Explore climate change through

intergenerational religious education

Dec. 30, 2009

By Barb Ballenger, Director of Faith Formation

Good Shepherd Catholic Church, in State College

Once or twice a year Good Shepherd offers an educational program that invites parishioners of all ages to learn about a particular faith topic from and with each other. We call it GIFT (Generations in Faith Together), and it's a great way to connect the efforts of our religious education program for youth with our desire to reach parents and other adults in the community.

In February of 2009 the topic of GIFT was "Love Creation as Yourself," in which we invited parishioners to learn about the Catholic Church's teaching on addressing Climate Change and to explore how they can make changes in their own lives and in public policy. 

On this page, you'll find information about our program as well as links to our follow up resource and materials. If you would like even more information on how to put together an intergenerational program for you faith community, please feel free to contact me at barbballenger@gmail.com.

What we did

Our typical GIFT program is a three-hour event held in the parish hall in our church. We run the same program three times, over three days (Saturday and Sunday afternoon and Monday evening), so we have room for everyone and so people can find the day that works best for them. We pitch this most successfully to families, and even make it a requirement for the 40+ families who opt to teach their children at home. (Catholic parishes have a large mandatory religious education component for children in grades 1 to 11. At Good Shepherd, families either send their kids to our church-based catechetical program or teach them at home with materials provided by the faith formation office). About 120 people attended Love Creation As Yourself over the three days, ranging from 20 to 50 people a day.

For Love Creation as Yourself, the faith formation office worked with the parish social justice committee to plan the event. This ensured more hands in the planning and implementing, and it provided a way for the Social Justice Committee to get the word out about climate change, and get people interested in future follow up actions. We invited lots of parishioners to present and to volunteer, which brought more diversity to our participation.

Love Creation as Yourself included the following components. 

• Opening session -- large-group, intergenerational learning and activities.
• Potluck meal -- we aimed for zero waste, so had people bring their own place settings and compost their left overs.
• Break out sessions -- parishioners and local presenters ran these age-specific sessions, which filled an hour. See the program outline below for the list of what we offered.
• Large group unpacking of what people learned, and time to make an individual action plan for changes to make at home
• Closing Prayer service
• Take-home packets with resources -- these were just small cards that gave the url for the religious education web site containing all the materials and resources for follow up.

For more details on what we did, view our program outline.

Providing follow up resources

     We used a wiki page, much like this one, to make follow up materials available both to participants and to people who couldn't attend.  This was a great way to encourage our families to weave this into their education efforts at home. Here are versions of the pages we created:

-- Follow Up Resources for Love Creation as Yourself

-- Educational Activities for Families

What did people learn?

     How do we know if our program was effective? We always have participants fill out a survey at the end of our GIFT sessions to let us know what they learned and what worked well. We usually provide them with a paper survey right there, but this time, to keep with our zero-waste effort, we e-mailed all the participants an on-line survey to fill out.

     (A side note: we used survey monkey for this -- and I really recommend it for both evaluations and for doing on-line sign ups for all sorts of programs. It has a free component. We pay about $20 a month for an upgraded version, and it's really worth it.)

     So what did people say?

In the survey we asked people to describe one thing they learned from the session that they were still thinking about. Here are the responses:

• Giving up commercial cleaning products. Some are easy, but I am not ready to give up all of them. We are starting with making our own laundry detergent and will go on from there. are also enlarging our garden this year. I'm still looking for a push lawn mower.

• The carbon footprint calculation.

• Amazingly little trash after lunch

• thinking about the environment and how I can improve my impact on it is always on my mind.

• How our society programs us to be consumers and how as Catholics, we have the Gospels to help us be different from the mainstream.

• Sharing rides

• The idea of how easy it would be to make minor changes in my daily living to help conserve

• How to make changes on a personal level

• It's always great to be reminded that one person can make a difference - that we all need to take responsibility for our earth. I left there promising to recycle all paper (not just newspaper) in our house and so far I have kept my promise. I have quite an impressive paper pile for the recycling bin.

• Trrying to be less consumption driven and less wasteful

• The wildflower seeds, totally cool.

• As Barb indicated, we actually did not learn anything new. It's just time to take action.

• So, we will stop doing one specific harmful thing during lent and start doing one specific helpful thing.

• The things i do on a daily basis, what can i do better, to benefit generations to come!

• I came away with the idea that it is morally our responsibility to take care of the earth. I do think if everyone did one more thing to conserve, we could make a difference.

• The abundance of what we have has added stress to our lives. Less is better and it's easier to see what's important. Thanks for being creative with GIFT.

• The new things I learned had mostly to do with the climate change issue. I didn't have a great understanding of the cyclical nature of climate change so I learned a lot there.

• What I also learned is how many nice people there are in the parish (which is new for me!)

• Thank you!

• Manufacturing and Sales chain - how stuff is made/disposed of

• Carbon footprinting. Climate changes due to carbon in the atmosphere. Awareness of what we can do in our families to change for to good of the world.

• Composting