Billion Minds Institute Projects

Billion Minds Institute accelerates and assists efforts that take seriously the social, psychological, and emotional i) impacts and damage of climate and environmental challenges, ii) building blocks of transformative responses to those challenges.  Social and emotional strengths are essential foundations for humanely navigating the Anthropocene.

Billion Minds Institute  helps others:

1. design and fill in needed capabilities to build the social climates and collective efficacy and impact needed to steward the earth's climate.  
2. scale those capabilities in ways that advance climate mitigation, adaptation, and environmental sustainability. 
3. connect helping, or “anchor,” institutions (eg universities, health systems, government, corporate sector, philanthropy, NGOs) to equip and super-size that work, and 
4. develop the policies that grow all the above.  

Recent efforts include:

Conceiving, funding, and sponsoring a US National Academy of Sciences Workshop to explore prospects and opportunities to bend the Human Sciences towards the purpose of empowering community led action.   

Advancing participatory and deliberative decisionmaking methods and help bolster the potential of these methods to strengthen and mutually reinforce social trust, ties, agency, and community mental health.  This includes collaboration with Iswe in its development of accessible modes of deliberative decision-making in the lead-up to COP30 and other efforts to shift to more public problem-solving about multiple pressing issues also beyond climate change. Those include an initiative by The Assembly Project (TAP) to routinely incorporate such methods as a part of New York City politics and policymaking.

Designing and socializing new policy directions with a range of efforts underway, including in collaboration with ICLEI, NYU GSPH, Wellesley Institute and the International Society for Urban Health to i) incorporate psychological resilience within multiple channels of climate resilience finance, and ii) to design consensus technical guidance for municipal governments globally to grow urban climate adaptation planning in these directions.  

Initiating and resourcing the Care of People x Planet (COP²) global network and its recently completed Roadmap for Care and Change.  The Roadmap, announced at COP27 and completed by COP28 in coordination with the UNFCCC Champions Team, lays out a strategy for integrating psychological resilience within global efforts to make 4 billion people more climate resilient.  BMI also organize, launch, and accelerate the global spread of that strategy starting by creating an ambitious set of it's Early Adopter initiatives.  

Supporting community anchors to innovate collective approaches to psychological resilience.  Friendship Bench-Brooklyn (FB-BK) will connect BMI, Friendship Bench, and Maimonides Health's Population Health Department to plan and then implement Brooklyn-wide adoption of the Friendship Bench model of community-led mental health care and promotion across this health system's primary care network and its partner Brooklyn Communities Collaborative.  This will also demonstrate how such overdue innovation in community mental health, especially in ways that bolster collective agency and efficacy, can be mainstreamed within established health system funding and infrastructure. 

Leading youth-focused climate psychological research and resilience initiatives by funding and supporting a groundbreaking US-wide youth survey recently published by PNAS examining the psychological impacts of climate change, which revealed important correlations between climate experiences, emotional responses, and educational opportunities. Building on these insights, BMI has developed collaborative frameworks to strengthen psychological resilience among climate-engaged youth, establishing support networks and implementing sustainable systems that address both the emotional dimensions of climate awareness and foster effective youth climate leadership capacities.