Hosting a Climate Solutions Event? Use “The Dalles Protocol”

From the summer of 2018 through the summer of 2020 I had the privilege of working with the CO2 Foundation. This role demanded I come up to speed quickly on a variety of strategies to limit damaging impacts of climate change and accelerating extreme weather. Conferences, workshops, and webinars are among the most important tools for those working within the climate space. Over and over, I have seen some do this effectively; others miss the mark in making the most of people’s precious time together.

When we come together to learn, communicate, and act for the sake of the planet and human communities, events on climate solutions must move the ball forward. How do your events and those you’ve attended stack up?

The following climate solutions event protocol, named for the historically-important Oregon town where I live, can boost our chances of wise climate action.

“The site of what is now the city of The Dalles was a major Native American trading center for at least 10,000 years. The general area is one of the continent’s most significant archaeological regions. Lewis and Clark camped near Mill Creek in 1805… The name of the city comes from the French word dalle, meaning either “sluice,” “valley,” or “flagstone,” referring to the columnar basalt rocks carved by the river” [Wikipedia]. Deployment of The Dalles Protocol can function as a stepping stone to more effective climate action.

The categories

Each is expanded upon below with numerous action recommendations:

• #1 Think systems. Be relentlessly cross-sectoral.
• #2 Capture best thinking, then get the word out.
• #3 Build relationship networks.
• #4 Use cutting-edge pedagogy.
• #5 Be trauma-informed.
• #6 Stay humble and curious — always more to know.
• #7 Celebrate participants and event leaders.
• #8 Spread the word that process is important.

#1 Think systems. Be relentlessly cross-sectoral.

Climate change is the example par excellence, of global systems: Everything is connected. Creating artificial barriers and assuming things were not connected [“we can burn fossil fuels with no appreciable impact on humans”] is what got us into this mess. Conceptually, ensure that your event topics reflect the interdependent, cross-sectoral nature of climate change and its solutions. Even if your event targets a particular group — scientists, technologists, policymakers/policy-deployers, business people, climate activists, or any other specialized group, ensure you have enough representatives from other sectors (or people cross-trained) in the room to speak knowledgeably about how to reach and learn from the other sectors. Yes, this will likely demand you reach out and cultivate relationships with people you don’t yet know. All to the good!

“Think/Feel/Do” is a mnemonic to avoid the problem of “not knowing what we don’t know” or “knowing what we don’t know…then running into a brick wall when people we need are not in the room.” Attend to inclusion of each of these domains — think (scientists and technologists), feel (members of faith communities, resilience trainers, and climate activists attuned to social justice), and do (entrepreneurs, climate activists, educators, policy makers, government workers who deploy policy, journalists and media producers who can further get the word out, etc., etc.).

• Structure your sessions and keynotes to attend to cross-sectoral implications.
• Have a sign-up form asking participants to identify their cross-sectoral strengths.
• If your event leans scientific, include presentation spots for those whose authority arises from experience and and/or qualitative data.
• Publicize your event to a variety of constituencies, through a variety of means. Keep an outreach list so future event organizers can easily build on your success, vs. wasting time reinventing it from scratch/missing people.
• Open events with a land acknowledgement.
• Invite participants’ modes of participation to reflect alignment with climate goals: Encourage purchase of transportation carbon offsets; highlight vegetarian meal options; limit use of plastics.
• Offer scholarships (for paid events and/or for travel and lodging) to ensure people with valuable, wide-ranging demographic and socioeconomic backgrounds are present. Facilitate carpooling (a web app like this can help). For evening-only events, make childcare and food available so working parents can participate. If appropriate, offer translation services, which you may need because you’ve done such a good job with outreach, right?

#2 Capture best thinking, then get the word out.

You put mammoth chunks of time into planning your event; speakers and participants contribute much in their own time and best thinking. Amplify this impact. Time is short — not just for busy volunteers and professionals within the climate space, but for meaningful progress to be made on climate change. Not any more is there “always next year”!

• For in-person events, video all keynote speakers, and ideally all workshops. Edit and publish videos within one month, while interest is high — and inform participants, those on the wait list, and the public via your event webpage/social media that you will/have done so.
• Make online attendance possible or at least live-stream/video the event. This will minimize the carbon footprint of attendance, and allow people to participate otherwise limited by schedule or finances.
• For webinars, save the video and publish within 48 hours; similarly communicate to your audience that the content’s available.
• Set up a system to get slide decks and digital products from speakers at least the day-of. Make these slide decks and associated digital content available in a timely manner.
• Best practice for building global knowledge? No pay walls. Publish in perpetuity onto YouTube for Vimeo (for instance); have good tags to make videos findable; for longer videos, add time stamps into the description for each important topic.

#3 Build relationship networks.

People attend events to connect with other people and to make big jumps in learning. Because of our mirror neurons, being with other people fires us up in ways that simply reading a book or article cannot. Amplify that beneficial in-person effect.

• Make sharing contact info the default — people must opt-out. Publish a directory as soon as the event ends — password protected, if warranted. Consider including people in the directory who were wait-listed. During sign-up, ask enough about people’s interests to help them connect across numerous domains and interests; include this info in the directory.
• Build time for unstructured discussions and networking into your program schedule.

#4 Use cutting-edge pedagogy.

