Creating Community Around Climate and Preparedness

And a survey for y’all

Hello all!

With the new year, I’ve been putting a lot of energy into how to evolve Cramming for the Apocalypse. I love writing the weekly newsletter as it keeps me reflecting and it seems you all enjoy it as well and will continue doing so for free. I also plan to increase the frequency of the podcast, also for free.

However, I’ve always envisioned this community being more than just a one-way channel. I also feel like there’s an opportunity to share resources and work together toward individual and community preparedness and to work together to take action for a better, more just, and healthier planet. With that, I would like to invite you all, my dear readers, to take this very quick (less than two-minute) survey that will help me to create exclusive content, resources, and opportunities for paid subscriptions.

I will give you a small preview of what I’m cooking up, though. I ask about it in the survey, but I’ve been working with Brekke Wagoner from the Sustainable Prepping YouTube Channel to create a series of resources to make disaster preparedness not so daunting. Stay tuned for that and make sure to let me know what else you’re interested in receiving resources on in the survey.

Thank you so much for being here! I can’t wait to see how this community evolves.

Everything’s Better in Community 

With the initial plug of the survey out of the way, I want to go into a little more detail about why I’m moving in a direction of creating resources that are meant to bring people together as well as to create more resources. Content is great and writing is my way of processing the world. But it’s also a solitary process. Or rather, it can be. It involves many hours at a computer hammering out words onto a screen. But many of us–I assume it’s “many of us,” but honestly I’m mostly speaking for myself here–crave the connection with other people around the work in which we are immersed.

As a classic extrovert, I know that I crave connection with other people. And that’s something I realize goes back to my very early days. I reflected on this recently when my husband unearthed a bunch of old files that I had hanging around and in one of them was a print out of my StrengthsFinder “Signature Themes” from 2011. At the time, I was working at University of Maryland with students leading Alternative Break service-learning trips and I had them all take the quiz which is designed from an “asset-based approach” of what strengths you bring to the partnership.

My themes were: Empathy, Connectedness, Communication, Input, and Learner.

As I read through the themes, I realize that there probably is no need to re-take that quiz 13 years later because the descriptions feel spot-on. I’ll go into StrengthsFinder in a later post, but for this purpose, I’m honing in on the themes of Connectedness and Communication.

Here are excerpts from those sections.

Connectedness: 

“...Yes, we are individuals, responsible for our own judgments and in possession of our own free will, but nonetheless we are part of something larger. Some may call it the collective unconscious. Others may label it spirit or life force. But whatever your word of choice, you gain confidence from knowing we are not isolated from one another or from the earth and the life on it.” 

Communication: 

“You like to explain, to describe, to host, to speak in public, and to write. This is your communication theme at work. Ideas are a dry beginning. Events are static. You feel a need to bring them to life, to energize them, to make them exciting and vivid. And so you turn events into stories and practice telling them.”

Interestingly, there’s not much mention of other people in these theme descriptions. I suppose it is an individual's personality test, but that piece is striking for me because I think the connectedness I feel extends to benefitting from being around other people and learning from them. It’s not just about the responsibility I feel for the community, but it’s about the reciprocity of it all. It’s how I can learn from others’ perspectives. That is why I do the things I do that are described in the “communication” description. I organize events and communities of people because we grow and learn when we’re in community with other people.

It’s for that reason that I want this space to evolve to be that community. I’ve tried to encourage more engagement in the comments, but that’s not everyone’s jam and that’s okay. So I’m hoping the direction that I hope to take and what comes out of the survey can serve as a space for those of us exploring preparedness and climate action can do so together in community.

Thanks to my new obsession with drawing and watercoloring (which I had no idea was in me), I made this just for this post ;)

Thank you again for being here!

And of course, one last plug to TAKE THE SURVEY :)