What I Learned About Sustainability From Hosting a Podcast With the Sustainable Sleepover Club

I’m Amy O’Brien and along with writing, I am a social justice and climate activist. I host the Sustainable Sleepover Club podcast.

We recognize that no one is perfect, we are constantly growing so we wanted to give people an accessible space where they could learn about sustainability. I am so thankful to have been able to unlearn and learn from being a part of this podcast and I’m thrilled to share some of what I’ve taken away with all you sustainable baddies.

My journey with sustainability

I started to learn about sustainability when I was just a few years old; my grandad and I would grow vegetables in our back garden and when they finally grew, I thought it was amazing. I also loved reading and began devouring feminist books which sparked a passion for social justice. When I was in primary school, we were taught about climate change but I thought then it would only affect polar bears and was very far away, plus that we could solve it by conserving water and turning off the lights! I didn’t fully grasp how this was impacting people until I was around 14.

I joined my local youth council in November, and I got involved in Future Generations the following September. This was a project coordinated by the NYCI (National Youth Council of Ireland) all about climate justice, a term I was being newly introduced to. Until Christmas, my group of 6 would meet on zoom (thanks to the pandemic) and chat about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through workshops.

I think what really cemented my notion of what this climate justice principle meant, was talking about everything through the lens of these goals. In the group, we started picking one goal eg life below water and another seemingly unrelated one eg gender equality, then trying to connect them. We’d speak about how fast fashion’s chemical toxins from production and the plastic waste from landfills are polluting our oceans but this same industry is paying women unfair wages whilst they work in poor conditions, all while creating clothes that are gendered to fit and perpetuate patriarchal stereotypes of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, discounting other identities and expressions. This is just one example but we began to connect these issues by connecting the SDGs and understanding them in the real world, and how they relate to actual people.

(Above) Amy O’Brien, Eve Lonergan, and Gabby O’Keefe

When the project finished, we realized that we had SO much more to learn, that we wanted to share these conversations and also bring in more perspectives. So, we started a podcast! We started to plan out a format, come up with a name, design a logo, launch our social media accounts, and so on but eventually, we released our very first episode in March 2020.

Seeing what we could do, pushed me to get involved in Fridays for Future, Spunout which is Ireland’s Youth Information Website, the Ombudsman for Children’s Office and writing for my local papers. I have also educated myself further on the topics we discuss and have tried to live a more sustainable life. There are so many ways to take action but this is my story.

The Sustainable Sleepover Club podcast:

How does it work? I, as host, interview our guests which you hear first, and then we head into the sleepover section. This is us, as friends, chatting casually about what we learned from the interview, unpacking it together, talking about our opinions, and making the whole podcast more digestible. We also have a fun question and bring a touch of ourselves to the episodes, making a sustainability lesson feel like a sleepover!

We have now released 33 episodes, including a fantastic LIVE event with the Irish Ambassador to the UN, Geraldine Byrne Nason, and introduced a new member!

What I've learned from hosting it:

I hope that listeners feel the same but I have learned so many invaluable lessons, from the biggest realizations to the smallest new term, because of hosting the Sustainable Sleepover Club. I’ve picked out 4 of the most significant messages that I carry with me always, that I hope you can keep close to.

Listen to understand, not to respond

This one has to come first because it is practically a podcast catchphrase!

So often, people confuse listening to someone only to retaliate instantly or just hearing with active listening which is so much more meaningful. Listen to other people to understand their experiences and their perspectives, especially when they are more marginalized by society.

Being able to understand the world they navigate will help you to be more empathetic and if we all had a little more compassion for others, it would be so much harder to continue exploiting people and the planet without doing something!

Everything is connected

The SDGs are like a blueprint for a fairer world. Theoretically, we can use them to map out the interconnections of social justice and change-making.

On a huge, worldly level, everything (like every goal) is connected and has a history that runs alongside a million other histories so we can’t continue to isolate issues such as the climate crisis and trans healthcare, and the lack of affordable housing.

On a more personal level, intersectionality is a term that refers to the way different marginalization can compound to form a person’s experience of oppression. A white lesbian woman for example will have a different experience than a disabled black woman or a trans woman. I found that my entire worldview changed when I truly started to comprehend and act on intersectionality.

We have power

Meeting all these wonderful guests, I began to uncover the true atrocities of the world. On a laptop in my bedroom, that could’ve left me feeling small, hopeless, and overwhelmingly sad but it didn’t. It didn’t because, at the same time, I was learning that we as individuals have power, particularly when we come together to form a collective. We impact the world around us daily just by being here but what we don’t always believe is, that we have the power to choose our impact.

As Gina Martin, one of our guests said in a TED X talk,

“We literally are society and without us all playing into white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and ableism… the systems collapse. We have the power, each and every one of us, to make a difference by using our voices and in all the actions we take.”

We are stronger as a community

I think I would’ve given up, not asked as many questions, and felt powerless if this podcast wasn’t, at its core, just a group of friends. We make mistakes, we’re always evolving, we challenge each other, feel anger, feel joy and we do it ALL together. We are a community, we support one another through this. A collective will always be more effective, we multiply our individual power by combining it. They also make this work lighter, I really feel like the Friday nights we record are just a chat with my incredible people.

This is what I have learned from hosting a podcast. I’m so grateful to Carl, Rohan, Anna, Eve, Gabby, and Ayushi for consistently sharing their opinions and to all our brilliant guests for joining us, bringing their knowledge in tow. From Mitzi Jonelle Tan, a climate justice activist in the Philippines, I learned about ‘revolutionary’ love — that the rage I feel about climate inaction is coming from a place of love because we so desperately want to protect the things we care about, the things at stake which helped me interpret my climate anxiety. From Ph.D. student Andy Hamilton — peace isn’t just the absence of war, instead, we need our own definition of sustainable peace. From Henna Amin, a poet, and Honey Ross, host of the Body Protest Podcast, we learned that what we think is beautiful today is a racist and patriarchal standard that is holding women back — this gave me the confidence to be boldly myself and prioritize the person I am. From Fionnuala Moran, I learned that the most sustainable thing you can find isn’t a thrifted dress or the expensive cruelty-free lipstick – it’s what you already own!