Dear Friends,

In December of 2020, I took a leap of faith and began my work as Director of Youth and Young Adult Mobilization at Catholic Climate Covenant. A year and a half later, I’m taking another leap of faith as I embark on the next step in my life’s journey as Associate Director of Distributed Organizing with Discerning Deacons, a role I will begin in mid-August. 

I’m grateful every day for the opportunity to have worked on the issue of climate action at such a critical moment in our planetary history, and in the history of our church. During my time at the Covenant, the Church has launched both the Laudato Si’ Action Platform and the Synod on Synodality, two incredible efforts in grassroots listening, community organizing, and empowered action that together bring the Church closer to the wholeness that God dreams for it. As crucial as it is that such empowering efforts come from the top of our institutional church, I remind myself every day that I, too, am church, and that I do not need to wait for permission to create the kind of church community that listens, that amplifies, that stands on the side of the excluded and brokenhearted.  

From my first week at the Covenant, I endeavored to listen to my fellow young people and center their leadership in the work of youth and young adult mobilization. I did not want to just create something for my peers; I wanted my peers to have crucial hand in creating it. I’m proud of what we’ve created together. From our Ecospirituality Nights series spearheaded by young adult intern Desiré Findlay to our successful Young Adult Integral Ecology Retreat launched in partnership with the Archdiocese of Chicago; the young adult-led #CatholicSolidarityFast collaboration with Ignatian Solidarity Network in solidarity with youth hunger strikers, to the young adults whose voices we have featured on our blog and in webinars, I’ve been blessed to be a part of such good and holy work in my time at the Covenant.

At present, we are in the midst of recruiting groups of young adults for a fall pilot program of Wholemakers, an innovative, faith-based creation care curriculum designed for young adults, by young adults, intended to activate and equip young people and their communities for taking meaningful climate action.  

The work does not end with my departure. God is hard at work in liminal spaces—those porous spaces of transition where the old ways of doing things break down and creative possibilities proliferate—and I can’t wait to see where the Spirit carries the work of Youth and Young Adult Mobilization at the Covenant in the years to come. In the short term, I hope that you’ll consider plugging into our Wholemakers program, whether by signing up to join a virtual young adult cohort or applying to pilot the program in a community of young adults to which you belong or minister. 

I will leave you with words of encouragement that have become a kind of refrain for me in this work: We are not beyond redemption.  

For so many of us, our imaginations have become so stunted by what Pope Francis calls our “throwaway culture” that we can scarcely imagine the possibility of making a neutral impact on creation, let alone a positive one. In our most despairing moments, some of us even find ourselves resigned to a sense that the best thing humans could do for creation would be to allow ourselves to go extinct. And yet, there are other ways of being in relationship with creation that are not about dominance and destruction. Our faith calls us to co-creative stewardship, acknowledging our capacity to not only exist peaceably within creation but indeed to benefit it with our ingenuity, our creativity, our nurturance. Many indigenous communities have practiced this form of generative mutuality for generations, and contemporary permaculture movements espouse a similar ethic. 

What if we allowed ourselves to believe that we could be beneficial species on this planet? That God’s dream for us is one of creative care and nurturance, in which our own sense of love and belonging is deepened along the way? 

Anna Robertson

Catholic Climate Covenant