Become Green Together: a participant’s perspective— Jack Drum Arts
This blog was written by Jack Burton, of Jack Drum Arts.
I’m Jack, Creative Director at Jack Drum Arts (JDA). Based in Crook, County Durham, we deliver participatory community arts programmes across the county for people of all ages and abilities, but primarily from our space in St Cuthbert’s Centre, a converted 19th Century Primary School with very high ceilings and a terrible draft.
We deliver projects and programmes in music, visual arts, filmmaking, dance, theatre, and have a strong model of youth leadership mentoring. Our participants are from all walks of life. Many face barriers to engage, including suffering from poor physical and/or mental health, economically disadvantaged, socially isolated, are disabled or neurodivergent.
In the summer of 2022, Jack Drum Arts was accepted onto VONNE’s Become Green Together (BGT) programme. I had committed JDA to reaching Net-Zero by 2030, through the SME Climate Hub earlier that year, and felt out of my depth as a slew of documentation including guides, standards, and spreadsheets rolled in. It was a great relief to find the VONNE programme, and I jumped at the chance to access dedicated support and training on how to contextualise, understand, and then tackle the beast of environmental sustainability.
JDA has been addressing the climate emergency creatively for the past few years through its projects with children and young people. Last summer our youth board produced, B.O.P Fest (Building Our Planet) which aimed to raise awareness of the climate emergency, providing a platform for local bands and performers as well as local campaign organisations and sector representatives. Our past two summer schools, provided for children and young people in our local community, have been focused on addressing the climate emergency and our response as a society. It is of course important that we do as much as we can to normalise the ‘addressing’ of the emergency, to make it a fundamental part of working collaboratively and creatively.
What we have found challenging across our organisation is the lack of knowledge and understanding of the science and theory underpinning the climate emergency. JDA does not know what its emissions are and thus what its carbon footprint is — vital information that would help ground the work we’re doing, the stance we want to take, and the advocating role that we want to play in our local community.
Participating in Become Green Together has been really beneficial for JDA. It has created the space for the work to happen in the first place, prioritising what would not otherwise be prioritised means it will happen! JDA has access to valuable resources and expertise through programme delivery partners SmartCarbon and Genee. With support from SmartCarbon, I’m logging data from our emissions sources, which will give us our first Carbon Footprint figure. With support from Genee, I’m developing an environmental policy and an action plan, that will guide how we approach the mission of reducing emissions and ultimately reach Net-Zero. It has been great to be part of a wider network of organisations, each on their own mission to implement change. Each session has provided so much space for the sharing of unique challenges and peer-led problem solving. Some of the changes I want to implement at JDA have come from these conversations.
The slow and steady dissemination of my learning with our team is beginning to take effect — JDA staff are beginning to have a better understanding of why we need to act now and of what they can do to positively affect change. This is now filtering through to our participants, who have a better understanding of why we are working through an environmentally focused lens and of what they can do to positively affect change. By the end of this year, we will know our carbon footprint and we will have actions in place to reduce it further, and this information will be accessible and available to all.
There’s no denying we are at the beginning of our journey, like so many other VCS organisations, and we have long way to go. I’ve just finished logging the data for our first reporting year, but it has already been hugely rewarding — we have systems and spreadsheets in place to collect it all, including a set of digital scales to weigh our waste! I know the work I’m doing will positively contribute to the futures of the children and young people we work with.
On a personal level, through participation in BGT, I have regularly despaired for the future of our species while entertaining my optimist/idealist inner self to think about how we can shift the tide. I have always been interested in the collective power of humanity and our frequent inability to wield it for the common good. We are ignorant of our collective power, and I think therefore that why we’re where we are — on the precipice of global temperature rises becoming irreversible.
I’m proud of Jack Drum Arts for jumping in at the deep end and getting stuck in. Now the challenge is to change the fabric of society that has afforded us all so much squandered time.
Jack Drum Arts is a sustainable, locally-based social enterprise providing cultural opportunities for communities in County Durham and the wider region through a range of workshops, courses, theatre, music-making and outdoor events.
Their mission is to increase access to arts activities and cultural events for people of all ages, particularly those who face barriers to engagement, by delivering high quality, engaging, innovative and transformative arts opportunities that promote self-expression, wellbeing, learning and community cohesion.
Become Green Together is a programme from Going Green Together. Applications to join the programme are open April-May and July-September 2023. Read more and apply online.
