Stories

How Rose Hendricks transforms language into climate action

At the Planetary Health Action Fair in San Francisco this fall, Rose Hendricks moved between twenty poster presentations, each one a different experiment in community action.

Here were teenagers with the Quest Science Center monitoring air quality and successfully advocating for climate literacy education in their schools. There, a team from the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry shared insights from engaging Latin American communities in culturally resonant climate communication. In another corner, the Caretakers of Wonder team demonstrated a playbook for building climate hope with children under eight.

“We organized this so people working at different organizations can share what they’re trying and learning,” Hendricks says. “To help them find others working toward similar goals.”

For Hendricks, now executive director of Seeding Action at the Association of Science and Technology Centers, this scene captured what she’d been building toward since becoming a Civic Science Fellow five years earlier. But the path wasn’t straightforward.

Hendricks’s civic science journey began with an insight gained during her Ph.D. work at the University of California, San Diego: Words literally change how we think. “If you talk about illness as either a battle or a journey, we actually showed there are measurable differences in the ways people emotionally appraise that situation,” she says. “Framing matters, so we should apply those kinds of insights to real-world challenges.”

After her Ph.D., Hendricks worked at FrameWorks Institute, studying how to frame social and scientific issues to expand public understanding and support for systemic solutions. Then in 2020, she spotted a listing for a brand-new type of fellowship where she could apply what she’d learned about communicating with the public to a new kind of challenge.

An ambitious experiment

The Civic Science Fellowship involved a unique task: uniting four scientific societies—the American Society for Cell Biology, American Geophysical Union, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Research!America—to collectively transform how scientists engage with the public. The project aimed to test whether professional associations could work together through a collective impact model, a framework in which multiple organizations align their efforts around a shared vision and mutually reinforcing activities.

The premise had emerged from workshops convened by The Kavli Foundation, the Rita Allen, Foundation, the Packard Foundation, and the Moore Foundation. The organizers realized that associations and societies hold a lot of clout in their respective fields, Hendricks says. Why not leverage that to make public engagement part of scientific culture itself?

She dove in, conducting a comprehensive landscape assessment, interviewing society staff, and analyzing their civic science programs. She facilitated connections across roughly 100 members, identifying opportunities for collaboration: sharing resources, filling gaps, and scaling up effective practices.

But by the end of the 18-month fellowship, the collective impact model hadn’t yet taken hold. It was challenging to align on a shared vision for change, common metrics for success, and a coherent set of mutually reinforcing activities, Hendricks says. She suspects the pandemic played a role by creating an existential crisis for associations that depended on in-person conferences.

But Hendricks doesn’t attribute the struggle solely to timing. “In retrospect, the fact that I was new to many of these organizations, and the staff participating across organizations were new to one another, meant that we needed a substantial amount of time to develop relationships and explore possibilities working together,” she says. “There may have been some reluctance to devote significant time and resources to the collaboration, since it was unclear how things might move forward beyond my fellowship period.”

Even if there wasn’t enough time for the collaboration to coalesce, the landscape research provided valuable insights. And the experience taught both her and her host institutions critical lessons about what makes networks succeed.

Today, Hendricks leads Seeding Action, an initiative launched by the Association of Science and Technology Centers in 2023 to cultivate “a culture of hope and action for planetary health.” The network has grown to over 125 organizations—science centers, museums, and public engagement institutions in multiple countries.

This network is thriving where the earlier one struggled, and the differences provide some hints about why. The Association has made a long-term commitment to house and support Seeding Action. It offers concrete resources, not just coordination. And it applies Hendricks’s cognitive science expertise to shifting how people think and talk about planetary health.

“So much of what we encounter about planetary health is doom and gloom, for understandable reasons. But that doesn’t generally motivate a lot of people,” Hendricks says. The alternative is an asset-based mindset. “It’s what we can work towards, not the fear we’re trying to run away from.”

A framework of possibility

Seeding Action centers its work on “active hope,” a term coined by the eco-philosopher Joanna Macy. “A sense of active hope is an understanding that a better world is possible,” Hendricks says. “And that we all have roles to play; that’s the active part.”

The philosophy aligns with her cognitive science training. Just as calling cancer a battle versus a journey changes emotional responses, framing planetary challenges through doom versus possibility fundamentally alters engagement.

Hendricks and her team have created evidence-based resources that help museums and science centers apply this approach, including guides on framing, imagination toolkits, and communication strategies. Seeding Action hosts monthly gatherings, facilitates partnerships, and continues to measure what works.

The impacts are tangible. Quest Science Center, an Association member in Livermore, California, now has a full-time Planetary Health Coordinator. “Quest was going to do this awesome stuff on their own anyway,” Hendricks says. “We’re just helping to provide the community and maybe lower the barrier to entry, share new ideas, and help them go a little bit farther, a little faster.”

“The network’s emphasis on equity, reflection, and peer learning has functioned like a mycelium network: quietly connecting and nourishing our thinking, language, and actions,” says Quest’s Adrian Bueno.

At Children’s Science Center Lab in Northern Virginia, staff created a “Happy Planet” summer camp for first through fifth graders. “It’s really cool that they’re doing topics like interconnectedness with first graders,” Hendricks says, “and through that lens of joy and happiness.”

Through partnerships with organizations and companies like iNaturalist and Sanofi, Seeding Action supports biodiversity monitoring projects and community health initiatives. Museums nationwide are transforming their approach—from the Boise WaterShed’s bike route simulators using real local streets, to Asheville Museum of Science’s exhibit documenting the impact of Hurricane Helene.

“Our field has begun to shift its approach from one focused on educating about problems to one characterized by supporting communities to take collective action,” Hendricks says.

But she knows how hard this shift remains. “I lead an initiative about planetary health, and I still fail to talk about climate change with other parents at my kid’s preschool,” she says.

That admission captures both the challenge and the possibility. If museums can become spaces where those difficult conversations feel possible—where people with different perspectives can deliberate together and survive it—they become something more than educational institutions. They become what Hendricks calls “civic infrastructure.”

At the San Francisco conference, those teenagers working with Quest in Livermore weren’t just presenting research. They were demonstrating that young people can advocate, can persuade, and can change how their community approaches climate literacy. Their success demonstrated what the entire Seeding Action network is learning: When you frame planetary health as something communities can act on together, people respond.

“A better world is possible,” Hendricks says. “And we all have roles to play.”

Hendricks is a member of the 2020-21 Civic Science Fellows cohort. Her Fellowship was supported by The Kavli Foundation.