The Climate Week India Blog

• On 13 July the coalition renamed its partnership document from the defensive-sounding "MoU" to The Commons Agreement, a single agreement held in common by every Partner, Ambassador, Volunteer and Anchor.
• The Commons Agreement went live in mid-July, with Jeffrey doing the groundwork and the document shaped by Kritka, Asheesh, Pialy, Vaishnavi and Jacob, listing 17 different ways an individual or organisation can engage.
• The Open Cupboard also went live, a shared resources board built by partners for partners, where anyone can post an Ask for support or an Offer of it, from a projector in Kochi to translation between English, Hindi and Tamil.
• A milestone landed on the calendar: Alt Eff, Haiyya and Asar committed to running 28 events between the three of them, with the partner count expected to roughly double on 2025.
• A de-jargoning series was drafted, ten social posts unpacking common climate terms across India’s languages, gently admitting this was knowledge the core partners, Anchors, Ambassadors and volunteers had to learn too, and inviting volunteers to translate them.
• And the handover began. Divya is stepping back from the Anchor role for 2026, and Kritka’s intensive stint is set to wind down after July, exactly the kind of rotation the model was always meant to allow. The rituals were built so the people could change.
• From a declined request to the UNFCCC in October 2024 to a coalition that other countries now write to for its playbook, the through-line held: nobody runs it, everybody makes it.

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• June was the month Climate Week India 2026 went public: the dates were fixed, the new logo went live, the rebuilt website came online, and the doors opened with an Expression of Interest form, a first Community Open House and the return of the weekly partner check-ins. Other Climate Weeks started paying attention, and a grassroots experiment from India was becoming a conversation across borders.
• The Expression of Interest form opened to new partners and volunteers, translated into Hindi (Vaishnavi and Kritka) and Marathi, with a dedicated Maharashtra team of Mayuri, Shubhangi and Roshan.
• Event budgets were requested and totalled Rs 6.6 lakh for 19 events, with no confirmed funder or sponsor as yet, exactly the position the coalition had always been willing to work from.
• The coalition had now met the Bangkok Climate Action Week founding team, with Divya recording on-ground conversations in Bangkok, and had reached the London Climate Action Week team twice with no response, though Jacob would be on the ground in London during LCAW.
• The first Community Open House ran on 16 June, drawing about 45 people to learn how Climate Week India works.

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• The 8 May kickoff pulled the 2026 team together, with Jacob and Divya joined by Kritka, Roshan, Mayuri and Shubhangi taking on outreach, website, social media, community management and Ambassador coordination.
• A dedicated Maharashtra team formed, with Roshan and Shubhangi on rural outreach and Mayuri on urban, chasing partners like SWaCH Pune, Pune River Revival and Earthing Stores.
• The team began experimenting with Luma for sign-ups.
• The Expression of Interest form was translated into Hindi with Vaishnavi, while Mayuri translated the "about us" content into Marathi with a short invite message.
• Jacob moved to get the 2026 logo commissioned.

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• With the 2026 dates all but settled and the first full cycle behind them, the Anchors spent April regrouping rather than announcing. The real work was decision-shaped: what should 2026 be, what from 2025 was worth keeping, and what needed to be rebuilt from scratch.
• A clear direction emerged to rebuild the website on a new platform rather than keep working around the constraints of the old one, the single biggest operational lesson from 2025.

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• The coalition set a date for Climate Week India 2026 (September 27th to October 4th), started raising money together rather than through a single sponsor, and began writing down its own method so the model could be handed on. The playbook was its admission that this was a repeatable way of doing things, one other communities in India and beyond were starting to ask about.
• The playbook’s structure laid out the principles (community-owned format, community agreements, code of conduct, goals), a timeline of spikes from one year out to three months after, and the systems, tools and templates behind it.

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• A conversation with the Kochi Biennale opened a path to a potential Climate Week India presence inside one of the country’s largest and most renowned art events, and a frank exchange about other Climate Weeks became an unplanned lesson in what Climate Week India did not want to be.
• Taken together, the month’s inputs pointed the same way: keep Climate Week India rooted in adaptation and in the lived realities of communities, not staged in five-star comfort.

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• The month was about converting a scatter of local asks into a single call-to-action strong enough to carry to decision-makers, alongside the Impact Report, an Ambassador call-out and a toolkit of practical resources for the regions.
• The 28 January check-in set the task directly: identify one call-to-action to take to decision-makers, drawn from the 45 community needs recorded on video during Climate Week India 2025.
• Named Ambassadors were being lined up: Pialy, Asheesh, Vaishnavi and Jeff.

