Helping young people process climate anxiety and take action

Written By Peter Allan

Jashan Gill with Inaam Chattha, founder and president of Green Mind Canada, at the book launch of Noura’s Jar of Worries and Climate Café art therapy workshop in Toronto, 2025. Photo by: Marium Vahed

 

By Patricia Lane & Jashan Gill

Jashan Gill helps young people process the emotional toll of climate change. As director of operations for Green Mind Canada, the 23-year-old from Brampton, Ont., works to normalize conversations about climate anxiety and provide youth with tools to transform worry into wellness and action.

Tell us about your project.

We believe the climate crisis is as much an emotional and mental health crisis as an environmental one. Through workshops, art therapy videos, children's books and trauma-informed, culturally grounded toolkits, we support young people and children with processing their feelings without shame or dismissal and without pressure to save the world.

Our work is grounded in youth voice, science and the honoured teachings of Indigenous knowledge keepers, whose practices of land-based stewardship, circle dialogue and collective care sit at the very heart of what we do.

We have partnerships with school districts in Toronto, Hamilton and Vancouver to facilitate in-class conversations with kids. We have published three children's books to provide stories of children contending successfully with climate anxiety. We recently released an animated film for young children, Ripples and the River of Trouble.

What impact are you having?

Our workshops have reached more than 10,000 children and youth. We have distributed more than 3,000 print and digital copies of our books. Our video has more than 800,000 views. Our tool kits are in demand from teachers and young adults who use them to host their own conversations.

I have co-developed sustainability guidebooks and heat-health adaptation tool kits in collaboration with the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment and the Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care, focused on improving access to cooling spaces and strengthening preparedness for medically vulnerable populations. I am also on the board of the Brampton Environmental Alliance, engaging local government on air quality, community health and accountability.

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Peter Allan
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