this toolkit will help anyone discover how to love and appreciate the complex world we live in and to design creative ways of helping make it a better place. 

Overview of the Program

Week 1: Activating Your Agency and Making Change 

Here we explore how you, yes you, can find the power and tools to activate your agency, expand your sphere of influence, develop reflective and critical thinking skills, expand your mindset and be a positive force on the world around you! 

Week 2: Sustainability and Systems Thinking 

From unsustainability to the sustainable development goals, the circular economy and the tools for exploring complex systems in the world around us, this week we will dive deep into the issues and the opportunities for exploring and changing them!

Week 3: Exploring the Human Experience 

Humans can be very weird, which can make it hard to understand, empathize and effect change. So in this week's content, we cover how the human brain works, cognitive biases, social norms and the odd things that affect how we each engage with and ultimately impact the world around us. 

Week 4: Activating Change

Here we explore all the creative ways you can develop projects and initiatives that support positive impacts on the world around you! 

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A Sneak Peek at the Content

Week 1: AGENCY

Let's look at how to activate agency for ourselves and in others by working on identifying and expanding your sphere of influence. The first part of the Design Systems Change Handbook goes into this in great detail, and here is the summary version. 

Agency is the capacity of an individual to take action in a particular environment. For most of our lives, we are taught that we don't have impacts on the world around us. An agentized individual, however, is aware of their influence and the dynamic relationship they have with the world. 

Every action we take or don't take has an impact: the things we buy, the conversations we have, the air we breathe - it all has an impactful relationship with the world.

Your agency is about your capacity to act independently and make free choices. These choices are affected by your worldview and the way you see yourself, formed through your experiences with the world, society in general and the things you chose to learn. 

Social structures and circumstances have a huge impact on one's agency, and the life you are born into can increase or decrease your “given” agency. Many of these social structures and circumstances are out of our control, yet they have a huge impact on our agency. The most critical thing is how you interpret your experiences and what they do to your sense of self. Thankfully, we are also seeing seismic shifts in access to the resources that support individual agency development.

Design science pioneer Buckminster Fuller said, ”Call me trimtab,” (it’s even engraved on his tombstone) because he, like many other changemakers, identified that the smallest part of the system can make the biggest change. A trimtab is a tiny part inside the rudder at the back of a large ship. When the ship’s steering wheel is moved, the tiny trimtab shifts in direction and (re)directs the whole trajectory of the ship. Often, the smallest part of the system can move the biggest parts.

This analogy is important to consider when thinking about your personal sphere of influence and the agency that you have to make change in the world around you. Many people fall into the trap of deflecting responsibility to others or blaming the large obvious parts of the system, deferring change to elements that they have little control over. But it’s often the small inconspicuous parts that have the most power and influence over the system dynamics to affect change. Our job is to identify them and unlock their potential. 

Integrity (especially as we deploy what agency we have and develop) is the backbone of our sense of self. It is about having a moral stand that you can refer to and being “whole” or complete when you come to making decisions. As author C.S. Lewis says, integrity is "doing the right thing, even when no one is looking.”  

Expanding Your Personal Agency 

Developing agency goes hand in hand with developing a firm adherence to a set of values, honesty to yourself and the world around you. Fundamentally, it’s a code of conduct or moral compass that you use to set up your practice and govern your decisions as you grow your sphere of influence in the world. 

Individuals who have a strong sense of personal agency believe events are a result of the actions they take, and they praise or blame themselves and their own abilities. Those who see agency external to themselves will praise or blame external factors. For example, someone with a strong sense of personal agency will credit their study habits for passing a test, whereas someone else may attribute their success to the teacher or the exam. Likewise, if they don’t do well, the person with the stronger sense of personal agency will blame themselves rather than the teacher or exam (Carlson, 2007).  

reference: Carlson, N.R., Buskist, W., Heth, C.D. and Schmaltz, R., 2007. Psychology: the science of behaviour-4th Canadian ed.

Week 2: WHAT IS SYSTEMS THINKING?

Have you ever thought about how you think? Albert Einstein famously said, “We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” Truth-bomb, right? It just makes sense that when we look at solving a problem, we should employ a different level of thinking to avoid the issues that created the problem in the first place!

But what is that level of thinking... and how do you do it? We believe that Systems Thinking is the answer. Systems Thinking is a way of seeing the world as a series of interconnected and interdependent systems rather than lots of independent parts.

But before we go deeper into what systems thinking is, let’s talk about what it isn’t.

What systems are NOT

The main way we are taught to think is linear and often reductionist. We learn to break the world down into manageable chunks and see issues in isolation of their systemic roots. This dominant way of approaching the world is a product of industrialized educational norms – in one way or another, we have learned, through our 15 to 20+ years of mainstream education, and/or through socialization, that the most effective way to solve a problem is to treat the symptoms, not the causes.

Yet, when we look at the world through a systems lens, we see everything is interconnected. Problems are connected to many other elements within dynamic systems. If we just treat one symptom, the flow on effects lead to burden shifting and often unintended consequences.

Not only does systems thinking oppose the mainstream reductionist view; it replaces it with expansionism, the view that everything is part of a larger whole and that the connections between all elements are critical.

Systems are essentially networks made up of nodes or agents that are linked in varied and diverse ways. By using systems thinking, we identify and understand these relationships as part of the exploration of the larger systems at play. Everything is interconnected, every system is made up of many subsystems, and is itself a part of larger systems. Just as we are made up of atoms with molecules and quantum particles, problems are made up of problems within problems!

Every system is like a Matryoshka doll, made up of smaller and smaller parts within a larger whole. Seeing things in this way helps to create a more flexible view of the world and the way it works, and it illuminates opportunities for addressing some of its existing and evolving problem arenas.

The three key systems at play

Although the world is made up of endless large and small interconnected systems, there are three key systems that should be considered: social systems, industrial systems, and ecosystems. These three major systems keep the economy churning along, the world functioning for us humans, and our society operating in order (sort of, anyway!).

Social systems are the intangible rules and structures, created by humans, that create and maintain societal norms, rituals, and behaviors. Industrial systems refers to all of the manufactured material world, created to facilitate human needs (and all of which requires natural resources to be extracted and transformed into stuff). And the last big system, which is arguably the most important one, is the ecosystem. It provides all the natural services (such as clean air, food, fresh water, minerals, and natural resources) needed for the other two systems to exist.

Ultimately, approaching life from a systems perspective is about tackling big, messy real-world problems rather than isolating cause and effect down to a single point. In the latter case, “solutions” are often just band-aids (that may cause unintended consequences) as opposed to real and holistic systemic solutions.

Looking for the links and relationships within the bigger picture helps identify the systemic causes and lends itself to innovative, more holistic ideas and solutions.

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Participants can take the course at their own pace as well as run through it as the 4-week sprint. They get access for six months and can download lots of different activity sheets + The Design Systems Change handbook as well.

Week 65: International Youth Day | Tools for Supporting Young Change Makers

12th August is the day the UN celebrates International Youth Day this year, and what a year to shine a spotlight on all the incredible action young people around the world are taking. This year’s theme is Youth Engagement for Global Action, and over the last year, we have seen so many amazing activations from young people, like the Fridays for Future school strikes led by the incredibly inspiring Greta Thurnberg, as well as the landmark court case Juliana v. United States, which asserted that the impacts of climate change were violating Americans’ federal rights.

So in this week’s journal, we celebrate the highlights of the last 12 months of youth action, and in celebration, we developed a youth activation kit that is on sale for half price for the rest of August!

Friday School Strikes

#FridaysForFuture started in August 2018, by then 15-year-old Greta Thunberg, when she and other young activists sat every school day for three weeks in front of the Swedish parliament protesting the lack of action on the global climate crisis. The now famous youth leader Greta posted what and why she was doing this on social media, and it soon become a viral phenomenon that has grown into a global youth movement.

By mid-2019, young people were striking on Fridays in more than 2,000 towns and cities in over 100 different countries with millions of students joining in. This year, September 25th will be a national day of action whereby hundreds of thousands of young people around the world will strike from school, demanding leaders take action on climate change (with Covid-19 precautions in place).

YOUNG PEOPLE SUE the US Government OVER CLIMATE CHANGE

Since 2015, a group of young Americans fought an inspiring battle against the US government, claiming that their constitutional rights were being neglected if the government did not take action on climate change. Sadly, in January this year, a U.S. federal appeals court threw the case out, causing a major setback to efforts to spur the U.S. government to address the issue.

The pioneering law suit was brought against the government by a group of 12-18 year olds, including Aji Piper, Levi Draheim, Journey Zephier, Jayden Foytlin, Miko Vergun, and Nathan Baring among a total of 21 plaintiffs, all whom were passionate about the planet and not willing to sit by and watch their government continue to ignore the science on climate change.

Judge Andrew D. Hurwitz, who presided over the case, said the following when providing his opinion on the ruling, saying that the young people “have made a compelling case that action is needed… Reluctantly, we conclude that such relief is beyond our constitutional power. Rather, the plaintiffs’ impressive case for redress must be presented to the political branches of government.”

All is not lost as this action has clearly inspired others. After the devastating fires that ravaged Australia in early 2020, a 23-year-old Australian student brought a class-action case against government over climate change. More and more young people are demanding action from their governments and taking action themselves to secure their future against catastrophic environmental issues.

Youth-led Action Networks

There are countless youth-led climate and environmental action networks, educational organisations, not-for-profits and campaigns set up all over the world. Here is a list of just some of the initiatives set up and run by young people:

Alliance for Climate Education

One Up Action

Zero Hour Movement

Youth Climate Leaders

UK Student Climate Network

Sunrise Movement

Indian Youth Climate Network

Future Coalition

Hip Hop Caucas

Youth for Nature

Youth Leaders

Here are some of the youth leaders and their twitter handles all using their voices to forge a pathway towards a sustainable future for all of us:

Nadia Nazar, 17 from USA @nadiabaltimore

Holly Gillibrand, 13 from Scotland @HollyWildChild

Vic Barrett from the USA @vict_barrett

Isra Hirsi, 16 from the USA @israhirsi 

Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, 19 from the USA @xiuhtezcatl

Jerome Foster II, 16 from the USA @jeromefosterii

Luisa Neubauer, 23 from Germany @Luisamneubauer

John Paul Jose, 22 from India @johnpauljos

David Wicker, 14 from Italy @davidwicker_hf

Lilly Platt, 9 from the Netherlands @lillyspickup

Leah Namugerwa, 14 from Uganda @NamugerwaLeah

Saoi O’Connor, 16 from Ireland @saoi4climate

Timoci Naulusala, 12 from Fiji #timoci

Shalvi Shakshi, 10, from Fiji

Nakabuye Hilda from Uganda @NakabuyeHildaF

India Logan-Riley from Aotearoa / New Zealand @IndiMiro

Brianna Fruean, 20 from Samoa @Brianna_Fruean

Ridhima Pandey, 12 from India @ridhimapandey7

Marinel Ubaldo from The Philippines @YnelUbaldo

Winnie Asiti from Kenya @Asiti

Ayakha Melithafa, 17 from South Africa @ayakhamelithafa

Xiye Bastida, 17 from Mexico @xiyebastida

Autumn Peltier. 16 from Wiikwemkoong First Nation @StephaniePelti3

Amariyanna Copeny, 13 from the USA @LittleMissFlint

Take Action: our 4-Week Youth Activation Challenge

We have designed a 4-week learning challenge for any young person who wants to take action. With loads of UnSchool content from systems thinking to agency development and creativity, we have packed this program full of exciting and motivating content perfect to get any young mind activated and engaged.