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• The 31 December check-in was given over to a regulatory system for the partners’ internal communications, specifically WhatsApp, and to framing what the group was for.
• The governing image was deliberately generous: a potluck of experience and knowledge, not a billboard, and a space kept warm, focused and generous.
• The rules were paired with a simple New Year message inviting partners to use the space more actively and fruitfully in the year ahead.

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• The team built photo essays of the partners, one after another, and used the monthly check-in to ask how to release an impact report so it belongs to everyone in the coalition and not just the Anchors who assembled it. The answer being worked out was to make the report something partners could make their own.
• A recurring principle shaped the plan: give partners a template so the report could be made their own, rather than handed down finished.
• The coalition lined up in-person meet-ups that piggybacked on existing gatherings, including with Alt Eff, the Justicemakers Mela and the Serendipity Arts Festival.

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• The coalition turned its attention to two things that would let Climate Week India outlive its own dates: an Ambassadors programme to hold the regions between editions, and the documentation and Impact Report to prove, honestly, what had happened. The monthly check-in replaced the weekly one.
• Kritka of TerreGeneration organised the qualitative and quantitative documentation: the polling became a data set, the videos and photographs were organised partner-wise, transcribed and distilled for learnings, and thematic areas and community learnings were gleaned for the Impact Report 2025.

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• From 7 to 14 September, events ran across the country, most held by partners who needed almost nothing from the Anchors once they got going. Assam drew a hundred people. Alt Eff screened films in nine cities on a single Friday. The murals went up. Then the team told itself the truth in two columns: what worked, and what a small, largely unfunded team could not do well enough yet.
• By the close, as recorded in the Impact Report, Climate Week India 2025 counted 94 events across 16 states, 35 partners and more than 8,500 participants.
• On the honest side, the team owned that making noise before the week felt rushed, that many partners were unclear on the documentation process despite reminders, and that low sign-ups led a few partners to cancel.
• A structural lesson: with limited resources, the coalition could only afford a remote web designer part-timing after a full day’s work elsewhere, reachable only between roughly 8pm and 2am. That was a limit of what the team could afford to resource, not a comment on any person, and it slowed website turnaround at the worst possible time.
• Data lived in too many places. A split between the partner feeder sheet and the master calendar meant partner edits did not always reach the person building the site, and five events did not go through.
• The fixes wrote themselves for next year: a website where partners upload and manage their own events, a single point of contact per organisation, clear WhatsApp rules, funding started early, and a proper ambassador system to carry the regions.

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• August was the month the dam broke: sign-ups came in faster than anyone could announce them, a press team came on board, and a new sub-property, a set of climate murals called Bhoomi Bhaasha, arrived. One month out, the map ran from Haridwar to Havelock and from Morigaon to Mumbai, and the intro video finally said out loud what this had become.
• The update launched Bhoomi Bhaasha, a set of five climate murals whose placeholder name translates to "Language of the Earth" across Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi and Sanskrit.
• On 28 August Divya and Jacob shot the intro video and described the growth, coalition and partners as it was: two Anchors who pulled the partners together, a week that grew from one city in 2019 into, as of that day, over 55 events in 22 locations with 35 partners.

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• On the 11 July call, a potential comedy night in Bangalore was in talks with a venue.
• On 14 July the team reviewed design directions for the event branding and listed every collateral it would need.
• The 25 July internal session tackled success head-on, sketching KPIs such as commitments issued, diversity of participating organisations, media coverage, actionable reports produced, and alliances enabled.

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• The goals set a hard deliverable: a co-created document reflecting participants’ collective voice, to be taken to decision-makers by January 2026.
• Bangalore Creative Circus offered the first anchor date: a launch on 7 September built around their Market Day, which they were happy to give a climate theme.
• On the 27 June call the coalition agreed to create a LinkedIn page and to ask organisations to make their own event graphics, with the Anchors supporting where they could.
• The distributed model was no longer a funding workaround being explained apologetically. By June it was simply how Climate Week India worked.

Read the Code of Conduct here. →

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• Haiyya wrote in to say it was forming an internal team dedicated to Climate Week, focused on climate justice and the work of its community members.
• Alt Eff proposed a film club of five short films screening once a month across ten towns, and TerreGeneration added bird and biodiversity walks in Hesaraghatta and Lalbagh plus speed networking in Bengaluru, Delhi and Goa.
• Across May the community co-created the six Goals of Climate Week India 2025, from celebrating local climate solutions to co-creating a document of collective voices for decision-makers by January 2026.
• On 30 May the coalition wrote down its definitions in full: Core Partners in governance and decision-making, Solidarity Partners as the tangential allies including sponsors and venues, and Participants as the panelists and attendees. The rule held firm: sponsors sit under Solidarity.

