Alumna Profile: Gianna Lum

Many climate organizers encounter a familiar cycle – newcomers join an activist group, passionately engage, and then face significant burnout. For Gianna Lum ’20GSAS, confronting this cycle wasn’t an endpoint, but a beginning. Gianna, an organizer, reporter, and community builder, translated her experiences with activist burnout into Climate Cafe NYC. As the organization's co-founder, Gianna is creating spaces for New Yorkers to connect, process their climate emotions, and find tangible ways to take action without sacrificing their well-being.

Gianna’s consciousness of the climate crisis was sparked in her Bay Area fourth-grade classroom. She recalls her teacher, who gave each student a drawing of the Earth to color in. “We were all admiring each other’s artwork,” Gianna told me, “and then she handed us all scissors that cut the Earth”. The students reluctantly cut their drawings into pieces. “She said, ‘This is what humans are doing to the environment,’” Gianna recounts. The lesson stuck: every positive action, like composting or walking to school, allowed you to tape a piece of your Earth back together.

This early lesson propelled Gianna to study Earth System Science and Urban Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where she specialized in the physics of the atmosphere. But she felt a crucial piece was missing. Wanting to move beyond pure science, she came to Columbia in 2019 for the Climate and Society master’s program, seeking a more interdisciplinary education that included policy and law. At Columbia, Gianna appreciated the quality of her professors and the ability to enroll in a breadth of courses, including Climate Change Law with Michael Gerrard and Data Sonification with Dr. Ben Holtzman in the music department. Gianna was also a graduate research assistant under Dr. Kate Marvel, processing data on US drought conditions at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Seeking to translate her knowledge into action, Gianna joined the climate justice group Sunrise Columbia, where she worked on the campaign to pressure the university to divest from fossil fuels. “We had over 1000 petition signatures and would have signs in front of the school pretty often,” she says. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, on-campus organizing stalled, and like many others, Gianna found herself burnt out. After graduating, she took a job selling renewable energy, only to discover the company was a subsidiary of a major oil corporation.

Feeling disillusioned but still determined, she threw her energy into local organizing with Sunrise NYC, helping elect Jamaal Bowman to Congress. Yet, the burnout persisted. 

Needing a space to recharge, Gianna and her friend Jon Kirsch, whom she met through Sunrise Columbia, began tabling in parks and talking to New Yorkers. They found a common theme: people “were feeling equal anxiety or a sense of grief, but also they didn’t know what to do about it, or they wanted to know, how could they get involved locally?”. In November 2022, they hosted the first Climate Cafe in Jon’s Brooklyn living room, inviting activist friends and concerned neighbors to share their feelings over coffee and snacks.

Climate Cafe NYC has evolved into a vital community hub since that first meeting. While other climate cafes can focus solely on emotional processing, Gianna’s model differs. “Ours is really action oriented,” she explains. “We feel that people are most empowered when they actually do something about it after”. The organization provides a space to navigate difficult emotions, but it also equips people with the community, information, and resources to volunteer, engage in direct action, and plug into local work sustainably.

Alongside volunteer organizing, Gianna works professionally as a tech reporter, exploring alternatives to Bitcoin and how blockchain technology can be used for supply chains and healthcare.

By creating a space that nurtures both the activist and the activism, Gianna addresses one of the climate movement’s most critical challenges – burnout. Her work is a testament to the idea that caring for each other is not a distraction from the work but central to it. As she puts it, “Mental health is also movement health, and without that, we’re going to burn down”.