This is a letter that I don’t want to write. I struggle with it because of the occasion the letter marks: the end of Dayad, and the purpose the letter serves, to offer praises. Both factors and many more I am sure, make this very challenging for me. I have delayed this task and the occasion for as long as one could. And the reason, the Reason, that propelled me to summon up my courage and strength to write this letter today is grace. Nothing more, nothing less. Just grace.
Let me introduce myself for those of you who I have not yet met. My name is Shu Liang, and I am the founder of Stichting Day of Adaptation (Dayad), a non-profit organisation focused on climate communication with organisations and communities based in the Netherlands.
There is already some description on our website about why and what happened at the beginning of Dayad, so I won’t repeat it here. Shout out to Lindy Hromas! What I want to share here is the work rigor that I carried with me diving into Dayad. The creation process was guided by top-quality (if I may say so) industrial ambition and precision. But even so, Dayad was conceived out of professional frustration. I found climate communication to be too heavy and therefore unintentionally mentally distancing, which does not encourage people to action. I was curious to see how climate communication could be more balanced and engaging. That holiday season at the end of 2018 was very different for me than for most people: I locked myself away in my study and spent days and nights of those festive weeks in front of my computer. Intensive research and analysis helped me work out Dayad, in its thin yet resilient shell. Concept notes, name, website, logo, and colours started developing. I mentioned grace as the reason for this letter. Funny thing is that grace was very much absent when Dayad was born. This shows how Dayad has changed me as a person. Thank you, Dayad!
Slowly but surely Quickly and enthusiastically other people were attracted to the Dayad concept. Looking back, as much as I founded Dayad alone in its first few days of existence, Dayad was very quickly embraced by many warm, talented and willing minds, from the get-go. For that, I am deeply grateful. In that sense, the me-2-we transition occurred quite organically. And we embraced an egalitarian, cluster-approach. To this day I am very proud that egalitarianism remains one of our core strengths.
From our very first activity, Dayad presented itself as an organisation. My colleagues and I worked as a team. Shout out to Raluca Voinea, Radhika Bindiganavile. We organised a series of Dialogue Days in the spring of 2019, to bring the topic to the participants, creating a relaxed and safe space where participants were invited to share their personal experiences, perspectives and feelings on the topic of climate change and action. When the participants become messengers, and the messages are expressed using their own voice to each other’s ears, something magical takes place: deeply confronting but existentially necessary climate communication occurs with open minds and hearts.
In the summer of 2019, another initiative started to hatch: what if we engaged through a board game? A board game with a serious topic, climate change in this case, and with a captivating plot and exciting characters. Everyone can easily relate to games, especially one set in their workplace and community. All this mixed up, you get our climate board game, Minions of Disruptions. Combine the board game experience with a short and sweet, tailored discussion, voila, you get our Game Day initiative! Shout to Joy Pengel, Rishi Kumar, Aaron Cohen for the extensive research and design effort; and Koshanthia ueorguieva and many others for diligent playtesting.
The Game Day had its first official run at the end of 2019. It was with a group of students from the University of Groningen. Shout out to Nienke Edelenbosch and Rishi Kumar for facilitating the session and Ina Horlings for sharing our vision! You can read more about it here. Was it successful? Absolutely. Among the positive and constructive feedback we received afterwards, we saw the incredible ability and potential behind our approach: we opened up a fun and positive space to connect vague knowledge and understanding among participants, and by doing so, developed collective ambition and motivation towards climate action. We were pumped to bring the Game Day to more organisations and communities heading into 2020.
Another significant event happened at Dayad towards the end of 2019 – we got our mission! We had our first organisational strategy session at which we formulated a strong and authentic mission for ourselves. It is so strong that it has been used ever since then, withstanding all the challenges along the way. Our mission is to empower people and organisations to understand, accept and commit to climate action. Watch our video clip to see how we shared the mission in a super cool way! The mission gave form to Dayad´s inner compass, which guides us in our planning and decision-making. Shout out to Lindy Hromas, Lana Garrels and Guido van Noppen for this coming-of-age moment for Dayad.
Just as Dayad started to dream big, Covid hit us around the world. That was tough. We lost some great opportunities. We are still feeling the effect of it. We managed to carry out a Dialogue Day online, but I know deep inside I froze. It was too hard for me to recognize and let alone admit it to others. Looking back, that is one of the many growing opportunities I missed. If I were in a similar situation again, I would try to exhibit more bravery, open up more and share more. That is yet another way that Dayad has changed me – I am now more aware of and open about my vulnerability. For that I am grateful.
Luckily we got an opportunity to bring our Game Day online through a virtual conference hosted by the City of Groningen, and that led us to continue spreading the words of fun and engaging climate communication. Shout out to Nienke Edelenbosch. Not to mention the kick ass how-to-play videos that we made during this period, in English AND Dutch! Koshanthia Gueorguieva, Gueorgie Gueorguieva, Quirien Wijnberg, Désirée van Waes, Ru Nacken-van der Rest and Ewan Cameron – my hat off to you for your contribution. We subsequently hosted online Game Days successfully with groups around the world including Chile, Mexico, The Philippines, Sweden, UK and US!
