This two-day, in-person institute at Colorado State University in Denver will introduce faculty and teaching staff to an experiential learning approach to incorporate social action campaigns into either a semester-long course or co-curricular workshop series. This Institute is a pre-conference to the 3rd Annual National Sustainability Society’s (NSS) Conference. The Colorado '26 Institute will run from Saturday, August 15th, 9 am-4:30 pm, and Sunday, August 16th, 9 am-3:30 pm; lunch will be covered during the Institute. To cover hosting costs, the NSS will charge $60 for the 2-day Institute, if you also register for the conference. If you choose to only attend the Institute, NSS will charge $100. You are encouraged to register for the NSS conference! The NSS call for contributions is open now; non-presenting attendees are also welcome to register and attend. In this transformative experiential learning model, students develop and launch a social action campaign of their choosing during the semester the course is taught. The student campaigns seek to change a rule, regulation, norm, or practice of an institution, whether on campus or in the community. While not all of the student campaigns are successful, many have been and those that haven’t succeeded have still taught valuable lessons to those who led them and those who were engaged in one form or another. Our long-term goal is to mainstream this model for teaching active democracy. The world needs more people who have developed their knowledge and skills in bringing about positive change through real world experience.

Why does the gap between climate knowledge and action persist, even among those most committed to change? This workshop proposes a radical answer: we're disrupting two climate systems simultaneously—Earth's ecological systems and our own human adaptive capacity—but we've only been working on one. Dr. Lisa Graumlich, climate scientist and Episcopal deacon, guides participants through an experiential exploration of the parallel crises disrupting both outer climate systems and inner human capacity. Through a combination of teaching, guided reflection, small group processing, and practical application, participants will: • Understand the three mechanistic parallels between Earth system disruption and burnout in sustainability professionals • Name and process the grief, exhaustion, and psychic numbing many carry in silence • Learn the five forces maintaining the consciousness-action gap (and how to counter them) • Practice integrating contemplative restoration with prophetic truth-telling • Develop concrete commitments for sustaining engagement over the long term This is not another lecture on climate solutions. It's a carefully designed space to address what sustainability work is costing us, to grieve collectively what we're losing, and to find practices that sustain action rooted in connection rather than depletion. Lisa Graumlich is a professor in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences and dean emerita of the College of the Environment at the University of Washington. She has devoted her career to studying the causes and impacts of climate change, with a special focus on using paleoecological records such as tree-rings to understand the magnitude of human impacts. She is passionate about science communication, and she speaks frequently on climate change impacts and adaptation. She has testified on long-term climate variability before the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming and is the president of the American Geophysical Union as of January 1, 2023. Lisa served as the inaugural dean of the UW College of the Environment from 2010 to 2021.

Details forthcoming