About My Climate Story

My Climate Story is a public research project that encourages participants to consider global climate change on a personal scale, initiated and supported by the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH) at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

The project’s instructional videos, live workshops, and storybank aim to put climate literacy tools in teachers’ hands and to transform Philadelphians’ understanding of climate as a problem of techno-science into a matter of concern for all peoples. My Climate Story recognizes climate literacy as essential to the health of democratic society and works to democratize who can talk about climate change.

In workshops for aspiring storytellers from the sixth grade on up, My Climate Story has generated hundreds of accounts of how Philadelphians are experiencing climate change–and how those changes are making us feel. Climate stories from the workshops are, with author permission, included in My Climate Story’s public storybank, a resource for exploring how diverse individuals are making meaning of changes more typically measured in quantitative measures of atmospheric CO2 or sea levels and their rates of change. Workshop groups receive all submitted stories as a collection for their further development.

My Climate Story started as a public storytelling and story-sharing campaign designed to document how members of Penn’s community were experiencing climate change. Our commitment to getting people of diverse ages and backgrounds to talk about climate change has since expanded to become a series of interactive, customized workshops for climate storytellers ranging from sixth grade to university professors, creating climate conversations and guiding participants to recognize how local climate impacts are affecting their lives in the here and now–and shaping their life stories. 

My Climate Story trains individuals to become workshop facilitators in their local community. All workshops are customized and offered free of cost. Contact us if you are interested in learning more!