MULTISOLVING:
Book Groups

Would you like to be a part of nourishing dialogue that blends climate action with community-building to solve multiple issues at once?

Around the world, people are organizing themselves into groups to read and reflect on Multisolving together. Already, we know of groups in the US, Canada, and the UK. You can read the book together as a group of friends, as members of the same place-based community, or as part of an organization. Or some combination of all three!

These book groups are designed to braid the ribbons of participants’ different perspectives and life experiences. These reading groups provide an informal, exploratory environment from which solutions can emerge.

We don't have to face the uncertainty and worries alone.

Dr. Elizabeth Sawin

Helpful Tips to Get Started

Wherever you find yourself, you are probably facing uncertain times and worrying trends. But, we don’t have to face the uncertainty and worries alone. There are as many ways to hold a solutions cluster as there are people to organize one. Gather a group, in person or online, help people access the book, and talk about it.
That said, here are a few ideas!

Use the reflection questions at the end of each chapter to give a little guidance to your discussion. You can use one or two questions, whichever ones speak to you.

If you would like to meet over a few sessions, you can divide your reading into three sections. You can choose a different member of the group to steer the conversation for each of the three sessions. 

Introduction & Overview (Chapter 1) use this session to get to know each other better too!

Systems (Chapter 2 – Chapter 8)

Multisolving in Action (Chapter 9 – Chapter 12)

Let us know about your group! Take a photo and share it on social media and tag us. Or email us here to let us know about your event.

If you are meeting in person and would like to arrange for a bulk purchase of the books, reach out to us here so we can get you a discount!

Be creative. In the spirit of the poems that begin each chapter, make space for other ways of connecting with multisolving. Collage. Clay. More poems. Video.

Bring multisolving in your locale into the book group. Plan a final session after you’ve read the book and invite multisolvers from your community to share about their work. Take a field trip. Or hold a potluck and challenge each other to bring dishes that multisolve in some way, because of how their ingredients were produce perhaps or because of the culture or tradition they represent. 

That opened a new front of research at Climate Interactive: what else would improve around the world if countries truly transitioned away from fossil fuels? From improvements in air quality to energy security we documented many co-benefits of climate action, and incorporated some of them into Climate Interactive’s well known computer simulation, En-ROADS.

But, the multiple benefits of actions to protect the climate remain mostly theoretical without ways of overcoming the obstacles to multisolving. That’s why, from the beginning of our work we have collaborated with others to understand the bright spots of multisolving around the world and to pilot multisolving approaches. First in Milwaukee in partnership with the Milwuakee Metropolitan Sewerage District and then in Atlanta, with Partnership for Southern Equity, we began to see what was possible by bringing the different parts of a system together in pursuit of actions and investments that lifted up many goals at once.

From this action research, along with a series of case studies of multisolving projects, we began to see attitudes and approaches that are in common across a wide diversity of multisolving projects, a topic we wrote about in Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Then came 2020. Pandemic. Escalating climate change impacts. Dire warnings about biodiversity loss. And more and more folks connecting the dots between each of these issues and structural inequity. Invitations to write, speak, and teach about multisolving came fast and furious and with it the possibility that what we’ve learned from multisolving bright spots could help support leaders around the world to respond to crises with multisolving. That spark led to the launch of the Multisolving Institute and our mission of supporting leaders as they pursue multisolving approaches