Faith for the Climate celebrates Black History Month 2025

October marks Black History Month in the UK, which has been commemorated for more than three decades. It started as a celebration of the contributions that people of African and Caribbean backgrounds have made to Britain from past to present. 

This year’s Black History Month theme is “Standing Firm in Power and Pride”. At Faith for the Climate, we are honouring this theme by publishing an in-depth series of interviews with friends and allies within our network all month long. Through these rich conversations, we learn about their journeys into climate justice and their joys and challenges as racialised people within the wider climate and nature movement. 

We launched this series with our movement builder Rosh Lal’s interview with rehena harilall, the founder of Buddhists Across Traditions, uniting diverse Buddhist paths to promote racial, social, and climate justice. We learn how rehena’s climate justice activism is shaped by her African and Asian heritages, and her journey of healing and peace, shaped by growing up in apartheid South Africa. Part One came out on Tuesday 14 October and Part Two on Thursday 16 October (links below). 

We next feature Dionne Gravesande, who has decades of experience working with churches and national and international non-governmental organisations. She plays a leading role in Christian Aid’s work on global partnerships and ecumenical collaborations in the areas of inequalities, peacebuilding, gender and climate. She reflects with our director Shanon Shah on how her multifaceted work and personal reflections have informed her analysis of the interconnections between climate and racial justice. Check out Part One, published on Tuesday 21 October and Part Two on Thursday 23 October (links below).

Update (29 October): We have more interviews that we will happily be publishing in the coming weeks, so check back regularly. The interviews are fantastic, and further affirmation that, while it’s important to celebrate Black History Month, Black history should really be celebrated throughout the year.

While the views shared in these interviews are all the interviewees’ own, these conversations provide invaluable glimpses into the multiple pathways and experiences of climate justice from global majority perspectives. They are a taster of the breadth of faith-inspired wisdom within and beyond our network, which we invite you to dive into and savour. 

You can also celebrate Black History Month 2025 with the powerful visual and educational resource pack built around the theme Standing Firm in Power and Pride. Featuring stunning posters, over 30 illustrated portraits, lesson plans, assemblies, and digital tools, this pack is designed for schools, workplaces, and communities to honour Black British history with pride and purpose.