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.

Whether you’re developing newsletter content, creating social posts, or writing for a website, the messages, language, and imagery you use can make the difference between turning people away or inspiring them to act. In this lively, hands-on workshop, sustainability communications leader Kim Grob will teach you to create content that engages and persuades your audience. You’ll learn practical, easy-to-implement strategies—and practice them with your peers—so you can communicate your environmental and social initiatives in a way that moves people to donate, volunteer, or take other specific actions. Together with your fellow workshop participants, you’ll learn how to: • Communicate courageously — Move beyond data and science to create compelling, human content that stands out and gets results. Avoid common pitfalls like jargon, buzzwords, catastrophe messaging, politically polarizing language, and “stock sustainability” images. • Build credibility — Learn to balance emotional and rational appeals to tell stories that are authentic, human, emotional, and supported by the right data and details. Discover story frameworks that can be put into practice right away. • Spark collective action — Uncover proven strategies for inspiring audiences to act, such as audience-centric messaging, realistically optimistic message frames, and specific, concrete calls to action. In our facilitated discussion, you won’t just learn tactics, you’ll work together to put them into practice. Working in teams and independently, you’ll learn and practice achievable and effective communications tactics through: • Inspiring and illustrative case studies—see how brands like Patagonia, Tillamook, Reformation, Oatly, and others use storytelling, language, and imagery to create authentic and compelling sustainability content. • Concrete before-and-after examples—see messaging makeovers that take content from vague to clear, from complex to simple, and from jargon to human. • Large-group collabroation—work together to surface common communications challenges, identify jargon and propose alternatives, detect politically polarizing messages, and reframe content that catastrophizes. • Small-group writing exercise—identify problematic language in a passage and rewrite it using the strategies we’ve learned. We’ll end the workshop by sharing our rewrites and discussing key insights. You’ll leave with a checklist of strategies and a compilation of resources that will enable you to continue practicing and learning for months and years to come. Equipped with this new knowledge—and the practical tactics to put it to use—you’ll be prepared to create more relevant, targeted, and effective sustainability content, so you can rally more people around your causes. Who should attend? • Corporate sustainability leaders who are responsible for reviewing and approving internal and external communications • University researchers and leaders who need to communicate their work and get buy-in from policymakers, funders, and the public • Sustainability leaders working at all levels of local, state, and national government, who need to translate public policy into public action • Nonprofit leaders who need messaging strategies and frameworks to communicate with donors, partners, policymakers, and the public at large.

This one-day Carbon Finance Bootcamp for sustainability professionals is a high-impact, time-efficient intensive designed to clarify how capital actually moves into climate solutions, and how to engage with it effectively across roles and sectors. The program combines expert-led education sessions, real-world case studies, and interactive exercises to build practical fluency in core topics such as carbon markets, climate risk, blended finance, and investment decision-making. Participants leave with improved knowledge and language to advance climate goals and help draw more capital to effective climate solutions. Tailored for busy practitioners, the bootcamp delivers the essential language, frameworks, and insights needed to bridge the gap between climate ambition and capital allocation, all within a single, focused day. This course is for sustainability professionals of all kinds. Educators. Graduate and professional students.