I help parents & future parents who are worried about climate change transform anxiety into meaningful, sustainable, you-can-do-this action.
What I do
Hi! I’m Elizabeth, and I’m a coach, a teacher, and a graduate student in public health. I’ve spent much of the last decade of my “day job” professional life coordinating research studies on things like expressive writing for trauma resilience at an academic integrative medicine clinic. I’m also a mother of two little ones, and I care deeply about climate change and climate justice.
I work with people who are worried about the impact of climate change on children and future generations – people who want to find ways to cultivate resilience in the face of climate anxiety, who want to live in closer alignment with their own values, and who want to find their place in the climate movement for the sake of their children (and all children).
I believe that the best way to feel hopeful about the future is to be actively engaged in creating it, and I believe that every single one of us can make a difference when it comes to climate change.
To me, living a “climate conscious life” means practicing four key skills:
- Cultivating resilience: Facing climate change requires facing difficult emotions, like grief, anxiety, anger, and fear. Emotional resilience is a critical skill for individuals and families who want to play a role in the climate movement – while also living joyful lives.
- Learning with intention: Climate change is directly connected to every other social justice issue we’re facing today: racism, wealth disparities, gender inequity, xenophobia, oppression of LGBTQIA+ communities, and more. Taking the time to learn about climate change and climate justice from reputable, intersectional sources is an important practice for both individuals and families.
- Reducing harm & nurturing healing: We can all make compassionate, sustainable shifts in our lifestyle to reduce our overall environmental footprint and contribute directly to ecological healing. Doing so helps the earth, reminds us of our values, and lets our children know how much we care about their future (and often, these changes make us happier, too).
- Practicing conscious activism: While individual changes won’t be enough to address climate change to the extent needed, we all have more power than we realize to influence larger-scale change as well. Tapping into your own unique gifts, strengths, and resources can make activism a meaningful, sustainable habit.
When you begin to move towards a more climate conscious life, you (and your family) will have a deeper well of resilience to draw from when the news feels scary.
Instead of feeling paralyzed by every frightening new climate headline, you’ll know how to process your fear – and how to translate it into meaningful action. Instead of feeling a surge of eco-shame every time you hear the phrase “carbon footprint,” you’ll know that you and your family have a plan to address this. Instead of feeling powerless in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, you’ll live with the sense of freedom that comes with knowing that you’re using your unique gifts and resources to make a difference in the world.
And if there are beloved children in your life, you’ll sleep better at night knowing that you’re doing everything you can to make the world a safe, just, and sustainable place for them – and for all future generations.
If you’d like to get in touch with me, send me a message at elizabeth@elizabethbechard.com – I’d love to connect.
What I offer
- My book, Parenting in a Changing Climate: Tools for cultivating resilience, taking action, and practicing hope in the face of climate change: This is a book for any parent who has found themselves lying awake at night worrying about climate change, or constricting with fear for their children’s future at the latest climate headline in The Guardian or The New York Times. It’s for any parent who knows that climate change is a problem that needs their attention, but can’t yet fathom how to make room for one more thing in the mayhem of their everyday family lives. In part a memoir and in part a guide, it’s a book I hope will support you in finding your way through the experience of parenting in an age of climate change.
- Group coaching: In the spring of 2022, I’ll be offering a second round of my group coaching program to support climate-concerned parents in cultivating resilience, navigating difficult emotions, practicing hope, and finding their place in the climate movement. Parenting is hard; parenting in a changing climate is harder, and we all need community to stay sane in these challenging times.
- Free resources: I send out a monthly newsletter with ideas, resources, and recommended reading around the theme of living a more climate conscious family life – you can sign up for that here.
My story
Sometimes I tell people that I’m a “recovering activist”: growing up as a highly-sensitive child, I was deeply attuned to the suffering of the world, angry at injustice whenever I saw it.
