There’s a conversation happening in a lot of households right now that almost never makes it into a sermon, a small group, or a Sunday bulletin: the one about money pressures.
I’m not talking about giving or tithing, though. This is another, newer conversation: the one about what climate change is quietly doing to our budgets.
The Quiet Strain
If you’ve noticed your utility bills are creeping up over the last few summers, you’re not imagining things. Heat waves that used to be occasional now stretch longer, and air conditioning that used to run for a few weeks now runs for a few months. For a household on a fixed income, that difference isn’t abstract. It’s the gap between paying the electric bill and letting it slide for a month. Or, it might mean toughing it out and hoping you can live with the heat stress.
The same pattern shows up at the grocery store. Crop losses from drought, flooding, and smaller yields ripple through food prices in ways that never get labeled “climate change” on the store receipt, but that’s often exactly what they are. In parts of the country hit hardest by wildfire or flood risk, homeowners are discovering that insurance premiums are rising fast or that coverage is being dropped altogether.
Then there are the farmers who are dealing with everything from lower crop yields to changing growing seasons. Unpredictable rainfall and longer stretches of drought or heat stress can shrink a harvest before it’s even in the ground. Meanwhile, the inputs meant to compensate–like fertilizer, irrigation, and pest control–keep climbing in price. For a farm family, that squeeze doesn’t show up as a single bad month. It winds up as a hard conversation about next year’s planting decisions…and sometimes about whether the farm keeps going at all.
None of this is the kind of thing most people bring up during coffee hour or a weekly scripture study. It can feel too private, too much like admitting a struggle, or simply too complicated to explain in passing. So it stays quiet, carried by individual households, one tight month at a time.
The Conversation Nobody Schedules
The quiet strain doesn’t just live in individual homes, either. It shows up in congregational budgets too, and it’s just as rarely named out loud there.
Aging buildings with poor insulation cost more to heat and cool every year. Facilities committees quietly absorb rising utility costs into budgets that were never designed to flex that much. At the same time, congregations and the organizations that support them, including us, are feeling the pinch of a harder fundraising climate. Individual giving is stretched thin because household budgets are stretched thin. It’s the same strain, showing up at two different scales, and both usually stay unspoken until someone finally puts it on the agenda.
That’s worth doing.
We need to talk about this, openly. Naming it doesn’t fix it, of course, but a line item nobody discusses is a line item nobody can address. The households and congregations that end up making real progress here are almost always the ones where someone was willing to say the quiet part out loud first.
What Becomes Possible
Once it’s on the table, a surprising number of options open up, on both the household and congregational level.
For a congregation, it might start small. Their website could (and should!) have a sustainability page that names the climate actions they’re doing and invites others to join in. It might grow into a modest line item for resilience, insulation upgrades, more efficient HVAC, or even solar, paired with a look at what grants or incentives could offset the upfront cost. Some congregations have set up small emergency funds specifically to help members facing utility shutoffs during extreme heat or cold, treating it as the same kind of practical care they’d offer for any other hardship. A really forward-thinking congregation can ask itself questions like: How can we share our space more fully? How could we hold more of our meetings away from the building? How can our environmental care be a testimony to the entire community?
For a household, it might mean exploring local weatherization assistance programs many people don’t know they qualify for, or simply feeling permission to talk about utility bills with trusted friends instead of carrying it alone. Those conversations can lead to even deeper conversations about how you can care for vulnerable neighbors, what resources could be shared in a neighborhood, how a congregation can start a mutual aid fund, or how you could host an informational meeting about solar group buys.
None of this requires everyone to become a policy expert overnight. It just requires one or two honest conversations to start.
Where Iowa Faith & Climate Network Comes In
We want to be honest about something, too: this same strain shows up in our own work. Grant funding has been harder to come by this year.
Iowa Faith & Climate Network is a team of two (plus our board members and Speakers Bureau.) Right now we’re the only organization in Iowa doing faith-rooted climate work at this scale, connecting clergy, congregations, and individuals across traditions who care about the planet and don’t always know where to find each other. That work depends on the same kind of support we’re describing here. Individual gifts. Congregational partnerships. People willing to put “climate” as a line item in their own giving, even in a tight year.
If this post named something you’ve been quietly carrying, either at home or in your congregation’s budget, we’d love for you to consider naming Iowa Faith & Climate Network in your giving too. A gift from an individual helps us keep this work going. A congregational partnership helps us reach further than either of us could alone. See below for some creative options.
You don’t have to solve the whole budget conversation today. You just have to be willing to start it, at home, in your congregation, and with us.
7 Creative Ways to Raise Funds for Iowa Faith & Climate Network
1. Hold a congregational yard sale. Use half to fund some new climate initiative in your congregation, and send half to us. Homes get decluttered while good work gets supported. Win – win!
2. Get our merch and spread the word. Take orders for our bags, garden flags and T-shirts as holiday gifts. A group order will make the shipping cost far lower. Here’s our store link.
3. Host a climate-related event. For example, hold a donation-funded community workshop on home energy conservation.
4. Native plant or pollinator seedling sale. Congregations can start seedlings (natives, herbs, garden veggies) in late winter and sell them each spring.
5. Hold a “Creation Season” matching month. Find a board member or a couple of committed donors willing to match new or increased gifts during a set window of time (e.g. the week before Earth Day). This gives people a concrete reason to give now rather than “eventually.”
6. Put on a sponsored walk, hike, or bike ride for earth care. Have a registration fee, or have participants get pledges per mile. This doubles as a low-cost, high-visibility group event that gets people outside together.
7. Hold a repair café or clothing swap with a suggested donation. Volunteers can teach basic mending, small appliance repair, or bike tune-ups; attendees pay a small donation or “give what you can.” This practical, communal event quietly reinforces a reduce/reuse ethic without preaching it.