Reflections on peer learning
Part 1: What if the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis?
Over five months this winter/spring, a group of deep-thinking climate and migration justice folk joined us on a peer learning journey to explore cross-sector collaborations that might catalyse more holistic, justice-oriented strategy and action.
This was not a programme for people already working deeply at the intersections between climate and migration justice. It was not a training, nor a series of academic or theoretical lectures or workshops.
Instead, it was an entry point for those who felt concerned or overwhelmed about injustices that felt outside their immediate remit, but who had appetite to lean into complexity and scope for influence in their organisation’s work. The idea was to see if more cross-sector understanding and collaboration could improve the decisions we make, so that our work towards one kind of justice doesn’t perpetuate other injustices.
The people on the programme have expertise that spans lived experience, community action, cultural work, legal support, campaigning, and policy influence, across climate and migration justice. Their strategies range from legal frameworks to grassroots organising, from policy and advocacy to creative storytelling - read on to see where collaborations took them.
This was a free programme funded by Paul Hamlyn Foundation. You can read more detail of the programme’s approach and aims here.
Picture credit: Canva
Naming our conditions
It feels important to mention the timeframe of this programme, as the journey we were on together was accompanied by a global journey very relevant to both climate and migration.
We first met in November 2025 just as the UK government’s asylum reforms made refugee status temporary, and we had our last session in March 2026 a few weeks after these reforms came into effect.
In-between we witnessed a disappointing COP-30, a surge in violent ICE raids and deaths, the rise of the far right having an impact on safety for racialised people, and ongoing destruction and displacement for Palestinians in Gaza. We ended 2025 with widespread recognition that the world is now in a new era of climate extremes, and started 2026 with a US-Israel attack that prompted the current Iran war, causing not only devastating loss of life but also both large-scale displacement and significant emissions and environmental damage.
We mention these occurrences not to be inflammatory or cause overwhelm; we mention them because these were (and are) our reality. In the lineage of Staci K Haines’ work including The Politics of Trauma (which both myself and my co-facilitator Amira Tharani have been influenced by), naming our current conditions is an important first step to finding a way through. It has felt vital throughout this journey towards collaborations to never shy away from the reality of what we are living in, as there’s been increasing recognition that we cannot respond to these crises in ways we are used to. As Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé says, “the times are urgent: let’s slow down”.
This has been particularly important as many of the global events had deeply personal consequences on people in the group. Black and brown participants spoke about tracking these changes in their bodies with spikes in racialization, concerns about safety while mobilising for climate justice and in response to rising far right violence, and in some cases grief through family connection to regions under attack. We cannot ignore that injustices related to both climate breakdown and migration disproportionately impact Black and brown people, and racial justice must be a core thread through any solutions we may find.
How we responded
Overwhelm and urgency were present at the start, given the scale of the issues we were attempting to address. This made it vital to approach our peer learning journey in a way that not only leaned into the reality of our current conditions, but also provided space for care and complexity. Another quote from Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé came to typify much of the learning from the group throughout – “What if the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis?”
And so, we slowed down. We landed in shared understanding of the context with a session with Fahmida Miah of Climate Outreach, but did not try to rush straight into solutions or collaborations – instead we started with a grounding in knowledge and investment in relationships, and moved through questions towards ideas for action. All this was guided by land and connection. This meant having a seasonal approach to the journey of the programme as a whole to give it shape as we moved from complexity to action. It also meant starting and ending every session with grounding in ourselves, a commitment and connection to each other, and the land we are on.
Seasonal programme arc
We started to name some of the tensions we were feeling in this work through a series of Wicked Questions - how can we respond to the interconnectedness of systems of injustice, while being able to do really deep work in one area? How can we be open and inclusive, and also hold strong boundaries around our values and principles? How can we keep space and time to explore, while ensuring that our actions have tangible impact in the shorter term?
It soon became clear through time in conversation that there were two clear yet interconnecting focuses of the group: community-led decision-making, and storytelling + narrative-building. We started organising around two questions:
How might we (as climate, migration and racial justice organisations) collectively shape the narrative around climate migration so that justice is centred in our approach?
How might we (as climate, migration and racial justice organisations) collectively develop community-led approaches to climate migration and adaptation so that justice is centred in our approach?
A strong feeling across both questions was the need to root both narratives and actions in people’s everyday lives, avoiding jargon - making things rooted in human experience. For people embedded deeply in justice-based work, this real-world approach sometimes gets lost amongst the systemic analyses - and we need to be careful to speak about these issues in ways that feel as real and relatable as they are.
One participant said, ‘We can cognitively craft narratives but how do we reach people’s hearts?’ In Minnesota we were seeing people activated led by a deep sense of what’s wrong - how might we sustain this activation in the longer term? Strong, caring communities are sometimes activated by extreme events like Covid or anti-ICE raids, but how do we activate it before things become extreme? How do we activate latent care as a normal day to day way of looking out for each other? How do we build narratives that lift up people’s lived experience, in a way that is about care not using an identity to further an agenda?
