Two complementary responses to a world under strain
by Matthew Painton, Convener
Our work recognises that resilience has both an inner and an outer dimension. We need spaces to process what collapse is doing to us, and we need ways to prepare together for what is coming, not by retreating behind walls, but by strengthening solidarity where we live.
Collapse places very different demands on us at the same time. It unsettles our inner worlds — bringing fear, grief, confusion, and loss of meaning — while also placing increasing strain on the outer conditions of everyday life: food, energy, community trust, and local systems. Any response that attends to only one of these dimensions may well falter.
What Collapse Club recognises is that responding well to breakdown requires two complementary kinds of support — not as alternatives, but as mutually reinforcing responses to the same reality.
Emotional Resilience
For many people who are collapse-aware and wish to respond with care rather than defensiveness, this is where the work begins. Becoming aware of systemic breakdown can be deeply distressing, and much of what arises cannot easily be spoken about in everyday settings — sometimes even with those closest to us.
Emotional resilience spaces offer somewhere to metabolise difficult feelings, to stay present with reality without becoming overwhelmed, numbed, or reactive. In our meetings, people explore these experiences together, hear how others are coping, and reflect on the changes they are making in their lives. Many find that simply being able to name what they are carrying, and to have it met with understanding rather than dismissal, is deeply reassuring — and, over time, unexpectedly enlivening. Rather than draining energy, this kind of shared reflection often restores a sense of acceptance, agency, connection, and aliveness.
Solidarity Prepping
Those drawn to a loving or relational response to collapse are often wary of fortress-style preparation — hoarding, hard boundaries, and withdrawal behind walls. And yet, as stresses increase, adaptation still has to happen materially and locally. Food, care, safety, and mutual support cannot be abstracted away.
Solidarity prepping reframes preparedness as something done with others rather than against them: building shared capacity, trust, and cooperation rather than private stockpiles. In these conversations, practical concerns are explored together, alongside the challenges, tensions, and uncertainties they raise.
Synthesis
These two offerings only make sense together. Emotional resilience without practical solidarity risks becoming inward and fragile, unable to meet the realities of disruption. Practical preparation without emotional capacity quickly fractures under fear, conflict, and mistrust. Each supports and stabilises the other.
You are welcome to join us, in either program or both. Please visit our Meeting Calendar to see meeting times in your time zone. We hope to see you soon!
Collapse Club started in January, 2022 as a series of interviews on YouTube. David Baum, of Seattle, Washington, talked to people from the "collapse community," trying to understand what was bringing us together, and where we were going. The series has continued intermittently to the present, and is now an audio podcast at https://podcast.collapseclub.com.
In August, 2023, Susan Porter, then of Amarillo, Texas, brought her long experience with the 12-step program AlAnon to Collapse Club, and we began holding "self-help" meetings for people concerned about collapse. Those meetings continue, twice a week, with a team of five Conveners (see below).
Our focus has been on the "inner work" of emotional resilience, but we have always asked the question: "What is mine to do?" That is, what is the "outer work" that can give expression to our changing perspective on collapse?
In late 2025, we became aware of Kollapscamp, in Germany, and a philosophy of action called "Solidarity Prepping." The core idea is that reaching out to our community is the most important thing we can do to prepare for the upcoming disruptions of collapse. We can create relationships that sustain us, both in everyday life and in the extraordinary times when we must respond to disaster.
Today, in early 2026, our mission is to synthesize the inner work of Emotional Resilience and the outer work of Solidarity Prepping into a practice of love, compassion, and intentional responsibility that gives meaning to life in the time of collapse. We hope you'll join us!
Meet our Conveners
David has been attending to collapse since he was a teenager. In high school, he made an extensive study of nuclear weapons and decided that the game is up! He went to Harvard for three semesters, majoring in "turn on, tune in, and drop out." As a volunteer HAM radio operator in the Seattle Emergency Operations Center, he saw the mismatch between the incoming crises and human capability to respond. He was a volunteer for the Deep Adaptation Forum from 2019 to 2021. He writes on Substack. Email David.
Susan is an artist with over 25 years of membership in 12-step recovery groups. She has a strong desire to connect with and participate in building an online collapse-aware community. She has a Substack where she posts her thoughts on various aspects of collapse and recovery. Prints of Susan's artwork are available at FineArtAmerica. Email Susan.
Matthew’s lifelong environmentalism and social activism did not prepare him for the sudden collapse awareness that completely unravelled him in 2017. Since then he has been working closely with fellow coaches, therapists, facilitators and educators to upgrade our sensemaking practices in order to help others get to grips with what is transpiring on earth and to respond with virtue. He coaches Deep Adaptation and full-spectrum sensemaking one-to-one and in groups, does photography to transmute his anxiety into beauty, and lives in the UK. Please email Matthew if you would like to contact him about coaching.
Teresa was a member of the U.K. Green Party in the 1980s, a Parliamentary election candidate and the London rep on the Party’s organising committee. Later, Greenpeace kept her informed of the escalating climate and ecological catastrophe. From 2019 she became involved in creative and joyous actions instigated by Extinction Rebellion. Her continuing connection to nonviolent direct action groups (mostly in support roles now) sits alongside her profound acceptance of collapse: direct action might slow it down and is a community of great people who understand what is happening.
Jo is a retired psychiatrist, avid gardener and writer whose intense awareness and love for her natural environment infused her life lived on three continents. Since childhood she has been attuned to changing and damaged landscapes, but became acutely aware of the acceleration of global warming in the 1980’s. A longtime activist, previously active in Physicians for Social Responsibility in the fight against nuclear weapons, she is now seeking ways to work with grief and despair and efforts to minimize the suffering accompanying collapse. Art, meditation, gardening and the collapse community are her sources of solace. Email Jo.
🛟 If you have questions, want more information, or need technical help, please email: welcome@collapseclub.com.