Climate action doesn't start with policy. Before governments act, ideas have to become understood, accepted and eventually normal.

A lot of this happens through culture – the stories we watch, the people we listen to, and the ideas that shape how we see the world.

Groundswell backs advocacy organisations working to shift policy, law and public debate. But that work is easier when the cultural ground has already begun to move and climate solutions feel familiar, relevant and possible.

While doing this work, we could see a real gap in the climate movement. Millions of Australians were concerned about climate change, but weren’t engaging with traditional climate messages or spaces. Reaching them meant meeting people where they already were, through the stories, voices and culture they trusted.

And so we launched Culture Shapers – a program developed and curated by Sam Watson Wood, working with cultural leaders to help climate show up more naturally in the things Australians already watch, read and listen to.
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Groundswell's history of bringing people together

We already had some evidence that this could work. For years, Groundswell’s immersion programs had brought people from culture, business, philanthropy and other spheres of influence into close contact with climate scientists, First Nations leaders and campaigners, giving them ideas to take back into their own worlds.

Following their time with us, Claudia Karvan brought climate into Bump, musician Heidi Lenffer met Michael Bones and went on to build FEAT., bringing major Australian musicians together to invest in renewable energy, and Sam Elsom was introduced to Tim Flannery’s work on asparagopsis seaweed – an idea that helped seed what became Sea Forest.

Other participants changed careers, redirected philanthropy, created organisations, and found collaborators they might never otherwise have met.

Culture Shapers was an attempt to take that effect and become much more deliberate about it.
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Reaching the people climate campaigns often don’t

The research behind Culture Shapers pointed to a big opportunity.

Almost half of Australians sat somewhere in the ‘concerned, cautious or disengaged’ middle on climate. They weren’t rejecting the science, but climate competed with the many other pressures of daily life, and traditional campaign messages weren’t always the ones most likely to reach them.

So we asked a different question: who is already reaching these people? It's the podcasts they listen to on the way to work. The TV series they bing in one weekend. The people who make them laugh.

These storytellers often have enormous reach and trust, but many sit well outside the climate movement. And because the people making those stories know their audiences better than we ever could, our job wasn’t to hand them a script – it was to give them the right ingredients.
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Bringing culture and climate into the same room

The first Culture Shapers immersions in 2025 brought journalists, broadcasters, screen creatives, content creators and other influential storytellers together with climate scientists, First Nations leaders and campaigners.

At one immersion, the people in the room had a combined audience reach of around 15 million Australians, which is exactly the kind of leverage Culture Shapers is built around – not trying to speak directly to millions of people ourselves, but working closely with a smaller group who already shape what millions of Australians see, hear and talk about.

The early programs focused on the foundations including climate science, solutions, public attitudes, misinformation, effective communication and the role each industry could play.

But as the program developed, something became clear – people didn’t just want more information, they wanted to know what to do with it.
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From climate literacy to creative practice

That pushed Culture Shapers in a more industry-specific direction.

For screen creatives, the question became less ‘how do we talk about climate?’ and more ‘what makes a genuinely good climate story?’

In August 2025, our screen gathering with Hollywood Climate Summit explored global storytelling trends, audience behaviour, the commercial opportunity, world building and how creators could future-proof stories as the world itself changes.

The partnership also connected Australian creatives with a much bigger international movement exploring how film and television can shape public understanding of climate.

That pointed to the next step – helping people turn what they’d learned into stories, ideas and work of their own.
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We made it a comedy lab

In August 2026, Culture Shapers evolved again with the Culture Shapers Comedy Lab, bringing comedy and screen creatives together.

It still began with climate science and audience research, but much more of the time was spent on craft.

The group explored some big creative questions: How does The Daily Show find comedy in climate news? How can humour expose fossil-fuel misinformation without becoming preachy? What are producers actually looking to finance? And how do you build climate naturally into the world of a story without turning it into ‘the climate episode’?

Contributors included Daily Show writer Nicole Conlan, Yellow Dot Studios’ Staci Roberts-Steele, comedian Dan Ilic, Bump co-creator Kelsey Munro and climate scientist Dr. Lesley Hughes.

Then participants moved into making. Working in small groups, they developed original Australian comedy concepts with climate woven naturally into their worlds, before pitching them to writers, producers and industry leaders for feedback.

That’s where Culture Shapers is heading now – helping people move from understanding climate to making work that brings it into culture in a meaningful way.