To celebrate International Youth Day, the Program is half price for the rest of this month. Just use the code IYD2020 when signing up

Sign up here >

Free Sustainable Design and Circular Economy Toolkits

By Leyla Acaroglu

Over the years, my team and I have created a range of free, open-access toolkits to support change-makers in adopting the skills needed to help transform the global economy into a circular and sustainable one by design. 

Here I have assembled some of my favorite ones and a list of what we have created for anyone wanting to get started on activating change for free!

Through my design agency, Disrupt Design, my small team and I take commissions to make tools and self-initiate our own designs to help make change, wherever we can we get our clients and collaborators to allow for 20–100% of the content to be free and open access. We ourselves are committed to having a minimum 20% of our content open-source and free for all. 

Many of these toolkits would not have been made possible without the financial support of forward-thinking companies and organizations who see the value in creating beautiful and accessible content. So thanks! And if you are one of them, reach out to see what great things we can create together! 

The Circular Classroom 

We collaborated with the Walki Group, Co-Founders and the Finnish Education System to develop engaging and practical in-class resources on the circular economy, sustainability and creativity.

The Circular Classroom is a free, trilingual (English, Finnish + Swedish) educational resource for students and teachers alike. It is designed to integrate circular thinking into high school classrooms, all packaged up in a fun, beautiful format of video and workbooks.

The intention behind the project is to support young people in recognizing the exciting opportunity that redesigning products, services and systems have for the future, for exploring how their engagement with the world today impacts the future, and for supporting their decisions around future professions.

This commissioned project is designed to activate the circular economy in Scandinavia. The 3-part circular education program for high school students is available for free online in English, Finnish and Swedish. It is designed to be integrated into the Finnish high school curriculum, and is applicable globally.

The interactive video series and workbook toolkits includes an Educators’ ‘How To’ manual, as through our discovery workshops, we learned that students were very interested in this information, but the teachers felt they didn’t have the knowledge base to deliver it. This program is designed for co-learning between students and educators and includes 15 interactive educational activities.

www.circularclassroom.com

Circular Redesign Workshop Toolkit 

The Circular Economy Workshop Redesign Toolkit was inspired by years of running workshops with companies and organizations that want to embrace sustainable design, life cycle thinking and the circular economy.

We developed this over time when needing our own workshop facilitation tools, and then decided to put it together with instructions and make it open source so others can facilitate their own! 

Download the full toolkit here >

The Anatomy of Action 

A collaboration with the United Nations Environment Program, this project’s ambitious goal was to make sustainable living irresistible. To do this, we identified academically-validated lifestyle actions that will make a measurable change when amplified across communities. 

A year-long research study we conducted resulted in 5 key areas of impact and recommendations, which we turned into a momentum-building mixed media campaign called the Anatomy of Action.

This open-source project includes three videos, a downloadable toolkit to custom adapt to the local context, 350+ social shareable hand-drawn graphics, a 150-page data validation report, and a custom website. Within 15 days of the launch (still ongoing), there were 19k views, 3,500 toolkit downloads and 100+ countries who engaged, translating the graphics and data into multiple languages.

anatomyofaction.org

Post Disposable Activation Kit 

Your everyday actions can help to seed a movement that will dramatically and quickly reduce the massive environmental and social burdens that disposability has led us to, and help activate a global shift to a future that has positive outcomes for the entire planet. 

This requires all of us to embrace #POSTDISPOSABLE change! We have created a set of free tools to help you activate your leadership and make lifestyle shifts for a post disposable future! Become a citizen designer and help activate positive change now. Available in Spanish, Hindi & English. 

Check out the toolkit here > 

Superpower Activation Kit 

When I was named Champion of the Earth by the UN in 2016, we were inspired to create a toolkit of the everyday actions we can all take to activate our agency for a sustainable and just planet. That's how the Superpower Activation Kit was born! 

We put together this toolkit of everyday superpowers so every active citizen of the world who wants to participate with more purpose in the construction of the systems around them can do so. The 12 powers are based on a wealth of scientific data in our Disruptive Design Method, and the toolkit provides practical advice on how to activate them.

Download the toolkit here > 

Change Makers Lab Card Game 

As part of our 20% open source content policy, we have designed a fun hands-on toolkit that shares a series of activities designed for the Change Makers Lab created for SEAC Thailand. 

In this pack you get a full card game pack in Thai and English as a series of over 21 games to play with them focused on sustainability, systems thinking, active citizenship and making change.

Download the toolkit here >

Disruptive Design Workshop Facilitation Kit 

Expanding upon our skillset in experiential education and transformative change, we created this 65-page digital toolkit for Oxfam Asia. The guide was designed after a two-day Disrupt Design Activating Equity and Digital Activism workshop in Bangkok with Oxfam, along with 40 invited creative and media partners.

The goal was to create a step by step guide they could use within Oxfam to run workshops that help them design more effective campaigns to move people from knowledge to action. Chapters cover everything from ethical research to stakeholder engagement, systems mapping and creative communication decisions.

Download the toolkit here >

QUICK LINKS TO CONTENT

Circular Classroom (Finnish collab)
Anatomy of Action (UN collab)
UnSchool Open Source Kits & Classes
Disrupt Design Medium
UnSchool Journal
Fellowship Journals

Intro to the Disruptive Design Method
The ChangeMakers Lab Gard Game Kit
The Circular Classroom
The Post Disposable Activation Kit
Circular Economy ReDesign Workshop Kit
Superpower Activation Kit

5 Reasons It’s Time for Nature | World Environment Day 2020

Do you think it’s time for nature? The United Nations does, as “Time for Nature” is the theme for this year’s World Environment Day, which is celebrated each year on the 5th June. Of course it's in our opinion that every day should be a day to celebrate the magical natural beauty of the only known life-sustaining planet in the universe.

But we also wanted to take this opportunity to explore some of the top reasons why biodiversity is so bloody awesome and important, especially in a time where we are challenged by a global pandemic in which many top researchers and scientists warn that nature is sending us a message, drawing clear links between natural systems destruction and the rise of communicable diseases. 

Nature provides all the goods and services we need to operate the economy, not to mention life. We’ve only recently lost sight of the power and importance of nature in our human existence, with the last 70ish years creating the rise of hyper-convenience-fueled lifestyles that in turn created demand for the design of disposability that then led to environmental crises like ocean plastic pollution, climate change, destructive bushfires, freak weather events and deforestation - all issues that impact biodiversity. As these issues continue to be amplified as causes for encouraging sustainable lifestyles to be on the rise, the world is reawakening and reconnecting to the unrivaled power and importance that nature uses in creation and destruction alike. 

Here are five compelling reasons why this theme is so important, right now especially:

1. Biodiversity is critical to ecosystem success

Simply put, biodiversity is what makes Earth, Earth. Without diversity, we have weak systems that are susceptible to disease — which then breeds a new onslaught of system impacts. The UN explains that biodiversity encompasses the over 8 million species – from plants and animals to fungi and bacteria – that are all interconnected and share our planet as home.  All ecosystems need diversity to succeed. The oceans, forests, mountain environments and coral reefs are all teaming with genetic diversity of all manner of plants and animals. Ecosystems sustain human life in a myriad of ways, cleaning our air, purifying our water, ensuring the availability of nutritious foods, nature-based medicines and raw materials, and reducing the occurrence of disasters. 

To learn more about biodiversity and find out more about what you can do, check here for the UN’s “Practical Guide” to Earth Day 2020.

“At least 40 per cent of the world’s economy and 80 per cent of the needs of the poor are derived from biological resources. In addition, the richer the diversity of life, the greater the opportunity for medical discoveries, economic development, and adaptive responses to such new challenges as climate change”. - The Convention about Life on Earth, Convention on Biodiversity

2. All the beauty in the world comes from nature

There’s a reason that #naturephotography is hashtagged over 108 million times on Instagram. No manufactured life experiences can take the place of the beauty of what surrounds us every day in stunning sunrises, lush landscapes, and wondrous wildlife. We humans are biologically hardwired to be connected to nature (more on that in #3), and throughout human history we have been inspired and fulfilled through the unique, diverse natural beauty around the world. This inspiration isn’t just a feel-good philosophical inspiration (though, who doesn’t love to just feel the warm fuzzies when you see a baby animal or take in a breathtaking view) — it’s a literal contribution to the evolution of our species through ideas like biomimicry and circular systems design.  It's also no wonder that one of the most watched TV series of the last fifteen years  was David Antenborugh’s Planet Earth series. 

This collection of videos from TED Ed perfectly explores the wonderment of nature — not just in our environment but truly in an interconnected look at the nature of stuff, the nature of design, the nature of collection action, and of course, the nature of change. 

People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful and an amazement and a pleasure. - David Attenborough

3. The human brain needs time in nature to restore itself — and thrives when exercising outdoors.

There is mounting evidence that time in nature has huge benefits to the human brain and our bodies. While most attention has been given to the psychological impacts of nature on human well-being, like increased happiness and creativity boosts, other benefits like reduced hypertension and cardiovascular disease, and even lower risks of chronic conditions like asthma, diabetes, and obesity have also been found. 

Over the last 10 years, we’ve learned that healthier soil microbes yield healthier humans (although, Marco Polo noted in 1272 in his travel diary that the people of Persia’s foul moods were attributed to the soil and conducted his own qualitative study by importing soil from Persia to his banquet hall!) and that three days in nature basically resets your brain. Additionally, exercising outdoors (just a walk will do) has shown improved cognition and increased neuroplasticity, which interestingly helps slow aging.  

