Training clinicians to be organizers: Expanding professional identities through a year-long Climate Health Organizing Fellowship

The climate crisis and its harmful effects on human health are staggering. It is motivating clinicians to transform their scope of practice. Physicians and other clinicians are on the front lines of managing a growing surge of illness and injury directly caused by increasingly extreme temperatures, weather, and ecological transformation. But the joint institutional constraints of clinician socialization through training and the labor conditions of health care delivery tend to obfuscate and disincentivize the array of possible practical strategies for meaningful, collective intervention in the climate health crisis. How do clinical professionals respond?

This paper empirically and theoretically explores how clinicians can respond to this crisis by examining findings from a study of the first two cohorts of a Climate Health Organizing Fellowship – a year-long training program for interdisciplinary teams of health workers in which they launch a real-world organizing campaign to challenge and change a concrete climate health problem that they experience in their clinical setting or community. Rooted in the organizing leadership pedagogy of Marshall Ganz, to date this fellowship produced several campaigns that have successfully changed hospital carbon emission policies, won a municipal electric bus campaign, expanded climate-health medical education curricula in medical schools, and secured new climate health leadership roles within their institutions. In this study we found that this program provided an opportunity for clinical professionals facing the “crisis of expertise” presented by the climate-health crisis to “insource” new leadership capacities and technical skills necessary to organize to win material change in their efforts to combat the climate health challenges they and their communities face. The program also expanded participants’ professional identities and sense that they had jurisdiction in the domain of collective climate health interventions.