What does it take to align people with different worldviews, backgrounds, and lived experiences to create real momentum on climate action? That was the focus of our latest Let’s Talk Leadership event, where we were joined by three experienced and deeply thoughtful speakers:
- Pong Leung (Sustainability Advisor, Travesia Partners)
- Katie Harper (Advisor, Talk Climate to Me)
- Matt McCulloch (Head of Decarbonization and Energy Transition, Norda Stelo)
We came together to explore how we can build stronger alliances across differences to meet the moment with both urgency and care.
If you missed the event and want to watch the recording it can be found here.
Bridging Perspectives to Advance Climate Action
Pong opened by sharing his experience bringing together unlikely collaborators, including those from industry, government, Indigenous communities, and civil society, through initiatives such as the Energy Futures Lab.
He emphasized the importance of building trust to support effective collaboration. “When we got together, we didn’t jump into doing, because of course we don’t know each other,” Pong said, reflecting on the early days of convening leaders from diverse backgrounds at the Energy Futures Lab.
“Allyship isn’t about forcing everyone into the same room to work on something they don’t want to. It’s about making a generous invitation, and meeting people where they are,” Pong said. Pong introduced us to the tool known as The Spectrum of Allies and reminded us that we should not focus our energy on turning people with opposing views into allies.
Instead of trying to flip people entirely, he encouraged us to focus on nudging folks just one step forward along the spectrum of support and to recognize that even small shifts can build real momentum.
Why Talking About Climate Builds Allyship
When asked, “Why is talking about climate so important to building allyship?” Katie Harper from Talk Climate to Me laughed and answered, “The longer I’m around, it seems like community is always the answer.”
Talk Climate to Me is a fun, free, and unscary climate education experience for women and allies. Katie said the organization was created after the team noticed a gap in confidence between men and women when it came to talking about climate, even though women are generally more concerned about climate change.
She told us about the Spiral of Silence theory, which suggests that if we don’t hear people talking about a certain topic, we assume it’s not important. Katie added that we often don’t hear people talking about climate change for several reasons: a lack of confidence, the perception that you need to be a scientist to speak on the topic, and an overwhelming guilt that we can’t speak up unless we’re perfect.
Why does something like this matter? If we continue to stay silent about climate change, it’s not just those around us who miss the message. It’s also decision-makers and company leaders—people who “have high leverage to reshape systems.”
Katie’s main takeaway was that more people care about climate than you think. Her parting advice: “You don’t have to be an expert to talk climate, you just have to be willing to connect.”
Navigating Tension and Embracing Complexity for Climate Action
When Matt McCulloch from Norda Stelo was asked if he could recall a moment when climate action shifted from being viewed as a burden to an opportunity, he flipped the question. Instead, he offered a candid perspective from inside industry, describing how the narrative has changed over time from one of hope and innovation in the early 2000s to anxiety and cost today. “The perceived burden has grown,” he noted, “and that affects how people show up.”
Matt went on to say that the feeling of tension only seems to be growing, not just from dealing with the cost perspective, but also from how complex issues related to climate change are. But that shift also creates an opening. As Matt put it, recognizing complexity should go hand in hand with asking better questions, listening with curiosity across disciplines, and finding ways to demonstrate that we can grow our economy through climate solutions.
The technical aspects matter, but climate change is ultimately a people problem. And that means the path forward must include social change, collaboration, and a willingness to show up differently.
Takeaways from the Conversation
Each speaker brought unique wisdom, but several shared threads ran through the conversation:
- Pong reminded us that people are more likely to engage when they feel invited to participate in something meaningful to them; find a way to bring people together for a common purpose.
- Katie spoke to the importance of sparking conversations in your work, home, neighbourhood, kids’ school drop off, faith community, you name it. We need to know that we aren’t alone, and whether we see climate change as a health, environmental, cost, or other issue, we likely have some shared values that align.
- Matt challenged us to stay curious and commit to learning together. We might not all work on the same things, but there are likely commonalities in our systems, processes, maybe even equipment; can we leverage the pilots, trials, and learnings across sectors to move action forward with the urgency we need?
This conversation continued to circle around a key idea: people need to feel a sense of belonging and agency to get to work. To get there, we need to build genuine relationships as the foundation of our collaborations, meeting each other as humans first. Maybe we ought to share a meal and have a laugh, setting up a trusting basis for hard work ahead.
Thanks to everyone who joined us. Let’s keep the conversation—and the collaboration—going.
Tools & Frameworks Shared
To support deeper reflection and engagement, our speakers highlighted several helpful resources:
- Spectrum of Allies: For mapping different levels of support and strategizing engagement.
- Four Fields of Conversation: Otto Scharmer’s model to deepen dialogue from downloading to co-creating.
- Spiral of Silence: A look at why people stay silent even when they care and how to break the pattern.
- Perception Gap: Data showing that most people support climate action, even more than we think.
About the Speakers
Katie Harper
Advisor, Talk Climate to Me
Katie is an experienced facilitator and strategist, designing and delivering programs like Talk Climate to Me, an award-winning, cohort-based course and community that activates women as champions for climate action. Katie has worked on engaging people in climate action in the nonprofit and corporate sectors for 15 years and holds an MSc. in freshwater ecology from McGill University.
Pong Leung
Sustainability Advisor, Travesia Partners
Pong is a Principal and Sustainability Advisor with Travesia Partners. Pong supports businesses, communities and other organizations to take action on climate, sustainability and other tough challenges through collaboration, organizational learning and strategy. As part of his work, he was a founding member and lead strategies and facilitator of the Energy Futures Lab.
Matt McCulloch
Head of Decarbonization and Energy Transition, Norda Stelo
Matt is the Head of Decarbonization and Energy Transition for Norda Stelo where he sits at the intersection of strategy and implementation to accelerate impact. He supports heavy industry, climate technologies, and battery supply chain actors in getting to net zero faster while maximizing their ESG performance and enabling the energy transition.