4. Literally everything we need to sustain our lives comes from nature

Nature is beyond crucial to our personal health and wellbeing, as it provides all the foods, air and drinkable water we need to exist! Complex systems all interact to allow for plants to photosynthesize, create oxygen and filter water. We all are in an interdependent relationship with nature, and as long as we ignore that basic fact of life, we continue to ignore the need for political and cultural changes that will not just protect nature but also find incredibly regenerative solutions that enable us to live within nature and continue to advance our civilization into the future. Technically the services provided by nature are called ecosystem services, and there are more than one could imagine all working together quickly and tirelessly to help life on Earth flourish. So, next time you take a breath or eat a strawberry or drink water and get hydrated, take a moment to think of nature and all the services that the giant ecosystem of Earth provides for us for free. 

Nature’s oxygen factory

Every second breath of oxygen comes from the ocean

5. Nature is in a state of crises too 

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) recently declared that nature is in a state of crises too. Aside from the links between coronavirus, climate change and nature's destruction, nature itself is seeing species being lost at a rate 1,000 times greater than at any other time in recorded human history, and one million species face extinction, making this time what scientists call the sixth great extinction. The only difference is it's not a meteoride this time —  instead, it is us who are responsible for this mass extinction event. Scientists have also found something akin to an insect apocalypse, with bees and other pollinators being killed off in the millions. 

“Healthy ecosystems can protect against the spread of disease: Where native biodiversity is high, the infection rate for some zoonotic diseases can be lowered,” says United Nations Environment programme (UNEP) biodiversity expert Doreen Robinson.  

The foods we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink and the climate that makes our planet habitable all come from nature.

Yet, these are exceptional times in which nature is sending us a message:

To care for ourselves
we must care for nature. 

It’s time to wake up.
To take notice.
To raise our voices.

It’s time to build back better
for People and Planet.

Find out more here

This World Environment Day,
it’s Time for Nature.

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So yes, it’s absolutely time for nature not just today, but every single day, from now until we figure this shit out and implement transformational systems change. 

To further celebrate and help you get activated to support the global transition to a sustainable and regenerative economy, we are having a flash 50% off sale on everything over at online.unschools.co for this week until June 12! Use code: timefornature all week (ends midnight 5th June GMT time)

A year of Activating Change

It’s Week 52, which means we have officially spent an entire year writing and sharing new insights and ideas about how to make a positive impact on the world around us! What a year it has been — from hosting a Fellowship in Malaysia, to collaborating with the UNEP in creating our Anatomy of Action campaign, through to this moment in time, in which we’re hunkering down and figuring out new ways to support and activate positive change in the midst of a global pandemic. So this week we decided to put together a list of highlights of all the cool, creative changemaking things that we’ve talked about and experienced in the last year to get us all motivated for another 52 weeks of making positive world-changing change!

Week 1: One Person Can’t Save the World, But Everyone Can Change It

Global Climate Strike 09-20-2019 (photo by Markus Spiske via Unsplash.com)

In this inaugural article that launched the UnSchool Journal, our founder Leyla Acaroglu lays the groundwork for how we can start seeing the world’s problems as opportunities to activate our agency and make positive change — because intentionally or not, all of our actions already are changing the world around us: The power to make change lies in our personal ability to see our own agency and opportunity for for creative leadership and to then make intentional choices about how we will activate the influence we organically have on the world around us, while working on enhancing this to a point where we can actively make more positive systems change.  Read on >

Week 11: Yes, Recycling Is Broken

Photo: Vivianne Lemay via Unsplash.com

With plastic pollution totally out of control and systems in chaos following China’s decision to stop processing a large portion of the world’s recycling, we unmasked the harsh reality that recycling is a placebo that justifies and perpetuates waste: Recycling is a lovely idea when it works; in fact it's a fundamental part of the circular economy, after, of course, sharing services, remanufacturing and repair. But like any system that displaces the responsibility somewhere out of sight, the externalities come back around to bite us all in the ass eventually. Ocean plastic waste is just one of the massive unintended consequences of relying on a quick fix, which then, in turn, reinforces the problem you are trying to solve. Systems thinking 101: the easy way out often leads back in, and there are often no quick fixes to complex problems. Recycling as a solution has reinforced the problem, and now we are dealing with a ‘frankenproblem’. Read it >

Week 14: Systems Thinking 101

Creative problems solving requires a systems mindset, and that’s why systems thinking is one of the core pillars of the UnSchool’s core pillars. In this article, we dive into the foundations of systems thinking and share practical knowledge to help level up your systems mindset: A concept stuck in theory does little for the greater good. Understanding that everything is interconnected and being able to apply this knowledge as a tool for effecting change are two different things, and what’s most important is the practical experience plus the applied tools to turn theories into action. To move from ideas in the brain to practice in the real world, it helps to be equipped with the distilled and applicable knowledge about which tools can be used and how to apply these in ways that achieve the desired outcome — which in our case is always positive social & environmental change. Read it >

Week 18: Introducing our UNEP Collaboration: The Anatomy of Action

We were honored to collaborate with the United Nations Environmental Programme to create a project with the intention of activating sustainable living and lifestyles by exploring what types of actions individuals can take that will actually have an impact, if replicated and normalized, as part of people's everyday lifestyle actions. We launched the Anatomy of Action at UNESCO in Paris. We wanted to not only design something that supports lifestyle changes for sustainable living, but also base it on a deeper understanding of what is working, along with why and how to amplify it so that we get new types of behavior norms that encourage positive shifts within the economy: The action set presented in the Anatomy of Action shows everyday lifestyle swaps that fit easily into daily lifestyle choices. I drew heavily on behavioral and cognitive sciences to gain an insight into how to frame these actions as opportunities rather than losses, as the reality with sustainability is that it is a massive opportunity! Read it >

Week 28: The UnSchool Kuching Fellowship Recap

UnSchool Fellowships are nothing short of amazing, as we take a small group of creative changemakers on a weeklong, immersive adventure into activating positive change via systems thinking, sustainability, and design…as well as feast on exquisite local vegetarian cuisine, dive deep into our personal potential, and make lifelong friends. The Kuching Fellowship was the 10th (!) UnSchool Fellowship; it took place on the island of Borneo (Malaysia) in November, 2019. The Kuching cohort included seventeen fellows from nine different countries, and our Fellowship blog shares a day-by-day look at the adventures. Read it >

Week 41: Sneak Peek at the NEW Design Systems Change Handbook by Leyla

Leyla released her fifth handbook in her series on making change! Titled Design Systems Change, it’s packed with new insights and ideas on how to expand your sphere of influence and contribute to the transition to a circular, regenerative future. It’s also a workbook, complete with interactive reflections and actions to help expand your capacity to make change. This article includes a sneak peek at the introduction and first section on design: Just as it can accidentally make a mess, design can also be a catalyst for positive and significant change. This is because, at its core, design is about creative problem solving and forming something new that works better than the past version.  Read it >

Week 47: #StayPositive Brain-Boosting 30-Day Challenge

On April 1st, 2020, smack in the middle of COVID-19’s world takeover, we started our 30-Day Brain-Boosting Challenge to help get people motivated to stay positive, make change and develop their agency to get cool shit done for a positive, regenerative and sustainable future. And good news: you can still sign up! This article shares more details on how this challenge unfolds and helps you level up your changemaking abilities: Read it >

(BONUS COVID-related content: in Week 45, we took a look at how social distancing is doing some good for the planet!)

Week 49: Get More Vegetables in Your Life with our NEW Hero Veg Cookbook!

Join us in celebrating the hidden heroes of our lives, vegetables (yep!), in this fun journal article that announces the release of Leyla Acaroglu + Emma Segal’s co-authored plant-based cookbook. Hand illustrated by Emma and filled with recipes from their childhood and current cooking adventures, along with things Leyla has learnt on the CO Project Farm and collaborations from the kitchen, this cookbook guides you in the art of intuitive cooking based on a veg-centric philosophy. And hey, there’s even some recipes for you to try in a special preview of the book ;) Read it >

Thanks for taking a trip down memory lane with us in this year in review! We also had loads of amazing inspiring alumni profile spotlights; a 5-year birthday celebration and thoughts on 5 more years; thought-provoking reflections on greenwashing, plastic bans, and other changemaking topics; an exploration of our digital footprint that includes a full audit report; zero waste party hacks and lots, lots more!

What should we write about this year?

Leave us a comment and let us know what kind of content you’d like to see next!

#StayPositive Brain-Boosting 30-Day Challenge

On April 1st we started our 30-Day Brain-Boosting Challenge to help get people motivated to stay positive, make change and develop their agency to get cool shit done for a positive, regenerative and sustainable future.

You get daily dosses of content and you can still sign up here, but we also thought why not share some highlights from the program with you today to help you activate your agency and #staypositive! In today’s journal, we have included some content from three of the daily sessions, which are delivered in “Watch” “Read” and “Do” segments each day.

DAY 1: AGENCY

Let's look at how to activate agency for ourselves and in others by working on identifying and expanding your sphere of influence. The first part of the Design Systems Change Handbook goes into this in great detail, and here is the summary version. 

Agency is the capacity of an individual to take action in a particular environment. For most of our lives, we are taught that we don't have impacts on the world around us. An agentized individual, however, is aware of their influence and the dynamic relationship they have with the world. 

Every action we take or don't take has an impact: the things we buy, the conversations we have, the air we breathe - it all has an impactful relationship with the world.

Your agency is about your capacity to act independently and make free choices. These choices are affected by your worldview and the way you see yourself, formed through your experiences with the world, society in general and the things you chose to learn. 

Social structures and circumstances have a huge impact on one's agency, and the life you are born into can increase or decrease your “given” agency. Many of these social structures and circumstances are out of our control, yet they have a huge impact on our agency. The most critical thing is how you interpret your experiences and what they do to your sense of self. Thankfully, we are also seeing seismic shifts in access to the resources that support individual agency development.

Design science pioneer Buckminster Fuller said, ”Call me trimtab,” (it’s even engraved on his tombstone) because he, like many other changemakers, identified that the smallest part of the system can make the biggest change. A trimtab is a tiny part inside the rudder at the back of a large ship. When the ship’s steering wheel is moved, the tiny trimtab shifts in direction and (re)directs the whole trajectory of the ship. Often, the smallest part of the system can move the biggest parts.

This analogy is important to consider when thinking about your personal sphere of influence and the agency that you have to make change in the world around you. Many people fall into the trap of deflecting responsibility to others or blaming the large obvious parts of the system, deferring change to elements that they have little control over. But it’s often the small inconspicuous parts that have the most power and influence over the system dynamics to affect change. Our job is to identify them and unlock their potential. 