These questions led us deeper into collaborative organising around:
Approaches that are rooted in human experience (connecting with people’s hearts and minds, rather than corporate/organisational speak);
Activating strong, connected, caring communities — what are the ingredients to activate latent care before urgent crisis;
Building up the skills to have courageous conversations whilst looking after ourselves — upskilling with care and intention for ourselves and each other;
Centring people’s lived experience in community-led, non-extractive ways to challenge anti-migrant narratives;
Solidarity framing — designing anti-oppression work that both understands how multiple injustices are intertwined, and brings people together;
What can we learn from the joint exploration of regenerative and decolonial frameworks.
In part two of this reflective blog that we’ll share in the coming days, we’ll talk more about what emerged, where we got to and what next. Stay tuned, friends.
Part 2: From "how might we" to "how will we"
We shared reflections on arriving into this peer learning programme, in part 1 of this blog, by naming our conditions, and what that meant for how we responded. That first blog ended with sharing the ways in which our collaborative organising coalesced around:
Approaches that are rooted in human experience (connecting with people’s hearts and minds, rather than corporate/organisational speak);
Activating strong, connected, caring communities — what are the ingredients to activate latent care before urgent crisis;
Building up the skills to have courageous conversations whilst looking after ourselves — upskilling with care and intention for ourselves and each other;
Centring people’s lived experience in community-led, non-extractive ways to challenge anti-migrant narratives;
Solidarity framing — designing anti-oppression work that both understands how multiple injustices are intertwined, and brings people together;
What can we learn from the joint exploration of regenerative and decolonial frameworks.
What emerged
As we moved our energies from ‘how might we’ to ‘how will we’, we started to imagine specific, concrete ideas for collaboration that brought together climate and migrant justice. The investment in relationships and connection-building early on was already starting to come to fruition, and several potential collaborations were already brewing.
Early in the programme, two participants recognised a significant overlap between their respective networks. Culture for Climate Scotland works with arts and culture organisations on climate justice, while City of Sanctuary UK’s Sanctuary in the Arts network supports arts organisations to engage with migrant rights.
Together, they explored how arts organisations could be brought into conversations about both climate justice and migrant justice, helping each sector recognise the importance of the other. This led to the development of a Refugee Week event that brings arts and cultural organisations together to explore the links between these issues, rather than treating them separately, and to encourage collaboration and cross-pollination. You can find out more about the event and register to attend online here.
An exchange also kicked off between Hope for the Future and WEN’s Climate Sisters over the course of the programme, working together to amplify voices of racialised communities using a decolonial feminist lens, and building capacity for policy discourse.
Several members of the peer learning journey were all based in the North of England, so towards the end of our time together the idea emerged of taking some of our peer networking approaches into a more place-based focus. From this idea, the Climate Migration North Circle is taking shape. On the other side of England, the Bristol Nature Partnership focused on climate migration for their Green Mingle this month, with collaborations with the local City of Sanctuary group.
There was also talk of Cooperation Sheffield testing and feeding back on a grassroots deliberative democracy / people’s assembly toolkit being developed by Hope for the Future, as well as the emergence of Riverkin Collective CIC. Altogether, a lot of activity - not all of it will continue, but some of it we hope will plant roots deep enough to be sustained.
Where did we get to and what comes next
There was a real move away from trying to articulate and intellectualise, towards being able to embody, regulate and move towards action. While many started the programme in a state of overwhelm, looking for a quick fix to an insurmountably complex problem, we left with recognition that we have to do this work differently if we want the outcomes to be different. We have to take the time to understand perspectives from different parts of the system, and our own sectors, if we want to really centre justice in our work. We have to invest in reflective practice and learning, so we can make the connections necessary to break out of siloed, panicked thinking and towards solutions that enable us to think in abundance.
None of this is easy. The individuals who were on the programme now have to commit to the practice of making time for these connections to embed, and connecting this work with wider organisational planning for the future. It’s one thing for individuals to learn, but this is about culture change and organisational learning - so the next step is ongoing work to feed in knowledge and connections developed into this process to centre justice in organisational decision-making. This work takes not just personal capacity, but organisational capacity too.
We’re deeply grateful to each and every member of the cohort for stepping into this work -
Tay Malik at WeCanMake
Roisin Cavanagh at Friends of the Earth
Anisa Saleh at Wen (Women's Environmental Network)
Hannah Green at City of Sanctuary UK
Cyril Moyo at Hope for the Future
Sophie O’Connell at Green Alliance
Olya K-Mehri at Institute of Domestic Violence, Religion & Migration
Jo Petitt at Asylos
Eloise Smith-Foster at Cooperation Sheffield
Amy Lightfoot at Greener and Cleaner
Sarah O’Hare at Culture for Climate Scotland
Anna Ralph at Bristol Climate & Nature Partnership
It also takes funders to invest in collaborations that take time, and to invest in communities like the one we were able to temporarily build thanks to Paul Hamlyn Foundation Ideas & Pioneers Fund.
In order to do that, the group was clear on some things that need to be composted to make way - not just for funders, but for our sectors as a whole. A sense of urgency that does not serve the complexity of the challenges we face. Siloed working that leads to burnout and closed thinking. And most of all, the idea that climate justice, migrant justice and racial justice can exist separately without recognising they depend on each other.
