What We Do
Billion Minds Institute (BMI) accelerates and supports work that takes seriously the social, psychological, and emotional dimensions of climate and environmental change—both their impacts and the foundational capacities needed for transformative response. Social and emotional strengths are essential to navigating the Anthropocene with humanity and care.
BMI helps others:
Build the social capabilities and collective efficacy needed to steward the planet’s climate.
Scale those capacities across climate mitigation, adaptation, and sustainability efforts.
Connect “anchor” institutions—universities, health systems, governments, corporations, philanthropies, and NGOs—to extend and strengthen this work.
Shape policies that embed and sustain these capabilities over time.
Recent Efforts
Human Sciences and Action: Co to develop participatory and deliberative methods to strengthen social trust, agency, and community mental health. Collaborations include work with Iswe in developing accessible formats for global use ahead of COP30, and with The Assembly Project (TAP) to normalize such approaches in New York City policymaking.
Deliberative Decision-Making: Collaborating on ways psychological resilience adds value and efficacy across a variety of social infrastructure-based communal problem-solving, ranging from restorative justice practice, to conflict mediation services, to formal participatory policy forums. For example, we are working with a CBO in New York City, Community Mediation Services, to layer trauma-informed counseling skills with youth conflict mediators in public housing, and advising how models of citizens' assemblies and similar participatory and deliberative methods can bolster their multi-solver potential to strengthen and be strengthened by communal social trust, agency, and mental health.
Policy Design for Resilience: Partnering with ICLEI and working with the World Bank to advance ways to operationally and financially integrate psychological resilience into climate responses in highly-impacted areas, including SIDS and cities.
Care of People x Planet (COP²): Initiated and resourced this global network and authored its Roadmap for Care and Change—announced at COP27 and completed by COP28 with the UNFCCC Champions Team. The plan outlines a path to make 4 billion people more climate-resilient, with Early Adopter initiatives now advancing the design and launch of a Global Resilience Observatory.
Community Anchors for Mental Health: Supported the Friendship Bench–Brooklyn program, connecting BMI, Friendship Bench, and Maimonides Health to embed community-led mental health care across Brooklyn’s primary care network. This project demonstrates how collective, neighborhood originating, forms of psychological resilience can become a mainstream ballast of health system design and funding.
Youth Climate Resilience: Funded and supported a landmark US study, published in PNAS, on youth experiences of climate anxiety and opportunity. Building on these insights, BMI is developing modes of open source technical support to youth led climate and mental health organizations globally in collaboration with the UN Youth Office.