At a time when climate anxiety can feel abstract and overwhelming, and being Jewish something people may need to hide in big cities, Adamah Los Angeles is trying something different: turning Jewish values into local climate action with dirt-under-the-fingernails practicality.
This spring, the Los Angeles-based branch of Adamah is inviting the Jewish community to engage climate work not as a distant political slogan, but as a lived spiritual and communal responsibility. Its newly opened LA Sustainability Fund is one of the clearest examples. Jewish nonprofits in the greater Los Angeles area can apply for grants of up to $20,000 to support energy-saving and sustainability projects, provided they are part of the Jewish Climate Leadership Coalition.
That’s real money for real change – the kind of funds that can help schools, synagogues, camps, and community spaces lower emissions and utility bills while becoming more resilient in a warming California.
The initiative arrives alongside LA Climate Week (April 12–16), where Adamah LA is organizing and promoting events rooted in regenerative gardening, volunteering, faith, and climate resilience. Rather than framing environmentalism as gloom and doom, Adamah leans into repair, ritual, and relationship the Jewish way.
This is very much Adamah’s broader model: blending Jewish learning, land connection, food, farming, climate literacy and spiritual renewal into one ecosystem. Even its seasonal offerings reflect that approach. For Passover, which is still ongoing, Adamah has released a sustainability-focused haggadah supplement that brings ecological reflection into the seder through Torah (the Bible), meditation, and climate questions.
There’s also a professional side to the movement so Jewish communal workers can attend “ReTreat Yourself!”, a no-cost June retreat at Camp Ramah in California, designed to strengthen both leadership and spiritual resilience in these hard times.
In a city known for its urban sprawl, wildfires, and climate vulnerability, Adamah LA is building something close to the ground: a Jewish climate culture that is local, networked, and rooted in action.
In Hebrew Adamah is the connection between adam (human) and adamah, the earth.
While Adamah LA has emerged as a strong Jewish climate organizer during LA Climate Week, the broader week also opens space for Christian and Indigenous leadership, two groups whose environmental work often runs deeper than branding or institutional visibility.
For many Christian communities in Los Angeles, climate action is increasingly framed as a matter of stewardship, justice, and care for creation. Churches, faith-based nonprofits, and Catholic organizers often use Climate Week to host conversations around energy, food systems, environmental racism, and resilience in vulnerable neighborhoods. Their language may differ from activist circles, but the mission is often the same: protecting life, land, and future generations.
Indigenous voices, meanwhile, bring something even more foundational. Rather than treating climate as a policy issue alone, Indigenous leaders tend to center land relationship, ancestral responsibility, water protection, and sacred ecology. Their presence in climate events can shift the conversation from sustainability as a technical fix to sustainability as a way of living in right relationship with the earth.
Together, Christian and Indigenous participants help expand LA Climate Week beyond panels and policy. They remind the city that climate action is not only scientific or political, it is also moral, spiritual, and deeply rooted in place.
If you know of other faith-based events happening during the week, drop them in the comments below.
