About once a quarter, the Women’s Climate Congress invites members to join an online conversation circle. These member’s conversations are run as virtual circle conversations. Each has a theme concerned with climate change issues, our societal structures, responses and ethics, and the ways that women think and feel in the face of such threats to our families and future, and to the Earth and all her besieged and dying species.
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These circles, hosted online by our membership convenor, Lyn Stephens, are for new members and for those who have been with us for a while who want to stay connected, get to know each other, hear about what the Congress aspires to achieve and what we are doing, and contribute ideas.

How can the arts inspire and sustain us in this time of existential challenge? August 2021

On 17 August, 21 members from around Australia met online to talk about how the arts influence public discourse. The online circle was facilitated by Lyn Stephens. The circle was opened with a recording of A Chorus of Women singing ‘Acknowledgement of Country’ with words by Canberra poet Hazel Hall and music by Glenda Cloughley. Members introduced themselves briefly in breakout groups - considering a time when an artwork/artistic expression had had a particular impression on them.

Dr Sally Blake, who has been coordinating our 'Integrating (or more precisely 'Reintegrating' the Arts') group spoke a little about her visual art practice in relation to climate change of how the arts express and speaks upon what is deeply held and felt. Other artists in the circle also shared information about their projects.

One participant said: "The failure to act on climate change is a failure of imagination. The arts can bring us to the imagining of a renewed future". Another said : "Amid a culture bedded in scientific facts and dry journalism, the arts move us emotionally – that other immense realm of feeling which drives much of our behaviour and expression. As women, this is our familiar realm, and the arts can join us wordlessly together". Others commented on the power of art to enliven protest.

We are a movement of women, and we need to re-plan and revise the language and direction of societal politics and economics. We talked of bringing the arts forward in public discourse: the necessity for such expression from the heart, to restore compassion, empathy, contemplation, grieving, and renewal to public narratives.

After the event, visual artist Kuweni Dias Mendis wrote:
"Thank you for hosting for such a beautiful online space that I felt inclusive and safe. I really enjoyed the interactions, insights and was feeling connected to the women knowing we were all wanting the same thing even though we had different ways of going about it.

I am looking forward to connecting with these artists and working together as artists to connect people back with nature.
I must also make a special mention about the meditations you did at the start and your comments about reflecting about the art work before commenting that really struck a chord with me. Thank you bring that feminine way to the way we conduct our selves in a meeting and allowing everyone to speak without power and control I truly appreciate it."

Women Rising, May 2021
On 18 and 20 May 2021 we explored the theme of Women Rising, which focused particularly on three of our values from the Congress vision and values statement:

We, a web of women, seek and support wisdom for the common good.
We acknowledge the ancestral wisdom of First Peoples and accept our responsibility as custodians of a precious world that must be nurtured as it nurtures us.
As holders of a great and universal desire to look after the young, we raise our voices, confident in the potential of women to lead positive change.

The conversation was introduced by Congress member Honey Nelson who is a former veterinarian and aviator, an artist and a writer, and a woman who has lived a number of years in central Australia working in remote Indigenous communities with love and respect for their cultures.

On 20 May, we were also joined by Kath Kovac a new member who has worked with women in her community over several years and has now started her own business, Kupala, to empower women to change the patriarchal working culture into one that supports women and their unique needs and leadership styles. Thanks to all members that joined these two lively conversations.

Honey reminded us that it is a mere 5000 years of 100,000 years of human history, in which patriarchies have ascended to dominate worldwide hierarchical thought, structure, deities, and consequent history of conflicts and take-overs. These unmoderated exploitations have finally toppled our Earth’s climate balance, and harmed her life-sustaining waters, skies, and soils.

We exchanged our personal women’s stories of struggle, and our collective realisation that Now is the time when women’s leadership must rise and claim equal voice: as our descendants and all Life on Earth are facing a crisis of fire, flood, and unpredictable planetary upheavals. Our present leaders are failing to act with the immediacy and bold extremity which this emergency demands. Women’s natural ways of inclusion and nonadversarial debate are urgently needed, to balance the modes of power and decision-making that currently determine the climate and economic legacies we will leave to our children. This is a major part of Congress mission and action.