Projects

We can make it so people trip over ways to add their collective impact to everything from transforming local economies and energy use, steering local development on sustainable paths, and securing foundations for participatory, wellbeing-focused, communities.  We can accelerate people-led improvement through readily available tools, science, and organizational aids, and by sharing skills and partners to effectively come together as equity and caring-driven communities. 

The usual slow walk towards progress on deep divisions and inequities, health and economic disparities, chronic community traumas, and disparate exposure to environmental harms, is untenable and unacceptable. This is true not only for reasons of justice and fairness but because full inclusion, access to core public goods, and social and emotional thriving, are essential building blocks for communities to humanely navigate the Anthropocene.

Billion Minds was created to therefore help:

1. work with others to design and fill in the playbook for a ground-game, naming its key working parts, aims, and measurable impacts 
2. scale-up that playbook with results for climate mitigation, adaptation, environmental sustainability, and social strengthening and wellbeing. 
3. connect helping, or “anchor,” institutions (universities, health systems, government, corporate sector, philanthropy) to equip and super-size that work, and 
4. develop the policies that grow all the above.  

We are just beginning. To start, Billion Minds will be collaborating with the global-scaled learning platform for health improvement, Project ECHO, universities, and the community action non-profit Hester Street, to support grassroots organizations to magnify their reach and effectiveness.  Together, we hope to advance a social climate roadmap and test a learning collaborative format to apply it.

Billion Minds also convened and facilitates the national Social Climate Leadership Group.  Among its initial areas of focus is to identify needs and opportunities to empower youth with respect to the social and emotional impacts of climate change. We also aid efforts to translate into policy best practices that put tools for emotional wellbeing in people’s hands with the Mental Health for All Lab at Harvard Medical School.  Billion Minds recently began collaborating with Climate Cares, with the Institute of Global Health Innovation and the Grantham Institute, Imperial College London, on how to globally connect learning around community-led resilience.  And it is exploring with other groups such as Thriving Earth Exchange and Anthropocene Alliance how to scale open-access to human and improvement science for grassroots community coalitions to escalate their impact, learning, and reach as implementers.