Integrity (especially as we deploy what agency we have and develop) is the backbone of our sense of self. It is about having a moral stand that you can refer to and being “whole” or complete when you come to making decisions. As author C.S. Lewis says, integrity is "doing the right thing, even when no one is looking.”  

Expanding Your Personal Agency 

Developing agency goes hand in hand with developing a firm adherence to a set of values, honesty to yourself and the world around you. Fundamentally, it’s a code of conduct or moral compass that you use to set up your practice and govern your decisions as you grow your sphere of influence in the world. 

Individuals who have a strong sense of personal agency believe events are a result of the actions they take, and they praise or blame themselves and their own abilities. Those who see agency external to themselves will praise or blame external factors. For example, someone with a strong sense of personal agency will credit their study habits for passing a test, whereas someone else may attribute their success to the teacher or the exam. Likewise, if they don’t do well, the person with the stronger sense of personal agency will blame themselves rather than the teacher or exam (Carlson, 2007)*.  

*Carlson, N.R., Buskist, W., Heth, C.D. and Schmaltz, R., 2007. Psychology: the science of behaviour-4th Canadian ed.

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DAY 2: REFLEXIVITY AND REFLECTION 

Reflexivity is all about mental flexibility, which entails continuing to learn at the edge of comfort when it comes to understanding things, advancing your ability to think in and around something, and not just seeing things from only one perspective, but honing the ability to think from multiple different vantage points. 

You will benefit immensely from developing a super strong reflective thinking muscle that supports you in your ability to gain deeper insights into the way the world works, how you interact with it and how this can develop your agency. 

Self-reflection, divergent and non-linear thinking skills, hypercomplexity and reflexivity all involve asking a significant number of questions and fostering a deep sense of curiosity about the world around you. It is about assuming you don't know something until you know enough to know it. Whereas many people seek to avoid things they don't know, instead we relish in the fact that there are always new things to uncover. 

This is a lifelong practice, something that you develop over time, with consideration and connection to your inner self. Where reflection is the act of thinking back on something and gaining insights from the vantage point of hindsight, reflexivity is about a more dynamic, intimate and developed self-awareness, fostering the ability to think in and through something, rather than just look back on it after the fact. 

Reflexivity thus is about the circular relationships between cause and effect, especially when it comes to human belief structures. A reflexive relationship goes both ways, where we see cause and the effect both affecting each other in a dynamic relationship, rather than just seeing one part of the connection. You develop the ability to see what happens when an action is taken, and likewise you can see what would happen if you didn't take an action. 

Through this, we can see ourselves as part of the systems we are interacting with, instead of seeing ourselves apart from them. While reflection helps us learn from the past, reflexivity gives us tools to extract information from the moment we are in and the ones we will enter into. 

A high level of social reflexivity, for example, is defined by an individual having the ability to shape their own norms, tastes, politics and desires, and it is very much connected to the ability for one to identify their own agency and exert actions that connect to the advancement of one's influence on the world.

Reflection is a very useful daily practice tool that enables us each to see inside and gain insights into ourselves, which in turn enables us to grow personally and professionally. But to reflect on the world is equally as important. Tools like observing and recognizing bias, alongside learning to love problems and shifting mindsets, are all part of the tool set of positive, practical, proactive changemaking (and all of which we will explore over the coming days). 

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DAY 3: SPHERE OF INFLUENCE

Your sphere of influence is the space in which you have the ability and power to change things. 

The idea that one person can save the world is not very agentizing, as it either encourages people to deflect responsibility for change to that one magical “other,” or it puts an immense burden onto the shoulders of those who want to be involved in the changes and expects them to influence the entire world. What instead is so much more useful is for us all to understand, no matter who we are, that each and every single one of us change the world every day through our actions. We all exert influence over the worlds we inhabit.

The things we buy, the food we eat, the jobs we do, the way we move around — these all have profound impacts on the natural environment, the economy, and society. Unfortunately, many of our actions result in flow-on effects throughout the system, which are often invisible to us and result in some form of unsustainability. The perpetuation of this blind participation in changemaking is one of the major issues we face. That's why there are movements to change the way we design, produce and consume everyday things so that their impact via our actions is lower. The movement toward a circular and regenerative economy is well underway, and this challenge pack you are engaging with is designed to help you discover your agency and role in this bigger picture. 

The decision to be involved in change, be it in your personal or professional life, starts by discovering how to activate your personal agency (which we have been looking at), identifying the sphere of influence you uniquely hold (today's topic) and then adopting the tools that will enable you to expand that influence and activate your creative potential to engage with change (content covered over the next 3.5 weeks!).  

Your sphere of influence is the space that you hold court over, combined with the knowledge you have, the people and communities you engage with, and the integrity you hold (which often translates to how much others value your knowledge, etc). Your sphere of influence is also the scope of the potential impact that your actions may or may not result in. 

When we are kids, our sphere of influence is small, often restricted to our families, but it's potent because we often wield quite a bit of influence over them at this stage in our lives. Then, as a young adult, we expand to have a more significant influence on our friends and peer group (as they do on us), and this slowly grows out to colleagues and partners and then our own kids and others as time and experiences and life advancements give us more agency and influence over the space we hold. The influence that we can each have is based on the amount of agency we cultivate and the integrity we build in ourselves over time. I will note here there are many structural forces that can restrict some and enable others. This is an entirely different topic, and we will discuss aspects of it later on — I just didn't want it to go unsaid that the lack of equity when it comes to certain resources does greatly restrict some people. 

That being said, there is a reality that every agent in a system impacts it. Every action we each take or don't take will have an impact (good, bad and all the options in between) —  the things we buy, the conversations we have, the air we breathe, the things we post online — these all have an impactful relationship on us and on the world, as everything is interconnected. The domino, butterfly or flow-on effect reminds us that our actions have impacts. Both “bad” and “good,” intentional and unintentional, everything we do in this big complex system has an effect on something else, and if you identify your agency and sphere of influence, then you are in a unique position to have an intentionally positive impact with the intent to change the systems around you, as you will be enabled to see yourself within the systems and work within its dynamics. 

An agentized individual is aware that they have influence and that their dynamic relationships with the world they inhabit are influencing them, too. 

By working on identifying and expanding your agency and sphere of influence over time, no matter how few resources you have, you can find creative ways to leverage this into new ways of effecting positive change. The world has seen this time and time again — the smallest part of the system can, if positioned right, effect the most significant change. 

That's why it's so exciting to see that we are all in the middle of a great movement toward change. There are many people the world over redefining their lives so that they, too, can participate in the world with more purpose and contribute back to the planet and their communities. And I assume you are one of them too!

A sphere of influence does not just tally up the number of people you know or the social network you have, although these are important in some cases of social influence (and important for personal connections). The key thing to influence is the integrity you hold and the trust that others have in your ability to influence within the space you hold. 

FURTHER READING

• A quick summary of identifying who's in you your sphere of influence here

• Read about the concept of Locus of Control here 

• Read this paper on sphere of influence and ecological problems 

Now Published! Design Systems Change Handbook + Excerpt: Speed of Change

Today’s the big day! We have been working extra hard to get it ready to release (Covid-19 and all!). The new handbook by Leyla Acaroglu, Design Systems Change is ready to transfer creative provocations, reflective activities and fascinating knowledge on design, systems and change directly from its digital pages to your brain!

Accidentally released just in time for a unprecedented change in our entire world, Discover how to activate change plus build the knowledge and resilience needed in these constantly-changing times by downloading the e-book here.

Over the last three weeks, we have been sharing fascinating excerpts from the new handbook that you can read here, here and here. In this week’s journal, we wrap up our series of sneak peeks by sharing another brain-activating excerpt from the final section on Change, all about the cognitive impacts that the speed of change has, taking a hyper-focus on climate change.

The world has changed rapidly over the last week, and many people around the world are now dealing with this extremely fast state of change. With this week’s excerpt being all about the way that the speed of change affects us, hopefully it will offer some food for thought during these reflective and challenging times.

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Excerpt from Design Systems Change, By Leyla Acaroglu

SPEED OF CHANGE 

Things that accumulate slowly over time make it hard to tell what is happening until there is a really obvious tipping point, like when you leave something in your fridge for too long and mold slowly grows —  first you can hardly see the tiny blue spores colonizing last Sunday’s dinner, but then suddenly it’s a full-on mold infestation, and it almost always seems to have appeared out of nowhere. 

The rate of change affects our ability to see and comprehend it. 

Slow-moving change is a beautiful thing in nature. Leaves turn golden and fall to the ground, we grow old somewhat slowly, hair graying overtime, skin wrinkling at a much slower rate than a dehydrating zucchini in your fridge. But the incremental changes in our atmosphere, the daily contributions of carbon and other gasses like methane back into the open space between the soil and the sun, for example, this slow seemingly invisible version of change is a significant challenge for us to comprehend, as it makes it very hard for people to accept the impending reality that the planet is warming as a result of our actions. 

Incremental changes, over time, have significant accumulated impacts, unless there is a mitigating factor that alleviates the increase (a balancing feedback loop). When you are boiling water on the stove with the lid on, it starts off all calm and then suddenly the heat generated turns into steam-filled bubbles which want to escape, and as they get pushed to the surface steam accumulates inside the small space between the water the lid, and suddenly, all that trapped steam energy escapes in the form of a rattling lid and spurting hot water. The cumulative outcome of slow change is hard to see until the pot is actually spitting the water all over the place as you attempt to calm the storm inside it.  

Most of us are oblivious to the way the planet regulates temperatures through complex interconnected systems, from the ocean currents, carbon cycle to the seasons and wind systems. The relationship between these is where the perfect living conditions for life have come into being, we have lived in a relatively stable climatic period of 10,000 years called the Holocene. 

Yet subtle shifts in the natural systems that regulate the temperature over time has starting to jeopardize the fragile space between the Earth and the Atmosphere. We feel like we live on a stable planet, one in which days tick by and not much changes, except for the leaves during autumn and the politicians in government every few years. But actually, we live in complete chaos. The systems around us are constantly changing, many of them through the interaction with our human-created interventions, we just don’t have the time-perception to see it in real time. 

We are living in the equivalent of that pot of water right before the moment of boiling, and the person responsible for watching it has walked away. The climate crisis is a result of millions of micro actions by industry, individuals and governments, a multi pronged attack of sorts as greenhouse gas emissions are not just from the burning of fossil fuels (although this is quite a lot) but also from gasses such as methane and hydrofluorocarbons which are released as a result of many different activities embedded in the economy and all aspects of our daily lives. 

