In Conversation with Katie Hodgetts
3 years, 3 months, 17 days, 11 hours
1 April 2026
I want more climate anxiety, specifically in people in power.
Katie Hodgetts is the founder and Executive Director of The Resilience Project, which supports the wellbeing of young people facing fatigue in their fight for climate justice. She is also the author of the book ‘Act, Rest, Reset, Repeat’ and in 2023 was recognised by The Conduit as a Young Climate Innovator.
We met for this interview only minutes after Katie’s powerful speech at the Inner Development Goals summit in Stockholm in October last year, where she spoke to the stress, anxiety and loneliness experienced by activists striving for a better future for our world.
In our conversation I wanted to understand Katie’s own journey. Though her awakening to the climate crisis came by chance, she saw at once that it wasn’t narrowly an issue about the environment. ‘It’s really about politics. It’s really about humans. It’s really about greed and injustice and a misallocation of resources.’
Interestingly she doesn’t see her own purpose as specifically about climate change. She sees it as helping others to be change-makers, by recognising that ‘the biggest, bravest, brightest person of themselves is already within them’.
One question I was especially keen to explore was whether Katie felt that for young people our narrative about the future should be one based on hope, or fear. She was adamant that there was no place for false hope, and that it was through ‘facing the difficult truths’ that people would be motivated to act. ‘I want you to panic. Because in that panic it propels meaningful action, meaningful justice.’
Image credit: Katie Hodgetts/Inner Development Goals.