August’s Going Green Together Peer Support Session
This session involved talking about upcoming projects at Going Green Together. We then discussed new environmental activities people were taking part in and opportunities they had heard about. We ended the session talking about challenges people faced with working in a more environmentally conscious way, and thought about solutions to those problems.
The main Going Green Together project elements we discussed were learning resources on the Act part of the Going Green Together website, which is a great way to find quick action points and an introduction to climate issues, and the Become Green Together training programme, for which applications are currently open for voluntary, community, and social enterprise organisations of all sizes to get involved in embedding environmental sustainability in their workplace. We also discussed other planned training sessions and seminars which will be coming later this year, such as Carbon Literacy Training provided by Cumbria Action for Sustainability. More information about these, including dates and how to register, will be available soon. You can sign up to our mailing list to be notified of these.
There were loads of interesting activities, projects, and opportunities shared by the group. Attendees talked about projects they had done in the workplace, such as switching to LED lighting, setting up water butts, encouraging co-workers to reduce their waste and promote recycling, such as through the Boots Scan2Recycle scheme, and sharing information with employees about how to change their pensions to invest in greener industries. Some specific events, opportunities and resources were:
- The All Our Futures 2022 Climate Change Conference for Young People, which will be held on the 10th August 2022 at Redcar and Cleveland.
- NEECCo’s meeting on the National Lottery Community Fund Climate Action Fund, which will be held on the 1st September 2022, and will discuss how the VCSE sector in the North East can coordinate their approach to this new funding.
- Ecologi as a potential way to supplement the climate action you take with funding international environment restoration and green energy projects.
- Ecosia as a way to help offset your digital carbon footprint by switching to a search engine which specifically invests in tree-planting projects.
The challenges we discussed were mostly related to how summer activities can cause a spike in carbon emissions and resource consumption.
Participants talked about how they were travelling more to engage with the communities they work with over the summer, and how to balance the importance of direct engagement with carbon emissions from vehicles, particularly in rural areas with weak public transport links. We discussed how keeping track of this kind of travel is important, making sure you can justify the travel you take, and using this record when talking to local authorities to make the case for more infrastructure. We also talked about salary sacrifice electric car schemes, to provide access to green transport for employees. Other opportunities people discussed were using a business travel scheme through Arriva to encourage staff to use public transport at a subsidised rate, and the Halfords Cycle2Work scheme.
Another element was how holding more in-person events had the potential to use more resources and create more waste, particularly if catering was involved. We discussed partnering with other organisations to use surplus food and deal with leftover food products, using Eco Shops as an example. The OLIO app for distributing surplus food was also mentioned.
Going Green Together holds peer support sessions open to VCSE organisations in the North East and Cumbria every month. Our next one will be online on Wednesday 7th September, at 4pm. You can join our Meet Up page to register for future peer support sessions.