Check out the Climate Week India Goals here. →

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• The 11 April kickoff call brought together some core partners.
• Jacob opened the floor to a name for the core team; the contenders, none of which survived, included Hariyali Heroes, Dharti Defender, Jal Jyoti, Delulu Dispellers and Hot Mess Collective.
• Divya facilitated the Community Agreements for the partners, which everyone understood would go public on the website.
• Early event ideas were already concrete: BCC’s day of screenings and stalls, TerraConscious’s panel and VR experience, Ananas’s native nursery, Youth Ki Awaaz’s writing series in Indore, TINEB’s cleanups and TerreGeneration’s speed networking.
• This was also the start of the weekly community calls, the ritual that would hold the coalition together right through to the week itself.

Read the Community Agreements here. →

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We kept working the phone book. Divya and I, Jacob, picked partners the honest way, by who we already knew and trusted enough to call on a Tuesday afternoon. New organisations said yes and then did the best thing possible: they brought in others they thought would fit. Somewhere in these weeks a quieter realisation arrived. The partners wanted to run events and meet policymakers. What we kept doing was different. We kept calling everyone, one by one, and holding them together. We were becoming a nervous system for a body that did not exist yet. So we gave it words.

• Through January to March 2025 we kept calling organisations from our own contacts. Our only selection criteria were trust and familiarity. We chose people we would be comfortable disagreeing with.
• New partners came on board, including Haiyya (Akshay, Bhumika and Anjali), Bare Necessities (Sahar) and Mudito (Devina).
• Each of them brought others. The network grew sideways, by introduction, not by recruitment drive.
• It became clear our role was never going to be the same as the partners’. They wanted to host events, engage policymakers and show up to the meetings. Divya and I were the two people who kept bringing everyone into the same room and then calling each of them again afterwards.
• We needed a vocabulary for that difference. We chose the word Anchor for ourselves, as we did tend to prevent the vehicle of the coalition from being washed away by the tide of trends, monetary ambition, personal glory, or a party pulling it in any one direction too aggressively.
• We split the partner organisations into two kinds: Core Partners, who share the decision-making and governance, and Solidarity Partners, the tangential allies like venues and sponsors.
• We agreed, collectively, on one rule that still holds: if a funder or a sponsor ever comes in, they can only be a Solidarity Partner. Money can support the week. Money cannot steer it.
• We were still telling ourselves this was Climate Week Bengaluru, one city, like 2019. The map on the worksheet kept quietly disagreeing.

Jacob Cherian, Anchor, Climate Week India

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We had done this once before. In 2019 we ran Climate Week Bengaluru, seven days and seven events, and the people who met that week never really stopped working together. A year ago I started asking whether we could do it again. The plan was small: Bengaluru, like last time. In October I wrote to the UNFCCC for support and, for a range of reasons, they could not help. So I picked up the phone. For most of two months it was just me, a worksheet of names, and a lot of calls that started with "do you remember 2019?"

• In October 2024 I wrote to the UNFCCC asking for support. The answer, rooted in their own funding limitations, was no. That no is where the real story starts.
• I spent roughly the next two months calling potential partners myself. Disha and I built a worksheet of allies, one name at a time.
• The organisations I called were people we already knew: TerreGeneration, Bangalore Creative Circus (Manisha), SayTrees (Kapil Sharma), Jhatkaa.org (Divya), Alt Eff (Kunal), TerraConscious (Puja and Tania), Greenlane (Varun), Indian Ploggers Army (Plog Raj), Mission Shunya (Girish), FFF India (Disha), TINEB (DD) and a handful of others.
• On 7 and 10 November, we sat down internally and costed the version in our heads: a conference-style week that could potentially cost over 1 crore for one city, and about 40 lakh for every additional city, aiming at 21 to 28 events per city. On paper, it was a lot of money we did not have. In the mind, it was built on an inherited idea of an old-world conference.
• Action points from those November meetings were plain: buy the website by 7 November, and Disha and I would go through the Climate Week 2025 Agreement, the Letter of Support and other relevant documents.
• I took the case to funders and was turned down, repeatedly. At some point we made the decision that settled everything after it: we would run this with or without funding.
• That single decision started to change the shape of the thing. With no money to centralise, distributing the week across many hands stopped being a compromise and started being the point.
• On 7 December the core was Shagun, Swati and me, doing a full "Climate Week run-through." We decided to hold one small pre-event each month in the lead-up, starting with an XR designers meet Indian climate community designers idea.
• December 2024 is when Divya joined me properly. She drafted and sent out the first Letter of Intent for Partnership.
• The first acceptances came back soon after: Bangalore Creative Circus, TerraConscious, Haiyya, TINEB and Alt Eff. Five yeses. Enough to stop calling it an idea.

Jacob Cherian, Anchor, Climate Week India

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