Celebrate your achievements

A big part of 52 Climate Actions is making personal commitments to real actions, like insulating your house, ditching your car, creating a compost heap, or defending your home against flooding.

Completing any of these commitments is a cause for celebration. Get your friends, family and work colleagues round to admire what you've achieved, share food and drink, and encourage them to do the same. You could even cut a ribbon, unveil a plaque, or crack open a bottle of champagne to celebrate.

Alternatively, you could get your visitors to both help you complete your action and celebrate it in a single visit, especially if it’s something of community benefit like a climate risk assessment, planting an orchard, or setting up a local climate group.

Host a community work day

There are many ways to organise a fun community work day. One example is a 'permablitz'. This involves a group of people meeting up for the day to:

• Typically create or develop a community or household edible, wildlife-friendly garden, according to a permaculture design. Permablitzes can also involve sustainable non-food growing projects. For example, making compost toilets or retro-fits of existing homes, growing fibre for clothes or planting for fuel.
• Learn about permaculture and gardening through skills shares and mini-workshops
• Build community networks
• Share a delicious lunch
• and have lots of fun

Permablitzes spread through a network of reciprocity. Once you have been to a few permablitzes you can have one for your own garden, community space, allotment etc. Including drinks and a barbeque is a good way to give everyone a good time!

Get together to swap clothes, surplus, ideas and laughter

Swishing works like a giant clothes swap: you bring items you no longer wear and exchange them for something new-to-you. It's a fun and social way of encouraging people to make the most of what they’ve got hanging in their wardrobe, sitting in a drawer or packed away in a box. While our pockets benefit from swishing, so do our bins.

Textiles make up around 3% of the average household bin in the UK. In West London alone almost 9,000 tonnes of textiles end up as waste. If we reuse or recycle these items instead we could save a whopping 39 million tonnes of carbon! Swishing events can be held almost anywhere, be it at home with your friends, at your office with your co-workers or at a community hall for anyone to attend.

Have a stay-cation

A staycation, or holistay, is a period in which an individual or family stays home and participates in leisure activities nearby. Common activities include use of the backyard pool, visits to local parks and museums, and attendance at local festivals and amusement parks. Some staycationers also like to follow rules, such as setting a start and end date, planning ahead, and avoiding routine, with the goal of creating the feel of a traditional vacation.

A closely related concept is nearcation, which is taking a vacation to a location relatively close to home. Staycations are less costly than a vacation involving traveling, avoid the stress associated with travel, bring economic benefit to local businesses, and greatly reduce the carbon emissions associated with travel.

Combine serious and fun events

Community events focussed on climate change like speaker talks, project visits, film showings, climate risk assessments, skill shares or adult education classes are a great ways to raise people's awareness and get them talking. But they can also be quite serious and, depending on the tone and subject, even a bit depressing. A good way to raise both attendance levels and the mood is to follow them with a fun event like a meal, dance or concert. These allow people to unwind, relax, reflect on what they've heard, build social bonds, and perhaps commit to work together.

Celebrate the changing seasons

Our relationship with nature and the cycle of the seasons has long been celebrated by communities in every country. Yet today we are no longer bound by harvest and husbandry to the cycle of the seasons, nor are calendars marked with festivals and celebrations that express connection with nature.

The changing seasons are still part of our lives, language and culture. Seasonality is experienced in all places, rural and urban alike, binding us to nature and the passing of time. May Day, Apple Day or Harvest Festivals still provide engaging and enjoyable ways to connect with landscapes and help enhance a distinctive sense of identity within local communities.

Our culture is bristling with music, art, myths, poems, sayings, metaphors, all binding our feelings and thoughts to the weather and the seasons.

Attend a green festival

A food, music or community festival brings people together for fun, relaxation, socialising, eating, dancing and great music in the open air. Festivals can have a high carbon footprint due to traveling, power consumption, food and waste.

However, many festivals now have strong green policies to minimise their impact, and many specifically focus on green education and inspiration. A green festival is a great way to recharge your batteries, find like-minded folk, and get encouraged and re-inspired. Use this guide for making your festival experience greener.

Picture credits: 1) Hillary Ungson - Unsplash 2) Kelsey Chance - Unsplash 3) falco - Pixabay