About this Event
Community Action Starts With Community
Eventbrite summary
A free, interactive workshop bringing Norwich people together to understand climate change, connect across communities and develop practical local action.
📅 Saturday 23 January 2027
⏰ 11am–4pm
📍 Carrow House, 301 King Street, Norwich, NR1 2TG
What could happen if people working to make Norwich a better place came together to tackle climate change?
Across Norwich, hundreds of charities, community groups, social enterprises and volunteers work every day to improve people’s lives.
They’re tackling inequality. Supporting families. Improving health and wellbeing. Creating opportunities for young people. Bringing neighbourhoods together. Supporting people through difficult times. Protecting nature. Building stronger communities.
Climate change intersects with many of these challenges. But it can also feel enormous, complicated and disconnected from the issues we’re dealing with every day.
So what if we tackled it together?
Join Climate Fresk UK and Community Climate Action for a free, highly participatory workshop at Carrow House, home of Norwich Unity Hub, on Saturday 23 January.
Together, we’ll explore what climate change means for our communities — and, most importantly, identify practical things we could do about it.
You don’t need to be a climate expert or environmentalist.
If you’re involved in making Norwich a better place to live, we’d love you to be part of the conversation.
Climate change is a community issue
Climate change is often presented as an environmental problem. It is — but it’s also about people and places. It’s about:
- the homes we live in
- the food we eat
- how we travel
- our health and wellbeing
- the green spaces around us
- the cost of energy
- the resilience of our neighbourhoods
- whether the places where we live can respond and adapt to a changing climate
Many organisations working across Norwich are therefore already tackling issues connected to climate change — even if they wouldn’t describe themselves as climate organisations.
This workshop is an opportunity to bring those different perspectives together.
Why Carrow House?
Carrow House feels like a particularly appropriate place for this conversation.
Norwich Unity Hub describes itself as a community for “people, place and purpose”.
Created in response to the need for affordable, flexible space for Norwich’s voluntary, community and social enterprise sector, the Hub has transformed Carrow House into a thriving home for charities, social enterprises, community groups and creatives.
But the idea goes beyond sharing a building. Organisations can share ideas, expertise, equipment and costs too.
That’s exactly the spirit we’d like to bring to climate action.
No single organisation has all the answers. But collectively, Norwich has an extraordinary amount of knowledge, experience, creativity, energy and influence.
What becomes possible when we connect it?
From understanding to action
This isn’t a conference or a series of presentations. It’s a workshop in which everyone participates.
We’ll move through four stages.
🌍 First, understand
Through the internationally acclaimed Climate Fresk, you’ll work with a small group to explore the causes and consequences of climate change and discover how different parts of the climate system connect.
You don’t need any previous climate knowledge. Rather than being told what to think, you’ll work things out together.
🤝 Then, connect
We’ll bring the conversation closer to home.
- What does climate change mean for Norwich?
- How does it intersect with the challenges our organisations and communities are already tackling?
- What’s already happening locally?
- Who else should we be working with?
- What could we learn from one another?
💡 Then, imagine
We’ll shift our attention from problems to possibilities.
- What assets already exist within our communities?
- Where do we have influence?
- What could our organisations change?
- What could we achieve together that would be difficult to achieve alone?
- What might a healthier, greener and more resilient Norwich look like?
🚀 And finally, act
Community Climate Action will help turn those ideas into practical next steps.
Because success isn’t simply leaving the workshop understanding climate change better.
Success is what happens afterwards.
Five areas of community climate action
In the second part of the day, we’ll bring the conversation firmly back to Norwich and the places where we live, work and spend time.
We’ll explore opportunities across five areas of everyday community life:
🦋 Nature
How could we protect biodiversity, improve green spaces and create healthier places for people and wildlife?
Could community organisations make better use of the land around their buildings, support local nature projects or help more people connect with the natural world?
🌱 Food
How could we produce, buy, share and think about food differently?
That might include community growing, reducing food waste, improving access to affordable food, sharing surplus produce or helping people develop new skills.
⚡ Energy
How could we reduce energy use, cut costs and make community buildings more efficient and resilient?
Could organisations share knowledge, equipment or purchasing power — or explore opportunities for locally generated and community-owned energy?
