After a few years at the helm of the Sustainable Living Program I’m moving on...
Let's reflect on our team's acheivements
While our programs aren’t out there always grabbing the headlines, we’ve achieved some amazing things, seeing some real change in the way communities interpret and impact our environment.
What I really like about our programs is how we work with communities – we don’t just go in there assuming we are the experts and telling people what they should do. I think we’ve all learnt, sometimes through trial and error, that if you want people to make changes to the way they do things and how they think about the environment, you’ve got to do it in a way that makes sense to them. Sometimes we have to throw our assumptions out the door and change the way we think and do things – which makes it a challenge but also makes it exciting and interesting.
This has led us to run a whole range of programs in different ways – our aim is always to reduce environmental impact, but we get there in some really divergent ways. So in Flemington, we are supporting a soccer tournament as a way to get the young people living in the high rise housing estate engaged in sustainability. In Colac we developed a program with the council to training home care workers, so now over 400 staff in the south west have the ability to conduct basic home assessments in the homes of their clients – over 10,000 people. We’ve developed a program that can be run as part of the VCAL year 12 certificate that gets young people to challenge themselves and their classmates to a ‘sustainability challenge’. And we have developed sustainability guides in picture formats so people from diverse cultural backgrounds can better understand them. And through all of this we have partnered with organisations as diverse as the YMCA, local councils, senior citizen clubs and multicultural organisations.
These are just a few of the examples of the work we have done. The main link between all of them is this that we go to communities with an open mind and find out what will work – and I think this is the most fascinating thing about what we do.
People really are amazing – there are solutions for a sustainable world all around us, we just need to tap into them and help them along.
But for me its time to say goodbye to Environment Victoria and the continually fascinating communities we work with – but we have a great and skilled team, and I’m looking forward to seeing what else they achieve.
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