I became a vegetarian overnight at age 14 after reading a PETA brochure, volunteered for Amnesty International and learned from ACT UP AIDS activists in college, and started a blog on the connection between animal rights and human rights in my early 20s when I lived in Seattle. I’ve never been afraid of difficult truths – in fact, I’m strangely drawn to seeking them out. I love talking about things that are famously hard to talk about, like grief, death, and trauma.
But as a young adult, I didn’t have the inner resilience to handle all that I was learning about the world, and years of being immersed in difficult truths while also navigating personal traumas took a devastating toll on my mental health. In the years that followed a rock-bottom depression, I turned towards integrative medicine as a way of healing myself – and activism took a back seat. I became an integrative health coach in 2011, and immersed myself in learning about yoga, aromatherapy, mindfulness, and expressive writing. My mental health dramatically improved, and I found that I loved working with clients on cultivating resilience in the midst of the Hard Things of their lives, like infertility and pregnancy loss.
In the aftermath of the 2016 election and the birth of my twins earlier that same year, I started to notice a marked increase in the headlines about climate change and every kind of social oppression – and the activist self I’d largely left behind in my mid-20s began to wake up again. This time, with an entirely different skillset, I found I had the capacity to face difficult truths in the world without losing myself.
And as a parent, I no longer had the luxury of staying stuck in despair about a world that I knew I had to teach my children to love.
What I believe
I believe that there is still time to create the just, livable planet our children deserve – if we act now.
I believe that grief and love are two sides of the same coin.
I believe that parents, and all who love children, can be a remarkable force for activism in the world – even if activism looks different during early parenthood than it does in your early 20s.
I believe that personal and collective resilience are critical (and often missing) ingredients for social and environmental change – and bow with deep respect to the BIPOC traditions that have carried this knowledge across generations.
I believe that climate activism must be intersectional and grounded firmly in climate justice.
I believe that we can make more powerful changes when we’re driven by our love for the future, rather than our fear of it.
I believe that the stories we tell about the world become the world we live in, and that it’s time to start telling better stories about climate change.
I believe we’re capable of more than we think we are, and that we each have something unique, meaningful, and needed to offer to the climate movement.
And I believe in what you have to offer the climate movement.
My background & training
Alongside my own personal experience as a mother and “recovering activist,” here’s the training and expertise I bring to the table in this work:
- In 2021, I completed a professional’s intensive course in Hand in Hand Parenting.
- In 2020, I completed a certificate program in Climate Change & Health through the Yale University School of Public Health, and began a master’s program in public health through the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
- I’m a Certified Integrative Health Coach (through Duke Integrative Medicine) and have been coaching regularly in both private and clinical settings since 2011. In 2015, I taught in the health coaching certification program at Duke Integrative Medicine, and I have been helping to train and mentor student coaches ever since.
- I’ve completed special training on climate change & coaching from the Climate Change Coaches, a fantastic UK-based organization.
- I’ve been a yoga instructor since 2012, with special expertise in yoga for fertility support, and participated in ClimateYogi training with Galen Tromble in 2020. I’ve also taken multiple trainings on the intersection between yoga and social justice from Off the Mat, Into the World.
- I’m trained in Leading Patients in Writing for Health through Duke Integrative Medicine since 2013, certified as an Expressive Writing Facilitator through Wellness & Writing Connections, and have participated in conducting expressive writing research for trauma survivors. Most recently, I co-designed and coordinated two studies on expressive writing for COVID-19 resilience.
- I’m certified as a practitioner of the Fertile Body Method, a beautiful mind-body framework for working holistically with fertility challenges.
- I’ve attended Advanced Holding Space for Pregnancy Loss training with doula and chaplain Amy Wright Glenn of the Birth, Breath & Death Institute, and Grief Literacy Training (Levels One and Two) with Being Here, Human.
- I have a bachelor’s degree in Religious Studies from UNC-Chapel Hill (I’ve always been fascinated by the ways spirituality impacts the human experience).