Pedagogy is “the study of teaching methods, including the aims of education and the ways in which such [learning] goals may be achieved” [1]. Unless you were trained recently as a teacher, you may be unaware of good teaching techniques, missed as a kid or college student. People learn best when allowed to think through, talk through, use knowledge, and experiment with reconfiguring information in different ways. Presenters who simply talk at participants miss out massively on opportunities to help participants remember, share, and create new knowledge. Shift from “sage on the stage” lectures to learner-centered sessions (“guide on the side”), which are actually better for communicating complicated content.

• Ask each presenter to consult with a professional secondary educator (aka teacher) to create a graphic organizer into which participants can write, reflect on, and/or categorize key ideas. (Here’s an example.)
• Demand that each workshop presenter include a breakout in the middle of each presentation over 20 minutes for 2- or 3-person reflection time of several minutes, allowing participants to reflect on, summarize, and/or identify their questions and next steps. (Here’s a breakout shared doc example.)
• Consider using additional group reflection and/or knowledge capture strategies… Relentlessly invite people’s resource ideas and best thinking.

#5 Be trauma-informed.

Significant portions of the population are survivors of childhood and adult trauma. In addition, working within the field of climate change exposes us to a clear understanding of current and future losses from extreme weather and climate change. The social-emotional and psycho-spiritual impacts of this trauma are important and impact how we work together. Neuroscience is clear: The trauma reaction inhibits wise and creative thinking. To enable people’s best, most constructive thinking/action, seek to make your event as trauma-informed as possible.

• Expect to dive into new materials and learn new things on the journey to becoming trauma-informed. For example: SAMHSA’s six key principles of a “Trauma-Informed Approach” relate to fostering experiences of 1) Safety; 2) Trustworthiness and transparency; 3) Peer support; 4) Collaboration and mutuality; 5) Empowerment, voice, and choice; and 6) Respecting cultural, historical, and gender considerations.
• If the idea of trauma-informed practices is new information, here is a checklist to get started.
• At the forefront of combining the still-emerging field of trauma-informed care with climate change is Dr. Bob Doppelt, who leads the International Transformational Resilience Coalition and is the author of numerous helpful books. Illustrating the protocol guidance above, he makes slide decks from prior events (many related to trauma-informed practices) available for free.

#6 Stay humble and curious — always more to know.

A super-effective tool for generating climate courage, plus speaking effectively with climate doubters/deniers: The humility involved in lifelong learning. We don’t need to know it all to know a lot. And, if we give people the chance to boost their knowledge by considering something new, in addition to what they (think they) already know, this route lets people save their dignity and change their minds.

• Check your and others’ emotional tone during the event: Are people hardening into arguing for positions or “othering” another group? This can be a symptom of emotional defensiveness and the impossible-to-fulfill desire for invulnerability, which works against the curiosity and creativity needed for solutions. Invite people to pause, take a few deep breaths and check in. Are there heavy feelings that need to be acknowledged before moving back into constructive conversation?
• Recognize that the (reasonable!) sense of urgency around climate change can incline people to oversimplify and hyper-focus on particular strategies. This response is driven by fight/flight/freeze coming from the sympathetic nervous system. We can helpfully compensate by asking “What else?” with calm curiosity when considering scope and type of climate solutions. [One example for your consideration: The strong focus on emissions reduction has limited widespread awareness of how legacy emissions and the “1,000 year ouch” necessitate large-scale, secure deployment of carbon removal from the atmosphere, per the IPCC’s 2018 Special Report.]

#7 Celebrate participants and event leaders.

At a volunteer management conference years ago, a speaker dropped a line that’s informed my working life since. She said, “Even paid employees are volunteers. Everyone volunteers to give their best.” People at the forefront of addressing climate change are here because we care. This takes courage, persistence, and continuing to confront distressing truths. This commitment is worth celebrating! People who attend events, and especially those who coordinate them, do so by giving part of their best selves. How can your event include fun, appreciation, celebration, perhaps even whimsy, to complement the ongoing seriousness of climate solutions pursuit? It’s both/and.

• Publicly acknowledge organizers, leaders, speakers, and support staff.
• Schedule time during the event for one or more free, fun events to which all participants are invited.
• On evaluations, ask participants to identify at least one thing the organizers and/or speakers did well.

#8 Spread the word that process is important.

The Dalles Protocol is designed to help event organizers shift focus to embracing process as much as content. Without strong process, good content is easily forgotten, or eclipsed by emotional and relational factors. The latter can hijack people’s attention away from important ideas…or reinforce good ideas when handled thoughtfully.

• When planning events, spend as much time considering and crafting process (experiences) as the content.
• Use the terms “process” and “content” until everyone is familiar to the point of frustration with this complementary binary.
• On your event webpage and documents, refer to The Dalles Protocol, and link to this page when possible: “Event aligned with The Dalles Protocol” or “Event inspired by The Dalles Protocol.” Certainly you don’t need to hit every one of the recommendations above, but a spirited try means progress beyond the status quo.
• When you sign up for a climate event, ask if they are aware of and integrating ideas from The Dalles Protocol. Share a link to this page.
• If you attend an event that soars or sinks in various aspects of The Dalles Protocol, let the event organizers know. The sooner process knowledge percolates through the climate solutions community, the more effective our work will be. High stakes, anyone?
• Share that you are using The Dalles Protocol by listing your event here.
• Attended an event that did something well? Share your kudos here.

Have you encountered structural event challenges not addressed in the Protocol? What additions or tweaks would you recommend? In keeping with the protocol, if you find anything of value here, please let me know!

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