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The Garrison Institute is playing a key role in a growing climate change network by serving as convener and supporter of a series of strategic explorations on the ways forward in shifting the dynamics of global action on climate change.

Garrison Institute board member Betsy Taylor, former president of the Center for a New American Dream, helped organize a U.S. Leadership Retreat on Climate Change held at the Garrison Institute in April, 2007. Aided by leadership coach and facilitator Robert Gass, thirty nationally and globally prominent leaders from the environmental NGO, government and business sectors gathered here to discuss frameworks to support new forms of cooperative, multi-sector action on climate change.

In this intensive retreat setting, participants stepped back from the public discourse of policy stances and spoke in more personal terms of competition between various sectors hampering their efforts in the past, and their deep desire to work cooperatively for the benefit of the environment. Participants articulated the emergence of moral imperatives on climate change, and worked together on a written Call to Action, which diverse key individuals and groups have joined. Such new framing and reexamined thinking supports new forms of action on climate change and may help find innovative solutions. Among the concrete goals participants discussed was reversing the upward trend in greenhouse gas emissions within the next ten years while mobilizing society for an unprecedented private/public partnership to build a green economy that provides greater opportunity and prosperity for all. This effort led to the creation of a new organization focused on climate change, 1Sky (www.1sky.org).

By facilitating leadership and offering a venue and a communications hub, the Garrison Institute supports social change leaders in their search for transformative action in the world. We are nurturing this network by offering leaders from diverse sectors the chance to slow down and reflect, examine the gap between what we are actually achieving on climate change and what remains to be done, and think creatively and synergistically about solutions that transcend current political realities. Their work together has just begun, and we are actively helping them keep the spirit of collaboration flowing, and to nurture new ideas as they emerge.