FAQ

When Is Now is a global, creative collaboration for urgent climate action: a collective seeding of demands that take root as radical beginnings across the world.

It links together poems, visual art, murals, and more forms of creative expression that reflect national and regional demands for climate action, and people’s lived experiences of the climate crisis. The initiative is mobilized by the Agam Agenda, Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF), and Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities.

Anyone can join When Is Now! It’s an open, evolving call for creative expression and collaboration to demand for urgent climate action. All you need is a seed of an idea, a string of words, and your willingness to share your lived experience as well as acknowledge and respond to other’s experiences of the climate crisis. Everyone is encouraged to tend to the poems and artwork of people living in other parts of the world.

You may respond to poems and other art forms that have already been contributed to When Is Now. Go to the Exhibit, choose a poem or other artwork that moves you, and then create your response. You may include lines from other contributions in your own poem or visual creations. All together, we will be interweaving lines of poetry into a web that stretches across the planet, asking “When?”, and demanding, “Now.”

And share these seeds of creative climate action! Tag @agamagenda on social media on Instagram and Twitter. Use the hashtag #WhenIsNow.

Check out the Submit, Respond, and Pitch pages to find out more about how to participate, and upload your files to contribute to the campaign. The team will confirm receipt of your work and notify you once your contribution has been accepted and published on the website.

Your work will appear on whenisnow.org and may appear on the social media platforms of the CVF and Agam Agenda. Because When Is Now is an open collaboration built through linked poetry, your lines of poetry/imagery/prose may appear in the work of other contributing writers and artists. While you retain copyright of your work and the organizers guarantee proper attribution on When Is Now, Agam Agenda, and CVF platforms, please be aware that contributing to When Is Now will mean making your submitted works available for anyone else to freely share and adapt your work.

While When Is Now highlights poetry as an accessible and moving form of expression, other forms of artistic expression can be submitted. Feel free to respond to the call through music, visual arts, performance art, and more!

Your participation will help widen the conversation on climate change through poetry and art, and amplify the demands of those who are most vulnerable to the climate crisis. Together, poems, visual artworks, murals, and more seeds of creative climate action will urge world leaders to act on the ecological emergency before us. The more people speak out on the climate crisis in creative ways, the more we can demand climate action. Beyond this, your contribution may be the seed that accompanies another person in another place on the difficult terrain of discovering new ways to survive and thrive on our beloved planet.

We honor the spirit of collective, creative action through poetry, cultural work, and the arts. We believe strongly in the right of creative talent and artists to be remunerated for their work. We also acknowledge that not all artistic response emerges due to material or financial incentives. When Is Now is an open, public call that believes in the power of collective agency.

Submissions through the public call are not financially remunerated. If you are compelled to demand the Now we need through poetry, art, and creative expression, we would be honored to review, share, and amplify your submissions. However, we are open to receiving proposals for commissioned work. See this page for more information.