May is Mental Health Awareness Month. The first full week — May 3 through 9 — is Children's Mental Health Awareness Week, with this year's theme set by the National Federation of Families as Beyond the Screen: Education, Prevention, Connection.
It is a useful week to talk publicly about something that has been a quiet but central thread in our youth fellows program for the past three years: the mental health dimensions of doing climate work as a young person, and what we are learning about how to support fellows through it.
This is not a clinical post. None of our staff are mental health professionals, and the work we are describing is not a substitute for the clinical support that some fellows seek and that we actively encourage when it is the right fit. What this is, instead, is an honest accounting of what we are seeing in the room and what has helped.
What the research keeps finding
The research on youth climate emotion has been building for several years. The most-cited single study, a 2021 global survey of 10,000 young people aged 16 to 25 published in The Lancet Planetary Health, found that more than half of respondents reported feeling sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty about climate change. About 45% reported that climate-related distress affected their daily lives.
Subsequent studies have largely replicated these findings, with notable national and regional variation. The pattern that holds across the literature is that young people who are most engaged with climate information — who read the news, who participate in environmental work, who take the science seriously — are also most likely to report meaningful distress.
This is not an artifact of youth temperament. Climate scientists in their thirties, forties, and fifties report similar patterns. The literature on climate emotion has, over the past decade, moved away from framing this distress as a pathology. It is being increasingly understood as a proportionate response to a serious external reality.
The harder question, the one our youth fellows program has had to engage with, is what to do with that.
What our fellows are reporting
We do not run formal psychological assessments on our fellows. We do run anonymous quarterly reflection surveys, and we have a long-running practice of structured one-on-one check-ins with each fellow at three points in their fellowship year. The patterns from the past three years are consistent enough to share, in aggregate.
About two-thirds of our incoming fellows arrive reporting some level of climate-related anxiety or distress before they ever start the program. The most commonly cited specific concerns: uncertainty about the long-term habitability of regions they care about, worry about generational responsibility for problems they did not cause, and a recurring sense of frustration at the gap between what the science says is needed and what current policy is delivering.
For most fellows, that baseline distress shifts during the fellowship year. It does not disappear — we should be honest that it generally does not — but the shape of it changes. Fellows who arrive feeling powerless tend to report, by the end of their fellowship year, a more grounded sense of agency. The framing they use most often is something like: "I still know the situation is serious. But I know what I am doing about it, and I am doing it with other people."
The reverse pattern — fellows whose distress deepens during the year — is rarer but real. We track it carefully when it happens.
What seems to help
The interventions we have arrived at, through experience rather than design, are surprisingly mundane.
Concrete, completable work. Climate distress in young people is amplified, in our reading, by the abstract scale of the problem. A meaningful counterweight is to be doing specific, observable work that produces specific, observable results. A water quality dataset that gets published. A neighborhood air-quality dashboard that residents actually use. A policy brief that gets cited in a city council hearing. The completion is part of the medicine.
A real community of peers. The youth fellows cohort is intentionally small — currently 18, growing to 36 by 2028 — and the fellows spend significant time together. The peer relationships that form, in our experience, are the single most important emotional infrastructure of the program. Young people who feel alone with their climate concerns feel quite different about those concerns once they know seventeen other young people who share them and are taking action.
Cross-generational mentorship. Pairing fellows with veteran environmental practitioners — staff, community garden coordinators, scientists, organizers — has been one of the program's most consistent successes. The mentors do not pretend to have solved climate change. They do bring a kind of long-arc perspective that is hard for young people to generate on their own. The framing many of our mentors use, in different words, is something like: "I have been doing this work for thirty years. The work has changed me more than it has changed the climate. That is okay. The work is still worth doing."
Time outdoors. This is the most underappreciated element. Fellows who spend significant time in the field — sampling, monitoring, restoring, planting — report meaningfully different emotional baselines from fellows who spend more of their time in front of screens analyzing data. We have started building outdoor field time more deliberately into the fellowship structure as a result.
Permission to grieve. Some of what fellows are processing is, accurately described, environmental grief. Loss of specific ecosystems, loss of certain anticipated futures, loss of certain landscapes that are changing in their lifetimes. The fellowship has built in a small, deliberate practice of acknowledging this — through occasional facilitated discussion sessions and through informal community rituals. The point is not to fix the grief. The point is to let it be a real thing in the room rather than a thing fellows have to hide.
What does not help
It is also worth saying, plainly, what we have learned does not help.
Performative optimism does not help. Telling young people that everything is going to be fine, when they know it is not all going to be fine, accomplishes the opposite of what is intended. They will register the dishonesty and stop trusting the framing.
Doom-only framing also does not help. Young people who are immersed exclusively in worst-case projections, without exposure to ongoing real-world work, do worse than fellows who get both. Both is harder than either, and both is what is true.
Solo work without community does not help. Climate work done alone amplifies the worst parts of climate emotion. The peer cohort is not a soft add-on. It is structural.
What we would tell other programs
Three things, briefly, for other youth programs in our field that are thinking about this.
Build climate emotion into the program design explicitly. Pretending it is not there does not make it not be there. It just makes it harder to address when it surfaces, which it will.
Hire or partner with mental health professionals who understand climate-specific distress. Most general youth mental health providers are not trained on this. The ones who are can be enormously helpful, both as direct supports and as consultants to your program staff.
Track outcomes that matter. Climate engagement is not a useful single metric. Sustained climate engagement, paired with sustained well-being, is. We have started tracking the latter.
A note to our own community
If you are a fellow, a fellow's family member, or a fellow alum reading this: thank you for the work you have done and continue to do. The texture of what you carry is real, and we see it.
If you are a young person in our broader community who is thinking about applying to the fellowship program: the next cohort intake opens in October. The application is rigorous; we will be honest about that. The work, and the people doing it, are some of the most worthwhile parts of TerraFuture.
May the rest of Mental Health Awareness Month bring some real attention to what young people are carrying. The work continues.
