After only an hour of talking with Krystie Babalos, I felt a renewed sense of hope towards community development and climate solutions. She is a sustainability planner with an extraordinary passion for our planet. In her words, “There is nothing more important than taking care of your home, no matter who you are, where you’re from, or what background you are.”

As a sustainability planner, she works on a variety of projects including green buildings, food security and watershed management. Her focus is on developing strategic plans and policies for governments and organizations that push the dial forward in advancing ecosystem health and climate action.

Krystie has worked all over the world on community development from the Philippines to Uganda to Haida Gwaii. Her international projects fuelled her to think of ways she can make a positive impact on people outside of her career:

“I have a lot of privilege living in Canada and access to funding that I know a lot of the communities that I’ve worked with elsewhere don’t have access to. I wanted to share some of this privilege that I’ve been blessed to have and do it in a way that is respectful to the communities and how they operate.”

Sfaira Foundation priority areas, credit: Sfaira Foundation

This desire spurred her and her friends to found Sfaira Foundation. Sfaira is a non-profit volunteer-run organization that supports sustainable development work around the world. They wanted to strip away the constraints and parameters that often come with foreign funding to assist in a community’s development without prescribing certain actions or ideologies. They are supporting almost 20 community organizations through small grants and some guidance to tackle 10 priority areas. They support community organizations to integrate these priority areas where possible, and to tackle different interrelated challenges at once.

Before she found her current career path, Krystie began her post-secondary studies with a focus on neuropsychology. This gave her the tools to address community building from a psychological perspective.

When I asked Krystie how she deals with feelings of eco-anxiety, her answer gave me so much more than I had bargained for. She dove into how our brains process emotions and what we can do to stay hopeful.

The village of Mpigi in Uganda where I visited while interning for a community focused organization, credit: Teghan Acres

Krystie explained to me that our nervous system has two basic components, one that is under our conscious control and another that is not. This unconscious portion is called the autonomic nervous system. Polyvagal Theory proposes that our autonomic nervous system has three states: ‘connection’, ‘fight/flight’ and ‘shutdown’. In the ‘fight/flight’ state we may feel we don’t have the resources of connection to address incoming threats and instead fight or flee. In the ‘shutdown’ state, we may feel we have to give up which can lead to a sense of hopelessness. In the ‘connection’ state we feel like we do have the resources to overcome our current challenges and are in the headspace to safely to connect with others. She likens hopefulness to being in that connection state and feeling like you have the tools to overcome a given obstacle, such as climate change.

“Yes, climate change is this massive complex challenge, but also over the next decade we know what we have to do and the work is already underway.”

Krystie describes hope as “the feeling of wanting something to happen and thinking it can happen.” She tells me that not only does she know that climate change can be halted and reversed, she also tells me how. Through her work as a sustainability planner she has become intimately familiar with solutions to our environmental issues. At the community level, she mentions:

carbon free high performance homes and buildings,
active transportation, transit, & zero emission vehicles,
carbon free energy sources,
robust healthy ecological networks,
reducing and making better use of materials, and
people/heart centered spaces in the public and private realm.

At an individual level, she poses a poignant question that will lead us all back to the connection state when we find ourselves overwhelmed and anxious:

“How do I make decisions every day to fall in love with the world around me?”

She goes on to explain that, “it can be a struggle - some days I am highly anxious and some days I’m in that connection state where I feel connected to my friends, family and community of practice. I think it’s about falling in love with the world around you because it’s pretty amazing.”

While our climate emergency needs the technical community solutions Krystie mentioned, our sustainable future is going to be built out of love for each other and our planet. Ask yourself what made you fall in love with the world, and go from there in taking steps towards a green and healthy future for yourself, your community and your environment.

The Psychology of Hope with Krystie Babalos