Mutual Mental Healthcare Toolbox
Overview
Frontline communities and their local leaders organizing around climate displacement carry enormous weight. They organize, advocate, and show up for people through crisis, loss, and uncertainty. Often without adequate mental wellness support in return.
This work does not happen on a single timeline. Leaders are responding to floods, fires, and forced moves while also holding the long, slow labor of building something better in their place. They are grieving homes and neighborhoods even as they organize their neighbors to imagine what comes next. They are showing up for community meetings, testifying at hearings, and comforting families in crisis, often while carrying their own losses. The labor is read and it is heavy, and it rarely comes with the support it deserves.
Care is often treated as optional. Dismissed as women's work. But care is critical to life itself, from our first breath to our last. We need to be cared for, and we need to care for others.
The Grassroots Mutual Mental Healthcare Toolbox was built on that truth. It is a peer-developed resource created by and for leaders doing this work in their communities. Rather than importing mental health frameworks from outside the movement, this toolbox gathers what leaders already know: the songs that get them through hard nights, recipes passed down through generations, the writing that helps them make sense of life, and the practices that keep them whole enough to keep showing up.
The result is not a one-time resource, but the beginning of a living practice. One that grows as more leaders contribute their own stories, songs, and wisdom.
Why it Matters
Climate displacement is a mental health crisis. Leaders on the frontlines of this work are navigating trauma, grief, and burnout while fighting for their communities. Existing mental health resources rarely reflect their realities. This toolbox does.
It is also a model. The process of building it, including peer learning, mutual care, community-led research, is as important as the product. The Climigration Network is committed to supporting and documenting this work so others can replicate it.
What We Are Buiding
Songs: Music that carries us through the hard days
Recipes: Nourishment rooted in community and culture
Books + Poems: Writing that sees and sustains us
Crafts: Activities like knitting, crocheting, painting
Researched Resources: Curated and evaluated mental health tools
Member Visions + Stories: Futures we are building, in our own words
Community of Practice Design: A replicable model for peer learning + solidarity
This is a living resource, shaped by what leaders bring back to it, and it will keep expanding as the Grassroots Leader Community of Practice adds what it learns. Alongside it, we are publishing an ongoing blog series featuring the leaders themselves, in their own words, on how they use these tools to sustain the work and each other.
Blog Series
About the Grassroots Leader Community of Practice
The Grassroots Leader Community of Practice is a collective space for peer learning, solidarity, and collaboration among leaders addressing climate change and displacement in their own communities. The group has been meeting since 2021, protecting the trust and closeness that make it work while making room for new voices also doing this work across the country.
The group holds itself to a shared set of commitments: listening with respect, trusting one another to show up ready to learn and grow, protecting this as a safe space where stories are not repeated without permission, being honest about capacity, sharing responsibility for including every voice, and resolving conflict through direct, respectful communication. These commitments shape not just how the group meets, but how the toolbox itself was built.
The futures these leaders are building for their communities are the same futures this toolbox is meant to support: villages of care rooted in mutual aid, safe housing and healthy bodies for all, reparative healing and justice, and collaborations that stay rooted in community and lead by the people closest to the work.
Acknowledgements
This toolbox was developed in a partnership led by David Southgate, Camille Hadley and members of the Climigration Network Grassroots Leader Community of Practice with support from Climigration Network staff and Buy-In Community Planning.