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Our climate board game started to attract more interest. In 2022 Dayad sprang into a partnership with Simavi and their partners to adapt the climate board game to a very different community, the pastoralists in Kenya. The results were very encouraging – indeed, they were shockingly encouraging. Our local partners were just as surprised as AnaCapri Mauro, my team member, and I, to see how quickly and passionately the participants grasped and embraced this climate communication and engagement tool. This is really no small feat considering some of the participants are elders who were illiterate and had never even held a pen in their hands. The adaptation project was one of the finalists in a challenge. I am very grateful for all the partners including Simavi and Proportion Global, especially Sara Ahrari, Janne Dingemans, Patrick Mwanzia, Jane Rabera Nyamwamu and Thomas Schuurmans.
In the meantime, Dayad made a strategic decision in embarking on a journey to conduct research in the hope of sharing our results with a bigger community of practitioners and scientists. It was not an easy decision as research is resource-intensive, time and money for example, is not something that we have a lot of. We did it because we wanted to scale up. That was our intention from the get-go. We wanted to share what we have learnt along the way, what works, what could work better. With Minja Sillanpää’s brilliant leadership, a team of researchers including Minja herself, AnaCapri Mauro, Julia Eichhorn and Minttu Hänninen were able to conduct data gathering and analysis diligently and thoroughly. We were very fortunate to have worked with leading researchers including Mo Hamza, Sirkku Juhola and Sam Illingworth to make papers published in academic journals. One is already published: Decreasing psychological distance to climate adaptation through serious gaming: Minions of Disruptions; and a second one on its final stretch. At this point the papers serve as our collective and hopeful wish: that more people out in different parts of the world and the universe would see the value in Dayad’s strategy for the climate issue with communities and organisations.
Just like many other non-profits, Dayad also has a board of directors, and the ones we had were unusually visionary, enthusiastic and supportive. From the very beginning, the board members have been guiding me and others in navigating a business territory that is unfamiliar to many of us, whether strategic decision making, partnerships or fundraising. I still make the joke occasionally that I didn’t know what I got myself into when I started a non-profit in a country rather foreign to me. It was pure ignorance that I took the leap of faith, and jumped right into arms of wonderful support who carried Dayad together through all these years. Shout to Raluca Voinea, Paul Pietjouw, Sharon Smit, Perle Laouenan-Catchpole and Maria Dali-Tocarciuc!
There are many other wonderful people who were an essential part of the Dayad journey. I cannot express how full of gratitude I feel to call them my colleagues. They helped form the Dayad culture of respect and diversity. Other than the ones mentioned above, I am deeply grateful towards Olusegun Adeoye, Andrew Mertens, Alyssa Gayraud, Carlos Alonso, Fisayo Olajide, Giorgia Mecugni, Ijeoma Onwuka, Iuliia Naumenko, Kathryn Wellen, Luay Idriss, Nuno Cabecinha, Petra Hausherr, Sarvesh Singh, among many others.
So if all is so rosy, why have we chosen to close up to Dayad? It is true that we are still getting leads to organise sporadic Game Day activities. But we have not been able to scale up in a way that is financially sustainable and strategically impactful. We had made some great effort in grants applications and public fundraising – big thank-you to Lindy Hromas, Minja Sillanpää and Koshanthia Gueorguieva! Despite our best effort in the past few years, it is just not working, sadly. And to be fair, as a person, I have been stretching my own leadership and professional skills and capacities to a limit: mental health and leadership fatigue is real. It may be still too early to go into posthumous analysis now, especially as I am confident that more will become clear as we wrap up Dayad.
Now looking forward, what does this all mean for Dayad? It means that Dayad as of 31 August 2024 will cease development and operations will be limited to wrapping up existing activities. It means that the Dayad website will still be up and running as a source of repository information, but will not be further updated. It means that the business entity will be closed down. It means that if you have any related inquiry you will need to contact me directly, and I will respond in a personal capacity to the best I can.
As I am reaching the end of this letter, I feel so much ease and confidence in what we have accomplished together through Dayad and with Dayad. And this is with a small team of enthusiastic volunteers! Imagine how much more climate action we could accomplish if we can enthuse more people. Just imagine. Please, take a moment, click on one of the links above, read our papers, read our stories. Be inspired. Take action. We are in this together.
– Shu Liang
About the Author: Shu is the founder and director of Day of Adaptation, a non-profit organisation based in the Netherlands. She is a Chinese Canadian and recently Dutch living in Haarlem. Shu has a Master’s degree in Disaster Risk Management and Climate Change Adaptation from Lund University, Sweden, and has previously worked at World Food Programme Kenya and Global Center on Adaptation. Her professional interests are adaptation, sustainability, leadership, and communications. Shu is in constant reconciliation between the freedom of knowledge and constraints of reality: for one, the concrete tiles in the garden have often called her attention and action – she is finally about to start taking out the tiles. She is humbled by people’s vast capacity to adapt and care for each other.