Five Years Later, the Climate Conversation Has 250+ New Voices
Kathi King speaking at a Climate Stewards Alumni Gathering.
A Look Back with Climate Stewards Instructor Kathi King
Five years ago, the Community Environmental Council (CEC) launched Climate Stewards to bring the climate conversation beyond the usual circles and bring climate activist tools into the hands of everyday people.
Today, more than 250 Central Coast residents carry the Climate Stewards ethos into classrooms, city halls, food banks, gardens, workplaces, and even dinner-table conversations. At the center of all of it is Kathi King, CEC's Senior Education and Outreach Director, who has taught nearly every cohort since the beginning.
Building a New Model for Community-Powered Climate Impact
Kathi and CEC CEO Sigrid Wright had been searching for something like the Climate Stewards program for years before Climate Stewards existed. Then, in 2019, Sigrid attended a conference and struck up a conversation with staff from the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC ANR), who were working on exactly what she was looking for: a climate-focused version of the California Naturalist Certification Program — a quality training course anyone could attend to grow into the climate activists our communities need.
CEC quickly signed on, and after a pandemic-forced pivot to virtual instructor training, launched the course in January 2021. The first cohort was small, with just 10 people, but the experimental beginning proved the model could work.
“The first Climate Stewards cohort was almost like a focus group. I was constantly checking in to see if what I was teaching made sense, and I had some imposter syndrome,” said Kathi. “But I also felt a deep responsibility to create a space where they could face the challenges of climate change together, find hope in their community, and graduate feeling ready to do something about it.”
Five years, 16 cohorts, and 250-plus graduates later, that imposter syndrome is hard to picture. Kathi is now the instructor who has shepherded Climate Stewards from an improvised, ten-person pilot into a diverse network of community members finding their own ways to lead, collaborate, and move climate action forward.
Kathi King with the very first Climate Stewards cohort, which launched in January 2021.
Today, the UC-certified program is an eight-week course that combines climate and behavioral science with reflection, hands-on learning, and community-powered action. Participants explore the causes and impacts of climate change, learn how to communicate about them, and develop a stewardship project around an issue they care about.
Creating Space to Process Then Act
The Climate Stewards course curriculum has evolved alongside the people taking it, but one structural choice has stayed constant since the start. The course opens not with carbon cycles or emissions data, but with two full sessions on the behavioral side of climate change — eco-psychology, trauma awareness, communication strategies, and climate grief.
"There's a deep sense of relief in having space to grieve, to share what we've been carrying, and to realize we're not alone in these feelings," Kathi said. "This isn't easy work. Choosing to show up and talk about it is harder than looking away, and I want to honor that."
In the early cohorts, that order caught people off guard. Kathi recalls students wanting to dive straight into the science and wondering why they were instead asked to share their feelings. But over the past five years, that reaction flipped.
Kathi King with members of the Fall 2025 Climate Stewards cohort during a coastal cleanup day field trip at West Beach in Santa Barbara.
Kathi has noticed a shift in how people relate to the climate crisis, driven in part by more people experiencing its effects firsthand — fires, floods and smoke-tfilled summers that have made the issue personal before they even begin the course. Now, when she previews the curriculum on night one, participants nod along. Rather than pushing their feelings aside, they’re learning to acknowledge grief, find strength in one another, and turn that energy toward a more grounded question: What can we actually do?
The balance between acknowledging the hard parts and finding reasons to keep going carries through the rest of the program. Kathi pairs difficult conversations about the future of the planet with opportunities to reconnect with the places participants are working to protect. Field trip excursions have included coastal clean-up days, guided Santa Barbara Botanical Garden and Lotus Land tours, restoration days at Oxnard Mini-Nature Reserve, visits to the Tajiguas Landfill and Arroyo Hondo Preserve, and more recently, volunteer days with the Bucket Brigade to care for native habitats and open spaces.
“Climate work can be demanding, but it can also be restorative,” Kathi said. “Spending time outdoors, working alongside others who care, and seeing tangible progress can turn an overwhelming global crisis into something community members feel excited to engage with.”
When Climate Leadership Takes Root
From left: Kathi King, guerilla gardeners Diego Magaña and Solimar Gutierrez, and Climate Stewards alumni Miranda Magaña and Cody Howen, who partnered on a Stewardship Project bringing grassroots environmental action and native gardens to Oxnard.
The course asks each participant to develop a stewardship project around an issue they care about, putting the skills and knowledge from the course to work in their own communities. The result is a collection of projects that, together, have pushed climate work into places it might not otherwise reach.
Climate Stewards have brought climate education into schools and workplaces across the Central Coast. Stewardship Projects have focused on habitat restoration, pollinator education, community gardens, wildfire resilience, waste reduction, and more. Non-profit staff have used their projects to bring climate messaging into their organizations, while residents at local retirement communities have launched environmental committees, advocating for EV charging, composting, and reusable alternatives.
For some Climate Stewards, the course has become a springboard for civic engagement. Participants have advocated for limits on cruise ship visits to Santa Barbara, supported the statewide Make Polluters Pay campaign, organized around local oil pipeline issues and launched environmental committees at their schools and workplaces.
The projects are different, but they share a common thread: people finding a place where their existing skills, interests, and relationships can contribute to climate work. Increasingly, those efforts extend beyond a single project. Alumni return as teaching assistants, lead activities at CEC events, facilitate Youth Climate Workshops and continue collaborating with one another to drive solutions forward.
Kathi King during a Climate Stewards field trip to the Oxnard Nature Preserve.
For Kathi, that is one of the most rewarding parts of teaching the program. "We can’t solve a crisis this size alone, and we weren’t meant to.” Kathi said. “Every steward sees through a different lens, moves through different circles, and reaches new people. Weave all of that together and it becomes a living web of climate action, stretched across an entire region."
The Community Beyond the Course
Five years in, the Climate Stewards course has fostered a community of people who continue to learn, collaborate on projects, and find new ways to stay involved. CEC has worked to keep those connections alive after graduation through alumni-only gatherings, quarterly newsletters, invitations to CEC events, and opportunities to volunteer.
The program is evolving in other ways, too. CEC is working to reach more young people, including high school students who became eligible for the certification in 2025 and K-12 teachers who qualify for a full Climate Stewards scholarship. Kathi always looks for ways to make the program more accessible while preserving the depth that makes it so meaningful.
"Five years ago, we were just hoping this concept would work," Kathi says. "Now I look at 250 people who've gone through the program, and I see 250 different doorways into the climate conversation — a classroom, a corporate meeting, a holiday dinner table. My hope for the next five years is that we keep opening more of those doors.”
The Climate Stewards community gathered outside CEC’s Environmental Hub after an Alumni Gathering in October, 2025.