In some situations, it’s easier to see how actions lead to reactions. For example, we have a fight with a loved one and the emotional fallout is usually immediate. We can see how small things, like regularly spending too much money, or ignoring an illness for too long, or trash building up in the kitchen bin, quickly accumulate into larger problems that require us to take action to alleviate the issues. You need to say sorry, go to the doctor or take the trash out. Unless something is done to change the accumulating situation, then you will find yourself in a sad, sick or smelly mess. Yet many of the accumulated impacts of our actions when it comes to contributing to climate change, for example, are well beyond the scope of our immediate perception. We don’t see any of the released gasses accumulating, this is the danger of hard to see change.

If you say, chipped away at your savings bit-by-bit, it may not look that bad day by day, but soon you will have nothing left. Every action has an impact by either adding to or taking away from something else. In a closed system like Planet Earth, this means all our incremental changes accumulate and eventually create a tipping point of change. That change can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’; this just depends on what your perspective on things are and what the consequential outcomes will be. For example, when your government has elections, depending on who is elected and what they stand for, some people are elated by the change in government whereas others are in despair. This one change generates polar opposite emotional states. But no matter what political position you take, accumulated gases in the atmosphere are being trapped and generating a locked-in effect that prevents heat from escaping the Earth’s atmosphere, and unless we dramatically reverse the release of these gases, by changing the way our societies and economy is designed, the resulting heat will continue to push back against the system that regulates the weather and thus create flow on effects that none of us want to have to deal with. 

It can’t be a toss up between the economy and the planet. There is no economic activity without natural resources, and there is no human life (or any other life, for that matter) unless we have complex interconnected systems working to create the base materials that enable life to flourish, like water, oxygen and food. There is an old saying that I am reminded off regularly; it’s a bit hippy but remains true: “There are no jobs on a dead planet.” 

The economy is still largely run on oil, but not just through the stuff that’s burnt to keep the lights on or the transport sector moving. The design of our houses and cities operate as concrete heat traps, this creates an increased reliance on energy intensive products like Air Conditioners. Around 10% of global energy use is currently dedicated to keeping interior space temperature controlled. In Japan, after the tsunami hit and took out the Fukushima Nuclear reactor, the power supply to Tokyo, the second most populated city in the world, was sketchy. As life started to resume there needed to be drastic energy saving measures, so workplaces implemented dress code changes (even Hawaiian shirt days) to encourage casual dress as a way of decreasing the amount of AC needed to keep workers comfortable and productive. The culture in Japan is to wear full suits, even in smelting summer temperatures, thus requiring higher amounts of AC to be used in offices. The International Energy Agency predicts that by 2050 over 5.6 billion AC’s will be in use, that’s up from the 1.6 billion used in 2018. Currently, Japan, the US and Korea are the most AC obsessed nations in the world, but the predictions are that China and India, with a combined population of 2.8 billion people, will contribute to a global spike in energy needs for powering AC units. Of course, one of the main drivers for the need to increase AC use is climate change. 

This is a dynamic relationship between what we do and what then happens to us. Hurricanes get their energy from warmer sea temperatures. They grow stronger with all the extra moisture in the air, and then they wreak havoc on the humans who unwittingly helped create the conditions for them to grow by pumping CO2 into the atmosphere via constantly running air conditioning units to stay comfortable in poorly designed houses. It’s a vicious feedback loop whereby the things that we design to cure one problem create the conditions for a bigger problem to occur. 

House design plays a big part in the need for AC. Insulation, eaves over windows and location-specific construction materials and techniques can dramatically reduce the need for AC, but instead, all over the world, we now have these shoddy pre-designed fabricated, un-insulated, eave-less heat-boxes being built alongside giant glass and metal skyscrapers, all of which attract and store heat. It’s called the “urban heat island effect”, when so much concrete and heat-absorbing surfaces, like black paved roads, suck in and store heat during the day and then pump it back out at night, increasing the temperature by several degrees. In Los Angeles, where the city is designed around cars and thus has a huge amount of land dedicated to black roads, in a creative attempt to address this, roads have been painted white as a way of reducing this effect. 

Sadly, as more tragic weather related events, triggered by a changing climate, such as hurricanes and Tsunamis, when they hit a city they increase the gross domestic product (GDP) of the nation it affects as all the damaged goods need to be replaced, increasing consumption. New air conditioners purchased, new cars and TVs, clothes, sofas, mattresses and kitchen utensils, people will go out and buy all the everyday things they need to live their lives. Emergency services will truck in bottled water and bulk amounts of food. People will go into debt to get their basic needs met. All of the recovery actions from tragedy will look good on the balance sheets of the nations affected, reinforcing just how broken our systems of economic measurement and incentives are. 

Added to this all is that the inefficiencies of our current energy production systems is staggeringly bad. The old-school way of getting power to customers has been to burn energy-dense things found under the ground like coal, natural gas or crude oil. They are burned to heat water to make steam to drive turbines, which then creates energy that has to be transported to the end-user along wires. Thanks to the laws of thermodynamics, about two thirds of the energy embedded in the raw materials make it into the grid system in the form of electricity, and then another 5% of that is lost in the transmission down the line. Then there’s waste energy at the home, and the impact of power lines falling and creating fires, of which many towns in rural California now have regular intentional blackouts to decrease the risk of wildfires starting, forcing a move to small-scale, decentralized solar grids. One of my favorite facts about the inefficiencies of current energy generation is that old power stations cant be turned off or slowed down; they have to keep running no matter what the demand is. And since we have peak energy demand points, like when the office day starts, or everyone gets home and turns on their TV’s at the same time, energy companies have to run their systems at a high rate to accommodate this peak demand. Which means overnight when less energy is used, in some cases partnerships are set up with other types of energy providers to make better use of this wasted energy — like a coal power plant selling cheap energy to a hydroelectric plant so that it uses the night energy to pump water back up to the top of the dam so it can be released during the day.  

Herein lies the issue with incremental and invisible changes: they are often so hard to make visible that denying them is easier than acknowledging their reality and they happen so slowly that we all become habituated to them. Just like any cycle of addiction, noticing and then admitting you have a problem is often the hardest part. 

Slow changes just end up becoming normal.  

Like how each year the summers get hotter and drier, or the hurricanes come more frequently or with more intensity. First they are isolated incidents, with enough time in between them to forget about the last one when the new catastrophic event happens. This slow normalization process conditions us to accept the new operating environment, so by the time the events are more frequent, they are now a normal part of life, dulling us from the urgency that is needed to pull back the domino effect of a changing climate. 

It is now even more normal that we hear how each year was is the hottest and driest on record, weirder winters with less rain or much more than normal, earlier springs, freakier storms, more intense and regular wildfires. This is change in action. Sure there are many factors contributing to these changes, but the climate is one thing we have been measuring long enough to know categorically that the system is messed up somehow and that we should get our global act together to stop our shared house from burning down, flooding or being blown away. 

One of the main issues embedded in these changes is that often, extreme weather events don’t offer a clear and direct correlation between cause and effect. There is a big delay in the system from turning on your AC to a freak wildfire. Change is often not related in time, so the ability to connect the dots become more removed. The reality is that these big events are often a chaotic manifestation of a million different types of human interventions to natural systems that culminate in an array of impacts that have significant consequences for human livability. 

Thus, proving that the changes in climate are singularly linked to XYZ actions is difficult — like the increasing impact of server use on energy demand as a result of all the new data hungry “internet of things” gadgets in so many peoples homes. Or the collective impact of meat consumption of an industry that moved from pasture-fed to grain-fed, factory-farmed livestock. 

The consequential impacts from all our actions are resulting in the impacts that slowly add up to the mess we are in. And now, the rate of change is being accelerated, so the system is reinforcing itself. 

Design — It’s not what you think it is | Design Systems Change Handbook Preview

In case you missed it in last week’s journal article, we are gearing up for the exciting launch of a new handbook by Leyla that will be released on March 16, 2020, called Design Systems Change! This is the fifth in her series of handbooks she’s written about making change, with other series titles being: Make Change: A Handbook for Creative Rebels and Change Agents, Tips & Tricks to Facilitating Change, Disruptive Design: A Method for Activating Positive Social Change by Design, Circular Systems Design: A Toolkit for the Circular Economy, and now the fifth one in the series, Design Systems Change: How to activate your career as a creative changemaker and help design a regenerative, circular future.

This newest handbook, Design Systems Change, includes an in-depth exploration of agency-building tools for activating a life and career of creative changemaking. Packed with new insights and ideas on how to expand your sphere of influence and contribute to the transition to a circular, regenerative future, by design, this handbook is also a workbook, complete with over 30 interactive reflections and actions to help expand your capacity to make positive change. 

Leading up to its launch on March 16th, we are sharing excerpts from the handbook from each of the three main sections Design, Systems and Change. This week, we take a peek at the power of design in creating a circular, regenerative future and dive into what design is not. If you want to be one of the first to read the full 190+ pages, then you can preorder it here, and it will be sent to your inbox in a digital format as soon as it's launched! 

Expert from Design Systems Change, By Leyla Acaroglu

Design — It’s not what you think it is

Design is one of the most powerful and pervasive influencers of our lives. It is everywhere, from the bureaucratic processes that drive us all mad (often ad hoc and reductive design), through to the beautiful user experience of our treasured devices (often addictive and intentionally designed to steal your eyeballs away from other things). 

There are the pain-in-the-ass-designs, like call centers that are intentionally designed to make you hang up before you can voice your complaint, stores that usher you past expensive items in your search for the basics like bread so you buy more, or my personal pet peeve: the airport security line that requires all humans to momentarily become a cow as they are herded through a maze of control. Cities, buildings, products, services, bus routes, election processes — everything that we humans created has been designed by someone or a group of people. 

As a powerful social scriptor, design gives narrative; how you move around a city or the rules you obey or disregard, for instance, design influences your mind to create actions and form opinions. Our mind is activated in conscious and covert ways by visual signs and physical forms, wayfinding devices, restrictions, symbols and aesthetics. 

From the moment we are born, to the day we depart this Earth, our lives are profoundly influenced by the designed world. And, despite the hugely influential far-reaching impact of design as a profession and a socially forming process, for some reason, as a society, we seem to succumb to reducing design down to the basics of aesthetics and function, rather than what it is really doing — influencing and forming the entire world as we know it. 

Perhaps it’s through this mystique that it helps to perpetuate the systems of unsustainability that design enables in our extraction-based economy? 

