Sustainable Leadership:
‘Being The Change’
ESDGC work programme
Organised by Sustainability team, Corporate Responsibility Department
Swansea University
Wednesday 22nd March 2017
The three-hours practical leadership aimed at creating Ambassadors, Leaders and Visionaries.
The workshop was facilitated by Fern Smith, BSc, MA, CSTA is an artist and activist, co-founder of Volcano Theatre Company and Emergence. Her recent work has been researching, commissioning and making creative interventions inspired by ‘the art of living within the ecological limits of a finite planet’. She was the Arts Council of Wales Fellow on the Clore Leadership Programme in 2009 and is currently supported by an Arts Council of Wales Major Creative Wales Award.
Anna Pigott is from Human Geography at Swansea University, a director of Emergence, and a former employee of the Sustainability Team. Her current research explores the role of individual and collective imagination in social and environmental transformation, with a particular interest in how the future is imagined. She first encountered ‘The Work That Reconnects’ in 2014, an experience which has deeply influenced her approach to environmental problems and social change, both personally and in her research.
Attendees worked through a series of reflective, experiential and creative exercises, following ‘The Work That Reconnects’, an empowerment and change cycle developed over a number of decades by the activist and psychologist Joanna Macy in collaboration with international change-makers. They individually and collectively moved through Macy’s process, and left the workshop with information, inspiration and practical actions in order to create, and ‘be the change’ we want to see in the world.
Some challenging questions were put forward to staff and students like “Who do you think you are? What change can happen through you? How can we create conditions for dialogue and collective action during times of division and disintegration?”
Feedback from Alister Henderson (Aerospace Engineering): “The first task involved in business as usual, the great collapse and the great turnaround was very eye opening, seeing how everything was going as normal and yet under the surface there was so much going wrong with the world and seeing the lists of effects on paper was especially harrowing: Ice caps melting, corals bleaching, happiness on the decrease and of course global warming.”
Feedback from Alice Phillip (Biology): “As a result of this reflective process I have become more aware of how to achieve my goals. I also feel more focused, determined, and capable to go forth and attain these; step by step. My action plan for ‘going forth’ includes both short- mid- and long- term goals. In the long term I plan on educating wide groups of people on sustainable and ecological issues. My mid-term goals are to complete a fellowship researching how best to raise public awareness and educate about the environment, as well as completing a masters course on environmental management.”