🏠 Housing
How could we help create warmer, healthier, more energy-efficient and climate-resilient homes?
What role could trusted community organisations play in helping people access information, support and practical solutions?
🚲 Travel
How could we make it easier for people to reach services, activities, work and one another in healthier and more sustainable ways?
Could organisations coordinate transport, support walking and cycling or make shared and public transport more accessible?
There isn’t one correct answer — and we’re not arriving with a predetermined list of things Norwich should do.
We want to create the conditions for people who know their communities to identify the opportunities themselves.
Who should come?
If you’re involved in making a difference in Norwich, we’d like you in the room.
That could mean you’re involved in a:
- charity
- voluntary organisation
- community group
- social enterprise
- neighbourhood project
- youth organisation
- health or wellbeing initiative
- arts or cultural organisation
- faith community
- school or college
- sports club
- local business
- environmental group
You might be a staff member, trustee, volunteer, community organiser, artist, social entrepreneur or local resident.
Perhaps climate action is already central to what you do. Perhaps you’ve never considered your organisation to have an environmental role.
Both perspectives are valuable.
In fact, we’re particularly interested in reaching people who wouldn’t normally attend a climate event.
Because responding to climate change will require much more than environmental organisations.
It will require communities.
What could community climate action look like?
For one organisation, it might mean reducing energy use or waste.
For another, it could mean helping people struggling with energy bills or making services more resilient to extreme weather.
It could involve food growing, active travel, repairing and reusing things, improving green spaces, sharing resources, supporting biodiversity or helping people learn new skills.
Or it could involve something none of us has thought of yet.
That’s why we’re bringing different people together.
You’ll leave with more than climate knowledge
By the end of the workshop, we hope you’ll have:
- a clearer understanding of climate change and how its causes and consequences connect
- explored what those challenges mean for your organisation and community
- identified practical opportunities for action
- met people from other organisations who could become collaborators
- developed ideas and next steps to take back to your organisation
- strengthened your sense that meaningful change is possible when people work together
And the programme doesn’t finish when everyone leaves Carrow House.
Community Climate Action will provide follow-up support to help participants develop their ideas and turn plans into action.
Imagine the connections we could make
One of the most exciting possibilities isn’t simply generating new environmental projects. It’s creating new relationships.
Imagine:
- a community organisation with an idea but no suitable space meeting an organisation that has one
- a charity wanting to reduce waste connecting with people who know how to repair and reuse things
- a youth organisation connecting with a nature project
- a social enterprise finding new community partners
- several small organisations discovering they could solve a problem together that none could tackle alone
Carrow House already demonstrates what can happen when organisations working for social good share a roof.
What could happen if we shared our ideas for climate action too?
The final workshop in a bigger experiment
This is the sixth and final workshop in Initiating Climate Action in Colchester and Norwich, a pilot programme from Climate Fresk UK and Community Climate Action, funded by The National Lottery Community Fund.
It is also the third Norwich workshop in the programme.
Across the six workshops, we’re bringing together around 180 people through different parts of community life.
Our Norwich programme has deliberately worked with three very different communities: faith and creation care, sport, and the wider voluntary and community sector.
But we’re exploring the same question each time:
Can combining climate understanding, community connections, practical action planning and follow-up support help more people move from concern to action?
We’ll follow what happens after the workshops too — which ideas progress, who becomes involved, what barriers people encounter and what helps community-led climate action succeed.
The lessons from Norwich and Colchester will help us understand how this model could support communities elsewhere in the UK.
Event details
Community Action Starts With Community
📅 Saturday 23 January 2027
⏰ 11am–4pm
📍 Carrow House, 301 King Street, Norwich, NR1 2TG
🎟️ Free to attend
🤝 Delivered by Climate Fresk UK + Community Climate Action
🏠 Hosted at Carrow House, home of Norwich Unity Hub
🎟️ Funded by The National Lottery Community Fund
Places are limited, so please book in advance.
And please don’t keep it to yourself.
If there’s someone from another Norwich organisation you’ve always thought, “We should really work together,” invite them too.
Because community action starts with community.
Event venue & nearby stays
Carrow House, 301 King Street, Norwich, United Kingdom
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.