How I Work
Live Conversations with
Eco & Climate Chaplains
HOSTED BY RABBI ORA NITKIN-KANER
Climate-conscious chaplaincy takes root in hospital rooms and forests, in disaster response and congregational life –
There are innumerable ways to tend to souls in a climate-changed world.
How I Work is a peer-learning network for climate-conscious chaplaincy: a live, unscripted conversation series that opens a window into the many ways that this work is taking place.
Four times a year, we feature a practitioner from this expanding field, sharing their bio in advance and inviting questions from you ahead of time. Practitioners answer live, with room for questions from those gathered.
These sessions won’t be recorded. What’s said here stays in the room, a gift of the moment. Open to all, and especially to those working in and around climate-conscious chaplaincy.
Come to find a community of eco-spiritual care providers and learn how varied and vital this work can be.
Next session:
Tuesday, October 27, 2026 • 12–1pm ET | 9–10am PT
Rev. Alison Cornish interviews
Rabbi Ora Nitkin-Kaner
Participation in How I Work is free of charge. Donations would be deeply appreciated to support our ongoing programs for spiritual leadership development.
Rabbi Ora Nitkin-Kaner is a climate change chaplain, educator, and innovative spiritual leader. As the founder of Exploring Apocalypse — a trauma-informed climate chaplaincy practice — she helps individuals and communities across faith traditions explore the spiritual disruptions, invitations, and reorientations of climate change.
Rabbi Ora sees curiosity as an important spiritual posture for living in a time of climate crisis. Her work moves folks from reactivity into responsiveness, and from self-abandonment into vulnerability-inspired care. Prior to her role as a climate change chaplain, Rabbi Ora served as a spiritual leader and pastoral caregiver in prisons, hospitals, and congregations across the United States. A poet, liturgist, and meditation teacher, she holds a BA and MA from the University of Toronto, as well as rabbinic ordination and an MA from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College.
The Rev. Alison Cornish serves as the Coordinator of the Chaplaincy Initiative at The BTS Center. Alison spent the first half of her professional life working as an historic preservationist and architectural historian, primarily in New England and on Long Island, NY. After 20 years of work with museums, municipalities and nonprofit organizations, Alison attended Andover Newton Theological Seminary in response to a felt sense of call directly from Earth to address what is it that we are doing in our daily lives and habits that is destroying the planet that we inhabit. Following CPE, field education in interfaith work and parish ministry, and ordination in the Unitarian Universalist tradition, Alison served congregations on Long Island while also embarking on studies with the Buddhist teacher Joanna Macy and Dominican sister Miriam McGillis. Alison became a GreenFaith Fellow in 2013, and a Climate Reality Project presenter in 2017.
She has served as Senior Director of Programs at Partners for Sacred Places, Executive Director of Pennsylvania Interfaith Power & Light, Director of Seminary and Congregational Initiatives at Interfaith Philadelphia, and as the Affiliated Community Minister at First Unitarian Church, Philadelphia. Alison’s facilitation work includes the Work That Reconnects, training-the-trainers for Civil Conversations, group practice of Nonviolent Communication, and the curriculum “Healthy Congregations.” A Program Consultant for the BTS Center since 2021, her work has focused on ecological and climate grief, religious imagination, and chaplaincy in a climate-changed world.
Alison and her husband Pat live in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, on the unceded lands of the Nipmuc and Pocumtuc peoples, in the watershed of the Connecticut River. When not working, Alison can be found along, on, and in, a local natural body of water, currently the Deerfield River.