What We Do
Community-Based Solutions and Climate-Informed Ministry
For Brugmansia, we believe that the impacts of climate change need to be addressed at the community level and the best, longest lasting, most impactful solutions to address challenges are community driven. It is our goal to help you foster an environment where the existing potential inherent within your community brings about transformational social change for the betterment of the environment and the world in ways that recognize and address the challenges of climate change. It is our profound understanding that humanity’s greatest assets toward addressing climate change and climate-driven migration are not technological, but relational. And through community building and trusting relationships, we can uncover tangible, practical, and creative solutions to the challenges presented by climate change and climate migration.
What is Climate-Informed Ministry?
Climate change and climate migration already impacting every level of society in disparate and challenging ways, and our faith community ministries need to adapt to address these impacts. Agricultural declines are driving hunger, increasing food prices, creating new needs for emergency food assistance, and decreasing the amount of disposable income individuals can contribute to ministries and aid. Heat waves are pushing critical infrastructure to failure points, leaving folks without access to air conditioning, overcrowding hospitals with induvial suffering from otherwise preventable heat-related illnesses, contributing to various psychological and interpersonal crises including depression and domestic violence, and increasing the amount of energy consumed by buildings which, in turn, increases the amount of carbon being released into the atmosphere. Climate-induced migration and displacement is altering housing markets and driving climate gentrification, where historically marginalized communities are being displaced by wealthier individuals moving to avoid the impacts of climate change. And these are just a few examples of how climate change is impacting our communities.
Climate-informed ministry is ministry that takes into account how climate change is already impacting our local communities and prepares for likely impacts of future climate events. To meet these new and increasing needs of our communities, the ministries of our faith communities need to reflect the realities of climate change and climate-induced migration and be resilient enough to serve our communities when other community and cultural systems fail.
Preaching, Public Speaking, and
Theological Engagement
The drivers for climate change and environmental degradation are questions of how we, as humans, understand ourselves within and in relationship to the world around us. These are foundational theological questions central to any belief system or formalized faith system, with implications for how we approach solutions to climate change and environmental degradation. Through preaching, public speaking, and personalized adult education, Brugmansia works with faith communities to better understand how their unique belief systems shape their actions to help them identify theologically-aligned solutions to the challenges of climate change and climate-induced migration.
Workshops and Community Visioning
Brugmansia Ministries helps your community move beyond understanding the challenges of climate change and climate migration to actively working to address these challenges by building resilience. Our workshops allow faith communities to interact with the real climate projections for their community and, using tools from asset based community development, begin the process of identifying how they can adapt their buildings and ministries to address the challenges of climate change and climate migration.
See an example handout from a visioning workshop in Chattanooga TN here.
Deep Planning and Engagement
Each faith community is culturally, theologically, and historically unique. To enact long lasting and culturally relevant change, Brugmansia Ministries works with the uniqueness of your faith community in "deep engagements" which are longer term partnerships where Brugmansia will walk alongside your community from the beginning stages of infrastructure planning and/or theological engagement to the completion of concrete infrastructure projects and organizational systems changes. These engagements are always driven by the needs and desires of your community, with Brugmansia Ministries providing technical and theological expertise to help you engage, design, and implement human and infrastructure systems to address climate change and climate migration.