An update from ClimArts: what’s next & changing 📣

Thank you for being an active member of our ClimArts community.

We wanted to share a quick but important update with you regarding our organisation’s journey. ClimArts is entering a new chapter that we’re very excited about, and we want to bring you along with us.

As a cherished member of our community, we want to share with you the reasoning behind our shift and how it will better serve our vision moving forward. 

✨But first: We’ve accomplished a lot together!

Over the last three years, since we launched at the London Design Festival in 2022, we have directly enabled 150 creatives and experts through our programs. 

We co-created and produced four documentaries (available to watch on our YouTube channel) that have had a collective reach of 15,000 audience members. 

We are slated to complete a community project in Oxford, England together with the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University and have been nurturing half a dozen relationships with potential collaborators. 

All this work has prepared the soil for our next chapter, which necessitates a slightly different approach while staying true to our vision: "To ignite climate action through art, making solutions and insights feel personal and tangible."

✨Next chapter: Growing from strong foundations!

Our premise remains the same: art and science are two different ways of knowing, and bringing them together is vitally important for making sense of complex problems and approaching problem-solving—particularly climate change. 

We cannot and should not do it alone! 

We need to join forces with others (think tanks, climate organisations, academic institutions, government) to achieve scale and create meaningful impact.

✨The reality: Resources 

We also need to share candidly that it has become impossible to continue running as an all-volunteer team in an external environment that has made funding efforts for climate work disproportionate to the resources we invest. 

We had to work much harder to recruit our last set of artists for the learning lab, as artists are hesitating to commit resources to enter climate work while we are unable to offer these programs for free. This difficult reality—for both us and you—has forced us to make the decision to shut down our learning labs.

We’re actively seeking specific funding to build an asynchronous signature set of modules for climate communicators at large, but we will only be able to activate this if and when funding and other resources permit.

✨A new direction: Project-based collaboration

Moving forward, we’ll work exclusively on a project-based model and collaborate strategically with climate organisations, academics, community leaders, and others to create change—whether at the local community level or large-scale change that informs policy. 

We will offer storytelling, workshops, facilitation, and project management to our collaborators within a project framework and will continue to include you as project needs dictate. This also means that when we do reach out to you, we will be able to offer you a fee for your work, and should you agree to work on a project, it can potentially add to your portfolio of climate work.

We remain somewhat agnostic to areas of work within climate change. This means that a project involving food systems is as interesting to us as one focused on heatwaves or migration.

✨What happens next

We will spend the month of September working on our new website and preparing for this pivot. 

This includes spending time answering any questions you might have. You’re welcome to reply to this email with your questions about this organisational shift. We understand and acknowledge that this transition may be difficult for some of you. 

The team structure will be an ensemble of individual contributors, each bringing different and unique skillsets and holding responsibility for at least one organisational/operational activity.

✨Important: Platform changes

We will have to sunset Slack as of September 8th. 

This means that you will no longer have access, including session recordings, forums, and community discussions, as of September 8th. 

We know this may be disappointing, and we're deeply grateful for the energy, care, and creativity you brought to the space.

✨ Stay connected with us

We’re not going anywhere but rather being intentional about participating in the climate conversation through the voices of experts and artists. 

You will receive a newsletter from us starting October 2025 about our next chapter.

Please do stay in touch and connect:

👉 Reply here or email us at info@climarts.org
👉 Stay in touch by signing up to our newsletter!

Thank you again for being part of this journey.