One of the things I think about a lot is the relationship between design and the social structures that also influence us all immensely. After all, we are social animals, and humans attribute their success to collaboration and the social connections we form. 

Sure, we are riddled with biases and are as equally un-cooperative as we are collaborative, but we also look after our young intensely and form strong social bonds and smile when others smile at us, we work towards effectively getting along. We speak shared languages and operate under social expectations that condition us to behave in socially-beneficial ways and to value things in culturally appropriate ways. Objects and symbols are central to the forming of our cultures and interpreting the physical world we inhabit. 

Designers in all their types and roles – industrial designers, fashion designers, furniture designers, architects, landscape architects, interior designers, user experience designers, service designers, graphic designers, even engineers – all work to create the services, products and processes that the world engages with. Why? Because people have needs that are met through the creation of things. Designers are thus charged with the task of converting these needs into things that meet them and doing it in unique and novel ways that beat the competition. Designers are value creates. 

This system has incentivized many to come up with the desires before the products can fill them, but that’s an entirely different story to tell. Individually, we might want to stay connected to friends and colleagues so technology helps us do that, but collectively, we need to have a system of governance that keeps society in some sort of stable place. So, we iteratively design governments and legal systems with penalties for misbehavior.

Design thus operates on many levels to combine competing aspects, such as function, aesthetics, enjoyment, desirability, entertainment and control. The latter can be seen in many of the design decisions around shared communal artifacts, like street side seats or public buildings; there are often many aspects incorporated to deter certain types of people and engage others. The park bench is perfect for the office worker to sit for 30 minutes and each their lunch, but intentionally designed so that the homeless person can’t sleep on it or the skateboarding kid can’t grind her board against it. 

Design may be the output of imagination and creativity, but it forms the structures that create our societies as we know them.

The one unifying factor of design is that the driving force behind it is to create something that meets a defined or intended “need”. We define this as functionality, and everything that exists can be defined by its core function. If a product or service does not fulfill a clear functionality, then it doesn’t function, and it’s often seen as lacking value or being purely aesthetic. 

A chair with two legs that does not stand up is broken, a car without a drive shaft may look like a car but is unable to achieve the act of driving, a blunt knife or a bucket with a hole, a hat with no rim, a building without a front door — these are all pointless things as they don’t serve the core function that is needed for us to ascribe value and thus use them, desire them and keep them in our lives. Or more importantly, we may not part with money to own them. A government without a way of collecting money from its citizens may find that it is quickly unable to afford to pay for the services it intended to offer in exchange for votes, thus it is unable to function in terms of being elected or seen as governing. 

All designs can have unintended consequences, such as creating perverse incentives, spillover effects or externalities. These are often not conceived at the point of creation and are thus dealt with after the thing has come into existence and the feedbacks of interacting with the world can be seen.  

Design is therefore an all-encompassing human capacity that reaches beyond the known professions of industrial, fashion, graphic, user experience and interior design. There are also policy writers, researchers, scientists and administrative professionals who likewise employ design as a tool for enacting change. Absolutely everything that humans have conjured into being is, in some way. a designed artifact and thus, should be seen as a product of our constructed world. But perhaps the most important, unspoken thing about design is the fact that whatever we can make, we can redesign, which further opens up the opportunity for the idea us all being everyday citizen designers of the future. 

The way we each make choices, move through our cities, select food, and act on our consumption preferences all create a type of design outcome, as every action has impacts. 

By understanding the power of design, both as a profession and as an outcome of the choices we make in our daily lives, then we can gain the tools to redesign systems and unlock some of design’s potential to be an effective tool for enacting positive change. 

Many designers are none the wiser to the impact that they have; with short timelines and demanding briefs, it’s difficult to find the time to adequately assess the impact of any one or combined design choices they make. But this has to change. We need to foster within the design community a collective code of conduct, a set of standards and ethical guidelines to ensure that what we create is not just serving a system of exploitation and extraction, but instead creating greater value than is being taken. This is what circular systems design is all about!*

Thus, if we are to design the world that works better for all of us, then our perception of design, what it does to us overtly and covertly — that reductive idea has to change. Instead of it being a fruitless contributor to the world of luxury, business and entertainment, we can leverage design to be the incredibly powerful social influencer that it is by default, as it can make or break elections, control societies, create change and dictate the future. 

Contrary to all the design thinking rhetoric out there, ask any designer how they do what they do, and they will each give you a very different set of tools, processes and design practices that they use to get from a set brief to a solid outcome. Design thinking is one approach put forth by one set of designers who do a particular type of design work. There is nothing wrong with design thinking; it’s just that it’s not the defining process of design. There is no standardized design process, as design is an experiential act that requires many different tools. For example, an architect uses very different processes than a fashion designer or a UX designer. 

Design thinking can be done well and certainly serves a purpose, but it’s not the only type of design approach and should be like everything else: questioned for its integrity and viability to solve the more complex problems we collectively face. 

We can’t solve complex problems with simple solutions that don’t address the root cause of the issues within the system. We need depth of understanding and to embrace complexity. This is why applying systems thinking to any creative process is critical to coming up with solutions that fit within the complexity, rather than trying to design it away.

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Next week, we will share an excerpt from the Systems section, so stay tuned!

Sneak Peek at the NEW Design Systems Change Handbook by Leyla Acaroglu

Have you read any of our handbooks on making change? Leyla has written one each year since she started the UnSchool in 2014. The series titles include Make Change: A Handbook for Creative Rebels and Change Agents, Tips & Tricks to Facilitating Change, Disruptive Design: A Method for Activating Positive Social Change by Design, Circular Systems Design: A Toolkit for the Circular Economy, and now the fifth one in the series, Design Systems Change: How to activate your career as a creative changemaker and help design a regenerative, circular future.

The new handbook will be released on March 16, 2020 and includes an in-depth exploration of agency-building tools for activating a career of creative changemaking. Packed with new insights and ideas on how to expand your sphere of influence and contribute to the transition to a circular, regenerative future, this handbook is also a workbook, complete with interactive reflections and actions to help expand your capacity to make change. 

The new Design Systems Change Handbook is out in March!

In the next few journal articles, we will share excerpts from the upcoming handbook from each of the three main sections (Design, Systems and Change), along with an extensive introduction to Taking Action.

This week, we dive into the introductory section on how to activate your agency by sharing with you one of our favorite parts. If you want to be one of the first to read the full 190+ pages, then you can pre-order it now, and it will be sent to your inbox in a digital format as soon as it's launched on March 16th! 

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Expert from, Design Systems Change, By Leyla Acaroglu

Introduction 

Design is a powerful social influencer that shapes and scripts our experience of the world; we now live in a time where each and every day we interact with a world entirely designed by humans, for humans. Scientists now argue that we have entered into a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene. One of the main drivers of this shift to a world where humans influence every other living thing on the planet is design — the design of technology, of consumer goods, of scientific discoveries, of our lives. Design is everywhere.  

The broader concept of design encompasses our planning and intent to dictate and control the way the world works. Humans have been doing this now for eons, but before the Industrial Revolution, where we unlocked the power of fossil fuels, change was confined to the slower changes that nature does organically. 

For example, the plants we eat today were adapted each generation by farmers selecting the best-performing ones and changing the way they bear fruit for us; these changes were painstakingly slow. But now we have accelerated the rate of change thanks to technological development, and in doing so, we have greatly accelerated the changes to the systems that sustain life on Earth. We have designed a world exclusively for human needs, and unless we design it better so that we work within the systems that nature provides all that we need to live, then we will end up designing ourselves out of here! 

Just as it can accidentally make a mess, design can also be a catalyst for positive and significant change. This is because, at its core, design is about creative problem solving and forming something new that works better than the past version. 

Currently, so much of what is created is done so without the understanding of the impacts or the intent to create outcomes that are mutually positive for us and the planet. As a result, we end up living with impacts in which the externalities are ignored and the consequences are often unintended, but nonetheless momentous. So much of what we do in the economy is not accounted for in any way. These are known as externalities, and we often have no idea of how things like pollution are embedded in anything, like a pair of socks or what social costs were paid by the farmers who helped get us our morning coffee. Giant problematic systems like waste and pollution are the products of poorly-designed human systems. 

There is no waste in nature; instead, the waste product from one system is the food and fuel for another. Everything is interconnected and optimized to thrive. 

It’s obvious to most that we live in a complex and chaotic world with constant technological and social changes. Humans have done an incredible job at creating an array of design and technology solutions to work around the chaos, make our lives more comfortable, increase convenience and ease of living and prolong our lives. Yet many of these designed solutions come with entangled, complicated consequences, most of which are invisible to the human mind. 

We consume things ignorant of the impacts their creation causes and are selectively blind to the impacts their subsequent waste will create. Design helps to sell us things that reinforce many of the problems that currently exist. We have created a linear production system with cheap efficient manufacturing where waste is a normal part of our lives now. This is what we need to redesign —  the way we meet our needs so that we get beautiful, elegant solutions that are regenerative rather than destructive. We need to design out waste as we know it.  

Collectively, we also rely on a linear thought process that fits within a linear world. This system of simplification allows for exploitation as the fundamental components of a successful economy. This is increasingly creating alarming and catastrophic outcomes, allowing us to see how we have designed ourselves into the current status quo, and thus providing a pathway for us to design ourselves out. Design can transcend linear function and provide an interwoven systems approach fundamental to inspiring and enacting change.  

Paradoxical to the environmental crises at hand, we live in one of the safest times in all of human history. By many metrics, we are better off as a species now than any generation before us, due to food security, global diplomacy, advances in medicine, mass agriculture and efforts to alleviate poverty. 

Yet despite this incredible progress, it comes at a significant cost to the future, as many people now maintain a stressed-out, negative perspective of the world, much of which the media reinforces that society and the planet as a whole are destined for a bleak future. Indeed, our fears will become a reflection of what we do today unless we all work to design a different trajectory. 

Ask yourself —  if not you, then who? 

The future is undefined; it is made up of all our actions today. 

And, yes, there are many complex problems at play in the world around us. And, yes, all of these complex problems need creative solutions from skilled people. And, yes, you are one of these people. 

Why is it that some will take action, contribute to activating change, question the status quo, be willing to be different and rebel against the things that they know to be wrong, and others will not? Why do some humans passively accept what is and blame others for the things they don’t like? 

There are many possible answers to these rhetorical questions. One is the cycle of inaction, whereby apathy leads to inaction. But courage, convocation, compassion, curiosity and sheer tenacity are some skills that we can all foster to overcome the apathy and activate our agency to participate in creating a future that overcomes the challenges of the past and ensure that the solutions we put in place today are not the problems of tomorrow. 

