The Greenfaith Story

In our launch, we entered into an active partnership with GreenFaith, a fellow grantee of the KR Foundation, involving extensive discussions, interviews, virtual workshops with the Living the Change team and their extended network of partner implementers. Our focus to start was to attune— to GreenFaith and several of their organizational partners in their program Living the Change, to understand how they were engaging with air travel with their stakeholders, professionally and personally. Based on these listening sessions, we created a set of personas and insights, and brought them to our Advisory Convening at The Exploratorium, where we dove into underlying conflicts, ambivalence, anxieties, and aspirations relating to air travel. Following the convening, we began sharing out the insights and early prototypes of our Guiding Principles with the GreenFaith team.

We began our pilot with extending an invitation to all GreenFaith Living the Change organizational partners, led by Fletcher Brown and Kristin Barker, One Earth Sangha and Living the Change co-director. Based on responses, we submitted a survey to all interested partners, with a focus on understanding their engagement and constituency needs, the nature of their work, time constraints, and interest in air travel as a focus of behavioral change. We were fortunate to partner with the interactive agency SweetRush, who kindly donated their time to support our design process —which we dubbed as our Design Lab—as well as participating in the Grounding in Faith pilot and debriefing afterwards.

We followed a process to help us towards crafting a pilot campaign, and test out our Guiding Principles in a live case study. This included:

• Planning sessions with GreenFaith.
• Interviews with Living the Change (LtC) partners.
• Design and implementation of initial survey.
• Invitation to LtC partners to participate in a Design Lab for an air travel pilot program.
• Convening a Design Lab, a 3-hour interactive virtual session facilitated by Renée Lertzman and Gwen Gordon.
• Follow-up interviews and surveys to all participants.
• Planning meetings with PIO team and GreenFaith (Fletcher and Kristin Barker).
• Creative sessions with SweetRush and PIO team.
• Producing prototype of the pilot workshop—Grounding in Faith.
• Convening an alignment session with all participating partners to review prototype plans, solicit feedback and input.
• Submit follow-up survey to participating partners.

We launched our pilot with GreenFaith, designed to be integrated into their major global annual behavior change campaign, Living the Change. We called our pilot program Grounding in Faith named by our wonderful partner and collaborator and now advisor, Kristin Barker of One Earth Sangha and then co-director of Living the Change. We applied Project InsideOut methods, expert advising, and Guiding Principles.

The pilot was a highly intentional suite of offerings centered around a live, virtual workshop, offered three times across three time zones, facilitated by Renée Lertzman. In addition to the workshop, we produced in close collaboration with GreenFaith and their LtC partners a collection of resources, tools, and storytelling materials.

It was important to create a warm and attuned welcome and initiation into the campaign, given the emotional charge surrounding air travel practices. The home for the pilot was graciously provided by GreenFaith and designed and built by their own internal web team—Afzal (Az) Mohammad and Chris Hurst. This webpage was the result of a series of planning sessions and quick calls with our teams, and a true collaboration. We paid close attention to the messaging, tone, and a guiding user experience. This became the Grounding in Faith HQ.

Every aspect of the pilot, including the webpage, was intentional, thought-out and informed by our Guiding Principles and PIO method. This ranged from the welcome message on the homepage, the navigation and offering of FAQs, to the emails people received before and after participating—as well as a suite of guides. We wanted people to feel invited, welcomed, and guided along the way—especially when it comes to a charged topic like air travel. We ensured attuned and invitational language was consistent throughout every touchpoint with campaign participants.

TOOLS USED

Pre-Workshop Survey
An example of a pre-worshop reflection survey that can be adapted to your needs.
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Post-Workshop Reflections Survey
An example of a post-worshop reflection survey created with PIO partner GreenFaith that can be adapted to your needs.
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As part of the PIO approach, we piloted a story-pipeline process which we called Stories from the Ground, featuring first-person narratives from faith leaders and participants about their experiences with shifting their air travel practices. These stories, and all of our communications and messaging, modeled our Guiding Principle of Reveal, by including what is challenging, complicated, and hard, as well as the aspirational and more positive aspects of making difficult behavioral changes. These stories were hands-down one of the most popular and compelling parts of the campaign. The stories were created based on a discussion guide designed by Renée Lertzman.

TOOL USED

A Playbook for Real Storytelling
Being a storyteller isn’t just about being positive. This playbook offers guidance for becoming a compassionate truth-teller in our campaign work.
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Every person who signed up for our program was put into a pipeline to receive communications and surveys pre- and post-workshop. We also sent out a total of thirteen emails before and after the workshop, with links to our resources and guides. These emails—applying Attune, Reveal, Convene, Equip and Sustain—were designed to check in, provide a cadence of connection, and speak to certain challenges that may arise, such as planning family trips or how to have difficult air conversations with friends, family, co-workers, bosses, and the like.

The heart of the pilot was a 2-hour interactive workshop format designed by Renee Lertzman and collaborator Gwen Gordon. It led people into a journey that touched on the known components that inform behavioral change, in a condensed format: connection, trust, awareness, exploring ambivalence, exploring anxieties, sharing intentions with each other, discussing what most supports us in making changes, and the willingness to be vulnerable. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive and most people found the content and format unexpected, refreshing, and impactful. See excerpts from our surveys below.

During the workshop, many people had profound experiences awakening their intentions to reduce air travel, surfacing their anxieties and ambivalence, and motivating them to make lasting changes in their lives. Per the PIO approach—and our Guiding Principle of Sustain—we seek to go beyond the pledge or intention-setting, and sustain ongoing engagement. We recognize how intense revelations or intentions in workshops or events often dissipate. We also know that simple convening can rapidly accelerate our capacities to make change. However, given the nature of a short-term pilot, we had limitations in how we could offer longer-term engagement. Our solution was to create Grounding Sessions—a series of online sessions convened by Renée, open to any workshop participants, with the only agenda of sharing our experiences and checking in.

Resources for specific components from the Pilot program include:

• A workshop template
• Workshop facilitators guide
• A conversation guide
• A storytelling guide
• Email templates
• Process worksheets
• A website layout template
• Survey template(s)
• Discussion guides