Form a PAEAN Group

PAEAN is working towards growing a network of smaller, more local climate engaged groups. We will support those who are able to coordinate a group as well as individuals who want to find a group, either in their local area or online.

Suggested Format for Group Meetings

This is just a suggestion for holding a group session that brings together spiritual practice and activism while building collaboration and resilience as a community.

The coordinator (which can be a rotating position), invites members to take turns leading or holding different parts of the meeting:

  • Open the meeting, welcome, and guide a few minutes of silence, arriving, grounding.

  • A short invocation of spiritual protectors. Honor Nature & the Sacred web of life.

  • Guided meditation on compassion dedicated to a current area/event of suffering.

  • Support - Check-in - How are you doing? (few minutes each)
    Update on overall PAEAN focus - what’s happening
    Check-in to local climate issues - focusing on one area to support.

  • Action piece - planning an action. 

  • Schedule the next meeting and facilitators for the meeting. 

PAEAN Support for Groups Engaging in Direct Climate Action

PAEAN’s aim is to offer support to groups. This includes offering guidelines on how to prep for an action. We can supply flyers made by PAEAN and offer support for making signs, banners, and how to contact the local press.

We encourage individuals and small groups to take photos at actions to post to social media and to send back to PAEAN so we can amplify any actions taken. Our aim is to normalize taking to the streets to call on governments around the world to act on the climate and ecological emergencies.


Starting on the Streets: Touching the Earth Walks & Sitting for Survival

A good place to start is to do a meditation, with posters, outside of a local government building. For example, here are some ideas from a Dharma based climate group that organizes Sitting for Survival sessions in their local town. To add more pressure, another strategy is to sit outside banks or companies that underwrite the fossil fuel industry, while handing out leaflets to encourage divestment.

Another approach is to do “Touching the Earth” walking meditation on the streets, in a silent, single file line, perhaps ringing a meditation bell from time to time, with banners and flyers to give out drawing attention to the urgency needed. Meeting up regularly to do these actions is powerful. It’s also powerful and builds community to add an open mic for meditations, prayers, music, and speeches.

Further Ideas for Activism

Check out Awakening For Earth for a very simple action to help you ease into taking nonviolent direct action (NVDA).

And here are a few action toolkits to help get you started and NVDA training.

  • Utilize street theater, road blocking or road swarming, and other performative and disruptive actions like the Red Rebel Brigade

  • Post to social media and plan twitter/social media storms to demand that government and corporations take serious action on the climate emergency

  • Campaign for politicians committed to taking climate action

  • Hand out informative flyers

  • Create signs and banners about the climate emergency

  • Create petitions and draft bills at the town, state, and national level to help move the grid to renewable energy

  • Join seminars led by other climate groups

  • Join seminars led by indigenous people and organizations 

  • Raise awareness about dangerous banks and investors like JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, Blackrock, and some Vanguard portfolios, including local banks in your country or area. Encourage people to move money away from companies that deforest, pollute, or fund fossil fuel projects. Stop the Money Pipeline can support you with this.

  • Pressure colleges and universities to divest from fossil fuels. 

  • Pressure energy companies like Eversource, National Grid, and Enbridge to rapidly transition to renewables like solar, heat pumps, and geothermal.

  • Work with your local Municipal Light Plant. Municipal light plants are locally owned utilities and are all about local control. Residents can demand a transition to renewable sources of energy. 

  • Walking meditations / Sitting meditations. Sitting outside banks as an act of protest.

  • Pressure meteorologists, and media to cover the link between weather events and human-caused climate change