The Cycle of Inaction

From the climate catastrophe to homelessness, the plastic waste crisis, the opioid epidemic, the Sixth Great Extinction, deforestation, childhood obesity, and the Anthropocene, there are many significant challenges awaiting creative minds to contribute to changing them. We can live in a post-disposable world if we design out waste; we can break the cycle of addiction by creating social systems that enable support. Plastic can play a part in our lives and not pollute the planetary systems if we design higher value products and create closed-loop systems to capture them. These are endless systems change solutions just waiting to be uncovered and emerge new ideas. 

The reality and the magnitude of the problems at play can be overwhelming, especially to a mind unequipped with the tools for understanding the systems that create and sustain the problems to begin with. We live in a time of great technological change, where we can get information instantaneously and where that information can be tailored to us very specifically, playing on our fears, convincing us to consume, making it hard to escape the problem cycle. 

With all of these issues prominently on display through social and traditional media, it’s easy to get sucked into a negativity bias that disables our ability to act. We know that negative news sells and that pessimistic viewpoints drum up sensational headlines that get heartbeats pounding, fear flowing and people feeling paralyzed. 

With our emotional state being constantly milked day-in-day-out,  it’s no wonder human perception can quickly become filled with negativity, pessimism and inaction. 

This state of mind can easily reinforce apathy into inaction, which, in turn, reinforces the problems at play, as when people opt to not take part in changing the systems — this just enables the status quo to persist. We need to find ways of busting through the feedback loop of inaction! 

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Next week, we will share an excerpt from the Design section, so stay tuned!

This is really juicy brain food!

Great News On the Transition to Sustainability!

A massive shift is underway toward a sustainable, regenerative and circular future! To showcase how we’re in the midst of this exciting shift, we have compiled some of the recent changes we see as further demonstrating that the linear economy is on its way out, and a circular future is coming soon.

There is so much opportunity in reconfiguring the economy to evolve and solve some of our biggest threats, from ocean plastic waste to climate change. If you are inspired by these stories, then get yourself ready to take part in this great shift by joining us at the UnSchool and leveling up your changemaking skills!

IKEA and Microsoft go Carbon Positive

Two of the world’s biggest companies commit to not only be carbon neutral, but also take it a step farther to be carbon positive. Microsoft has announced they will ‘pay back’ all the carbon it has ever released into the atmosphere, and IKEA has developed a plan to make all their designs circular by 2030.

These climate carbon-‘positive’ initiatives mean that they plan, along with offset carbon credits, to transition from coal and oil sources, make raw material swaps and implement other supply chain initiatives to reduce the amount of emissions put into the atmosphere to less than what they input.

Circular Delivery Systems

The circular economy in getting into mainstream action through the delivery system LOOP, an initiative by Unilever and TerraCycle offering a delivery system for household goods in purposely-made reusable containers in the Northeast of the United States and Paris. They are planning on expanding throughout the United States and into Canada, UK, Germany and Japan.

World’s biggest investment firm won’t invest in climate negative companies

BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, with $7.4 trillion in their portfolio. In a letter this week from CEO Larry Fink to shareholders and CEOs, BlackRock has announced an exit strategy from companies that are not doing something about climate change, among other sustainability initiatives.

With a huge impact on global industries, this move is a strong positive statement in what is traditionally a fairly conservative and profit-oriented industry, independent of social and environmental impact.

China to ban single use plastics

China is one of the biggest consumers in the world, and it made the announcement last week to ban non-biodegradable plastic and bags by 2022, which is a huge step toward tackling the ocean plastic waste crisis.

The Yangtze river running through China is a one of the main contributors to plastic leaking into the ocean, and this move should help alleviate at least some of the source issue.

There is still much work to do to move us globally to a post-disposable future; however, steps like this do help advance us forward.

Yangtze River

An article discussing these announcements in Wired Magazine raises a good provocation around greenwashing. The author says, “Most targets used by businesses are not linked to specific operations, such as a supply chain or purchased energy. This means that net zero targets may ignore large parts of an organisation that are deemed too much of a problem to change.”

The World Circular Gap Report released at Davos announced that the world is at present “8.6% Circular”, which could be taken as exciting progress or distressing slowness, depending on how you look at things. The report shows the actions that different countries are making in detail and is well worth the read.

We talk about change all the time here at the UnSchool. The world is constantly changing in all sorts of directions, and these kinds of movements help us set the course toward a more sustainable and regenerative future.

There is always more work to do, and we are focused on upskilling as many people as possible with the tools to keep the momentum going forward!

Apply now for a 2020 program to join our global community of creative changemakers and contribute to forward motion >

Anatomy of Action: The many ways to have fun!

Let’s be honest — being a creative problem solver can be completely overwhelming and totally exhausting. From negativity bias to creative burnout through to compassion fatigue, there are many hurdles that can result in spending personal energy trying to make the future better than today. And then when we want to take a break from it all, there’s another thing that us sustainability-focused humans will consider, too: the impacts of our travel and leisure. Add in the negative stigma of sustainability that many people associate with going back to ‘the dark ages,’ and now we have a lot of confusion around how to kick back, enjoy ourselves, and have some fun.  If you’ve been following our work at the UnSchool for a while, then you may know how much we value fun (if not, watch this or this to get some insight). So, it was very important to us to look at how we can have fun in a better way through the Anatomy of Action. 

Action 1: Enjoy the Journey

Being an ethically-conscious traveller can have positive impacts on the communities you are visiting and on your personal well-being. Opting for a “staycation” vacation near your home — preferably in nature — can be rewarding for your health, the local economy, the environment, and, of course, your wallet! If you’re not into staying in your own house, consider an AirBnB; its sharing model has been found to make better use of existing resources. Aching to venture out a bit? A short road trip is also a more sustainable way to travel than flying. As environmental author Kate Galbraith noted in this NYT column, “The second-best thing to staying home — a more generous definition of staycation — is venturing just a few hours away, to a park or town that you haven’t already seen many times. The quick trip can seem as if you’re a world away, without the hassle of navigating a Transportation Security Administration screening or a long stint in the car.” 

Many people want to see the world — so much so that “tourism’s global carbon footprint has increased from 3.9 to 4.5 GtCO2e, four times more than previously estimated, accounting for about 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions.” And, many emerging economies depend on tourism revenues, small island development states in particular. So if you go the distance, or if you travel for sun and surf, first opt to stay longer, since take off and landing are the most polluting parts of a flight. Secondly, eat local: according to the UN, “Food is the second largest C02 emitter in the tourism industry. In small islands like Mauritius, 98% of food is imported. Asking people to enjoy local foods will be both beneficial for the planetary and the social aspect.” Of course, you’ll also want to ditch disposables and be proactive in your footprint.

#EnjoyTheJourney Everyday Actions

1. Research and ensure your tourist purchases and activities have a positive impact wherever you go 

2. Consider vacations close to home and see the things that other people travel to your community to see

3. Travel slowly and take time to discover by taking the train/bus or cycling and walking  

4. Visit fewer places but stay longer in each

5. If you take flights over 6000 km, travel through hubs rather than direct and consider staying close to the venue to reduce travel time 

6. Experience the real: eat and stay local, embrace diverse cultures, experience what the terrain has to offer (run, bike, hike), and help local economies 

7. Refuse disposable plastics and other single-use items and minimize your visit’s impacts

8. Collect memories from your trip that leave footprints in the sand, not on the planet - be mindful and proactive about the impacts of your fun times

Action 2: Stay Curious

Learning, curiosity, discovery, wonderment — whatever you want to call it, life is made more valuable (and fun!) through the addition of new knowledge, ideas, and actions. This does not mean you have to enroll in a professional learning program or institution; learning opportunities are everywhere, and we can choose the medium that works best for us, as this Harvard Business Review article points out: “Books, online courses, MOOCs, professional development programs, podcasts, and other resources have never been more abundant or accessible, making it easier than ever to make a habit of lifelong learning. Every day, each of us is offered the opportunity to pursue intellectual development in ways that are tailored to our learning style.”

 By embracing curiosity, you can gain all sorts of lifelong benefits, from a more flexible outlook on life and work, all the way to setting a better example for our kids and communities. You’ll also be better prepared for the future, as everything around us is constantly changing: “Trends including AI, robotics, and offshoring mean constant shifts in the nature of work. Navigating this ever-changing landscape requires continual learning and personal growth.” And, staying curious is good for your brain! Studies are proving how engaging your learning superpower can stave off age-related cognitive and memory decline.

Finally, learning is a great way to enhance your social life because it helps foster relationships and can introduce you to like-minded peers (especially if you take a workshop or volunteer for a cause, for example). This is an increasingly important point to consider since we have become increasingly factioned and isolated within our hyper-busy societies; in the US alone, an estimated 42.6 million adults over age 45 are thought to be suffering from chronic loneliness. This isn’t just a social or cultural issue — loneliness actually has a physiological impact “via stress hormones, immune function and cardiovascular function with a cumulative effect.” Some officials even believe that loneliness poses a greater risk to public health than obesity! So, when you take up learning new things, consider being intentional about finding a way to integrate social interaction to help build meaningful relationships along the way. 

#StayCurious Everyday Actions

1. Adopt a lifelong learning approach to keep your mind thirsty and active

2. Seek out and support new ideas to make the world a better place

3. Learn from nature and see where it fits in with your life

4. Discover more about the systems that sustain us - like where your food comes from and make more informed choices

5. Choose technologies and apps that make it easier for you to live more sustainably 

6. Foster an open and independent mindset

7. Be future focused and stay positive about how to contribute to a better world

8. Learn new things through formal and informal education 
   
   

Action 3: Choose Experiences

We are a sum of our experiences. Our identity is not defined by our possessions (in fact, more stuff equals more stress), but instead it is an accumulation of the places we’ve been, lessons we’ve learned, people we have interacted with, and the experiences we’ve had (good and bad!). Experiences we lock into our memories through daily living help create who we are. Emerging science highlights that the aspirations people have sometimes differ from what society labels as “the good life”. Traveling, spending time in nature and with family and friends, learning and seeing new things, and keeping active seem to contribute to happier and healthier lives.

As we swap from materialism and favor experiences more, some may worry about the economic impacts of doing so. As James Wallman points out in his book Stuffocation, “That’s the magic of experientialism. It’s not anti-consumerist or anti-capitalist. Money is still going into the economy and creating jobs – we’re just spending it on experiences. I’ve seen a transformation in my own life.” Indeed, making an economy more sustainable does not mean that it has to be a no-growth economy.  Like we pointed out in our “Stuff” section of the AoA, there are many economic opportunities to be reaped in transitioning to a circular economy that leverages collaborative consumption and “a move away from the ownership and consumption of physical things towards the consumption of intangible experiences.” 

