Fighting the good fight, better – Katie Hodgetts, Founder of The Resilience Project

Holding down a job in care, whilst also doing her master’s degree, she had thrown her life into activism, giving everything for the cause. Finally, exhausted, frustrated and driven to binge eating and bulimia as a coping mechanism, she felt forced to step away from the fight. By this point, she was only 25 years old.

Katie only took a year out. She explored the burnout she experienced, looking for ways to help other young people avoid the traps she fell into. What she learned formed the basis for workshops and courses which in turn expanded into The Resilience Project, through which she aimed to give young people the tools to make activism a healthy and sustainable part of their lives. Over the next five years, The Resilience Project became a global organisation. Katie then decided that what she had built could now be taken forward by others.

When I speak to her, dialing in from her home in the Cairngorms, it’s the day after she has announced that she’ll be stepping down as CEO, the perfect time for her to reflect on the journey she’s taken, the legacy she leaves and her next, possibly even more ambitious idea.

“When I was a child,” she begins, when I ask her to go right back to the start, “environmentalism was all about that image, you know, the polar bear on a tiny ice floe. The focus was on single issues, like wildlife, plastic straws, or litter. But for my generation it was about power structures and governments. That was the framing. I was studying international relations and politics, and I started to realise how unfair the whole system was. I was outraged that our future was basically being decided by a handful of rich white men.”

Like many people her age, Katie found herself dealing with a sense of powerlessness and isolation. She joined youth groups, hoping not only to force some real change in the world, but to find others that shared her beliefs. It was supposed to be a positive step, but Katie quickly found that it made things worse.

“We met every week on Zoom, every Tuesday, and each of us knew different, terrible things about the environmental apocalypse. So you're learning so much, but you’re not learning the skills or the tools to help with your change making. It’s just a group of angry young people making each other more angry.”

As she dove further into the world of activism with UK YCC and other organisations, she discovered an even more fundamental problem. Activism was competitive. Many in the community measured each other by their knowledge of arcane facts like the intricacies of the UK’s Net Zero policy. It wasn’t enough to contribute, you had to live the cause completely.   

“The movement exists in a capitalist system where individualism, attainment and success are some of the leading priorities,” Katie explains, “so they will influence behaviour. Even in a climate movement, you might still be focused on attainment, you might still feel competition with activists, and you might not lead with a sense of kinship and community.”

The result of these twin pressures – an echo chamber of rage and an underlying current of competitiveness – was a culture that Katie felt drove its members to an unhealthy focus on their activism. Taking time off felt like failure or a betrayal, and many people became excruciatingly conscious of every decision they made, from where they bought their clothes to what they ate. Katie cites the Clover Hogan quote that the world needs 100 imperfect activists more than it needs one perfect one – but there was little space for imperfection in the community.  

While Katie had her own challenges, driven by the desire to always appear as the confident, committed leader, she was far from alone in struggling. “At Bristol Youth Strike for Climate, about 80% of the team were medicated for depression or anxiety, and in my time with UK YCC, I’d seen so many people leaving because of mental health, because of infighting, because of climate anxiety, because of burnout.”

The question, of course, was what. Katie was convinced that young people were over-identifying with their activism, just as she had done. It was becoming more than a part of who they were, taking over entirely. It was clear that there needed to be a wider conversation than how to manage climate anxiety, or so she came to realise. “My intention when I started the project,” Katie admits, “was to learn how to get rid of climate anxiety and stop people experiencing burnout, but I started working with a psychologist, Caroline Hickman, and also the Climate Psychology Alliance and they actually showed me the wisdom and utility of both of those things.”

Climate anxiety, the thinking went, was a perfectly rational response to the state of the world. It proved you were listening, that you were aware. It was not something to be eliminated, while burnout needed to be recognised, discussed and understood, not shrouded in a sense of shame. In consultation with a board of youth advisors, Katie designed an eight-week program that aimed to give young activists internal skills for greater harmony and balance in their personal lives.

That first course was a success, but the biggest learning came from its failings. A section which guided the participants in creating their own sustainable campaign models was negatively received. “They said, no, we just want to keep having spaces where we can talk. And that was a really fascinating insight for me, because everyone was complicit in their own narrative on productivity being the most important thing for the fight and here they were, so relieved to have a space where they could just relate to one another.”

Iteration by iteration, Katie shifted the thinking of the courses and the project overall, developing what she called a “climate activation” model. It steered away from the word activism, which had begun to be negatively perceived and was also slightly limiting, with its strong stress on action and outcomes. “The journey became about the inner landscape, understanding who we are and understanding what we want in life. The action you then design will be underscored by awareness, sustainability, personal sustainability, trust and connection, rather than being something designed from a place of fear and anger.”

As the project went global, a train-the-trainer model enabled growth and flexibility, allowing courses to be tailored for a diverse range of communities facing different needs and challenges. Testimonies flooded in, with some saying that the inclusive approach had given them the freedom to work in their own way, while others openly talked of being brought back from the brink of suicide by their participation. Such powerful stories were deeply touching for Katie to hear, but she hopes the impact will spread in more subtle ways too.

She talks passionately about how activation, rather than activism, could play out on both grander and smaller stages, by giving young campaigners more space in their lives to build relationships outside the activist community. “My activism now,” Katie says with a smile, “could be something as small as going to Tesco and not using the self-service checkout, but actually going to talk to someone and ask how their day is. Because climate is linked to these bigger issues like capitalism, inequality, the factionalization in society, higher rates of loneliness. All these things are entwined. So when we start to penetrate the walls of loneliness and focus on connection, to me it is climate activism, because you are tackling these massive themes right at the root.”

Helping young people be part of that healing of society is a grand vision, but one that The Resilience Project, even without Katie at the helm, is determined to enact. “If we’re building happier, healthier, more connected young people,” Katie concludes, “it's not just going to impact climate, but so many other areas of the global scene.”

Pressed for a little sneak peek as to what that might be, she casually mentions that she’s going after “the other side” – Conservatives, Republicans, climate deniers. Not, she stresses, in an aggressive way, but in an attempt to find common ground, to stop the accusatory back and forth that leaves many people on the right feeling shamed and attacked by the left. It feels like an enormous undertaking, but if anyone can make headway with it, it’s probably Katie.

Words by Christopher-Wilson Elmes

Featuring Katie Hodgetts