There are numerous personal benefits to choosing experiences — namely, experiences make us feel happier and more fulfilled as we consumer experiences directly with others. And when we opt to spend time in nature, the health benefits expand that much more: improved cardiovascular health, better sleep, and a lower risk of Type II diabetes, to name a few. This is especially important to model for our children, who, as child-advocacy expert Richard Louv has noted in his book The Nature Principle,  “have become increasingly alienated from the natural world. “ Citing skyrocketing rates of childhood obesity, diabetes, depression, and ADHD, he links a lack of interaction with nature to a slow but steady erosion of mental, physical, and spiritual health. The good news is that we can correct course, get out there, and experience all that the world has to offer! 

#ChooseExperiences Everyday Actions

1. Engage in experiences and services that add value to your life 

2. Find ways to spend time with people you care about and make you laugh 

3. Spend more time connecting with nature and natural spaces 

4. Opt for active recreational choices for increased health and wellbeing (sports, games and outdoor activities)

5. Find daily ways to relax and take time out to reduce stress and anxiety 

6. Give yourself (more) digital detox time and embrace analog experiences 

7. Pursue purpose and passions, not possessions

8. Consider the impacts your current actives have on your life, and do more of what makes you happy

There are no simple solutions to complex problems, and the economic issues we face are indeed complex. While the global environmental issues may be big and sometimes overwhelming, they are the outcomes of many individual actions. So, the choices we each make as individuals, as workers, and as members of societies have the potential to reinforce undesirable actions or to create the opportunity for new, more sustainable solutions. 

The actions outlined in the Anatomy of Action are are some of the top-level actions any individual can do to help support the global shift toward a more sustainable and regenerative future. No matter who you are, every action you take has an impact, so by taking these more considered actions, you can contribute to a global movement towards activating the SDG’s. There are many other things you can do; this list is by no means an exhaustive account of all the aspects of our lives, but all the actions in the Anatomy of Action offers a starter list that any individual, anywhere can take action on to help make a positive future for all of us! 

Anatomy of Action: Money, Money Money

Activist Anna Lappé has famously said, “Every time you spend money, you’re casting a vote for the kind of world you want,” and no matter how complex economic systems and personal finances can be, our individual impacts do really does boil down to that one simple sentence.  

Like it or not, money makes the world go ‘round, as it is the core component to basically all of life’s functionality. Security, basic needs, pleasure, movement, hopes, dreams, relationships — money dynamically infiltrates every aspect of our being and influences the quality of our lives. But just because modern society ingrains social pressure to accumulate more and more money, does not mean that we have to be unethical about how we use it. Indeed, we can use money to powerfully influence the future so that it works better for us all, or blindly reinforce aspects of society that need to be changed. The power and influence of every dollar and cent spent is why Money is the fourth area of focus in the Anatomy of Action. 

Action 1: Ethical Investment

If you’re not investing responsibly, you’re investing irresponsibly. Everything we buy has an impact on people and the world around us in general, so when you are thinking about purchasing what you need and want, consider your real needs and what types of goods and services you want to see more of in the future. You have the power to choose what your money supports (and what not to support).  This goes for goods and services AND investments in stocks and bonds. The power behind this truth is becoming increasingly evident, as the global Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) market is now worth nearly $23 trillion, and there are more than 300 sustainable investment-related policy tools and market-led initiatives, in which more than half of them have been created in the last few years. Similarly, according to this report from the US SIF: The Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment, “High net worth individuals are increasingly influencing SRI issues including climate change, diversity, human rights, weapons and political spending with $3 trillion in sustainable assets.”

Investing in the future is also about the companies you invest in when you buy something. Financial planning that considers your sustainability impacts and available ethically- motivated options can support your family and your community, as well as the planet at large. In 2018, for example, more than half of impact investors reported tracking their impact performance against the SDGs, which are all about the future greater good for all. Choosing to invest how every big or small amounts of money you have in more locally produced goods and services can have positive economic outcomes for your community as well, as it injects cash directly into your community.

#EthicalInvesting Everyday Actions: 

1. Spend time and money on things that have positive impacts 

2. Decide on your priority social and environmental issues and invest accordingly 

3. Ask your bank about their sustainable investment policy and if they don't have one then swap banks if you can 

4. Speak up and voice your preference for sustainable investments - look at long-term drivers that affect company performance

5. Invest in goods and services produced in sustainable ways

6. Never invest in products made from endangered wildlife

7. Invest in a diversified portfolio (don’t put all your eggs in one basket)

8. Put savings in responsible stocks, investments, including pensions and banks

9. Pay taxes to help build your community

10. Advance your family finance skills and financial management to avoid going into or starting to get out of debt

Action 2: Divestment

Intentionally investing isn’t the only way to send a message to the market; divestment is another powerful way to share how important sustainability is to you. Divestment happens when people move money away from industries and commercial activities that are unsustainable and instead choose investments, banks, energy providers, and other companies and services that are supporting renewable options, sustainable consumption and production, and development of more sustainable and ethical industries. 

Most notably, fossil fuel divestment (inspired by the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa) is on the rise, and as of early 2018, more than 700 organizations from more than 76 countries with over $5.5tn (trillion!) of assets have committed to divesting in fossil-fuel companies and instead will invest in climate solutions. 

The needs are clear, with the planet and human health suffering in unprecedented ways — like the fact that unpaid health bills from air pollution due to fossil fuels accounted for US$5.3tn in 2015 (!) — that’s more than global health spending (and by the way, we talk a lot about the impacts of fossil fuels in our Move journal article). The UN has issued multiple warnings and clearly stated in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2018 report: “Unless humans transform the economy in such a way that has no documented historic precedent, the earth will experience worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040.”

While this cautioning is scary to consider, let a problem-loving approach override the fear, knowing that we all do have individual agency that, when activated for positive sustainable change, adds up to bigger collective shifts. 

Make no mistake, as more and more people do this, it sends strong messages to companies to consider their business models and actions to support renewable energy, sustainable technologies, and more responsible products. When it comes to fossil fuels, just 100 companies (all within the oil and gas industry) are responsible for 71% of global carbon emissions — so aiming at divesting from any of these 100 companies can definitely have a large impact. And in doing so, there will be a ripple effect in “creating a new wave of the moral entrepreneur or norm entrepreneur, concerned with labelling a particular behaviour (carbon pollution) as morally reprehensible, and, by so doing, shifting attitudes about climate change mitigation.”

#Divestment Everyday Actions

1. Move your money; ask your bank how they invest your money.  If it is in fossil fuels or other unsustainable industries (such as weapons, tobacco etc) - then move banks, and tell your bank why 

2. If you have a retirement fund, you could be inadvertently investing in unsustainable industries.  If so, ask your fund manager to move to a more responsible fund

3. For investments in stocks, bonds, funds you can avoid investing in companies you believe are harmful and choose to invest in those that support more sustainable efforts

4. Swap your energy provider to a non fossil fuel based provider or support collective or community run wind and solar farms 

5. Divest from fossil fuel or unethical companies 

Action 3: Energy Positive Homes

One of the areas we spent a lot of our money on is our living space. Our homes are a massive contributor to our personal ecological footprint, from rent to energy services, homes eat up a chunk of our personal budgets so they can greatly impact our anatomy of action. In the US, homes and commercial buildings consume 40% of the energy used throughout the country (and 10-20% of the average American’s energy bill expenditure might be wasted due to drafts, leaks, and outdated systems) — this, coupled with the fact that energy use per m2 in buildings needs to be reduced by 30% by 2030 to be in line with the Paris Agreement and follow the Sustainable Development Scenario, demonstrates what kind of opportunity lies in energy positive behaviors. 

Energy efficiency, renewables, appliances, and behaviors at home not only promote climate change mitigation, but also save money, generate utility savings over time, and increase the value of property; in fact, the World Green Business Council shares that “energy-efficient housing is more affordable over its lifetime than non-efficient buildings.” Renewable energy offerings are becoming more prevalent and therefore quite affordable; for example, US-based power company PG&E offers 100% renewable energy at the cost of USD $4.36 /month. Making your home more sustainable can also help support the local economy and can increase the level of comfort by enhancing the quality of your life. 

Swapping to a renewable energy supply moves us toward sustainable energy, but most of the savings can be attained through small technical interventions in the home, ensuring it is well insulated against hot and cold weather. And, as the US EPA has reported, “In addition to energy efficiency techniques, other emissions reduction opportunities for the home include actions such as: Making water and wastewater systems more energy-efficient; reducing solid waste sent to landfills; capturing and using methane produced in current landfills; reducing leakage from refrigeration equipment; and using refrigerants with lower global warming potentials. 

#EnergyPositiveHomes Everyday Actions:

1. Find ways to save on your energy bill via do-it-yourself or professional audit of energy used/saved/lost in your home and make simple changes 

2. Regulate home temperatures better by adding verandas, green roofs, high inertia walls, and bio-based insulation

3. Adapt to the season: stay comfortable and save energy (wear a sweater, draw blinds in summer) 

4. Take simple steps: seal windows and doorsteps, avoid thermic bridges, install double glass glazing, use LED bulbs, invest in high inertia radiators 

5. Change habits: open the curtains for natural light; close shades in hot climates; cover pans when boiling, spend less time in shower, compost organics

6. Produce your own energy: install a small scale solar installation to power your home

7. Collect rainwater and reuse it for gardening, toilets, and washing machines

8. Use appliances as intended, consider buying more energy and water efficient appliances when replaced

9. Compare energy providers available and choose a more sustainable one (renewable energy)

There are no simple solutions to complex problems, and the global economic issues we face are indeed complex and vast. While the global environmental issues may be big and sometimes overwhelming, they are the outcomes of many individual actions. So, the choices we each make as individuals, as workers, and as members of societies have the potential to reinforce undesirable actions or to create the opportunity for new, more sustainable solutions.  

The actions outlined in the Anatomy of Action are are some of the top-level actions any individual can do to help support the global shift toward a more sustainable and regenerative future. No matter who you are, every action you take has an impact, so by taking these more considered actions, you can contribute to a global movement towards activating the SDG’s and designing a circular economy that gives back more than it takes. There are many other things you can do; this list is by no means an exhaustive account of all the aspects of our lives, but all the actions in the Anatomy of Action offers a starter list that any individual, anywhere can take action on to help make a positive future for all of us!