Closeup:
Dr Kate Auty
The Commissioner for Environmental Sustainability
I would like to thank you all very much for giving your time, coming here today and informing us about what is obviously a labour of love for all of you because I very much doubt that any of you are paid what your actual time is in these functions that we’ve been analysing and assessing for the purposes of our audit. And I’d sincerely like to thank every single one of you for being here and being prepared to talk to us about the things that you’re experts in and we’re not.
I’d like in particular to thank Kathy here, who was one of the people who took me around some resource smart schools, which are going to be the subject of some awards later on in this year. And that was inspirational to me, it gave me an education and I hope that some of that will now show in our audit report. And I’m hoping that in relation to that the case studies that we do in fact include in the audit report this year reflect some of the really insightful and innovative stuff that’s happening on the ground amongst grass roots people, and as a product of all your hard work
Wideshot:
Workshop members.
Closeup:
Karen Brown
Toolangi Forest Discovery Centre
My name’s Karen Brown and I work for DSE at Toolangi the Forest Discovery Centre. One positive thing about us is we survived the fires this year and our education tract’s survived as well and projects are up and running and we’re getting lots through the door. So that’s a positive. Negative - I suppose there’s always the battle to get funds and ongoing support.
Closeup:
Nick Jansen
Parks Victoria
Negative thing about our program I guess is the same, the lack of support in same areas in funding. But on the other hand the positive is we’ve just had it back on the agenda and we’ve got 4 or 5 new officers going to be placed out in our education centres. We’ve got 4 or 5 new education centres around the state. So yeah, it’s looking positive for us.
Closeup:
Philip Armato
Marine Discovery Centre
A positive over the last probably 12-18 months has been that Fisheries Victoria has come online with the word sustainability as well so it really brings us - there’s a very strong relationship between the type of messages I’m being asked to send through Fisheries Victoria and the type of messages that we can send to sustainable schools. And I think like other people one of the ongoing issues I’m challenged with or we’re challenged with is probably creating good partnerships in the community and that might be linked to funding.
Closeup:
Simone Budd
Regional Waste Management Group
I think one of the most positive things this year has been the launch of the Barwon Resource Smart Schools network, which was launched in August, about 80 people attended that, and it’s facilitated by Southwest Sen - Sustainability Educators Network, so all the sustainability educators within the Barwon region. Negatives, I actually struggle to really find anything…except with our education centre, which has been running for a few years now, we would like actually new premises. And so I suppose it will be a struggle there to try and find some funding for that. Lots of enthusiasm, lots of support, but now we just need location, we need to build a site.
Closeup:
Mary Catus-Wood
Melbourne Water
What I’ve seen as positives is that Melbourne Water has things for everybody. There’s website, there’s tours, there’s trailers, there’s a variety of education resources.
What I see as the negative is that they try and be everything to everybody. They’ve got websites, tours, you know, so it’s focusing and picking out what’s going to be the best they can deliver to their group.
Closeup:
Paul Dullard
Sandhurst Catholic Education Office
Representing today I suppose the Catholic Education Commission of Victoria Sustainability group, a new committee set up across all of Victoria. Predominantly my role is facilitating Resource Smart, in partnership with CERES, through Sandhurst. And professional learning for staff and parents across our schools. One of the most positive things for this year we were funded through Sustainability Fund to take up Resource Smart in 50 schools across Catholic education across all of Victoria, which has been a huge momentum for our schools. And I suppose the challenge for us at the moment and what we’re working on is how do we continue that momentum post core-module and Resource Smart, and how we engage everyone, so I think that’s a challenge most of us would have.
Pan to Closeup:
Tristan Bell
Water & Energy Savers
Hi I’m Tristan Bell and I work at Water & Energy Savers. We’ve been managing the Schools Water Efficiency Program on behalf of the Department of Sustainability and Environment and the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development. The Schools Water Efficiency Program has been a huge success. It was mandated by the Department of Education so all the government schools were required to undertake it or show that they were already water efficient. And we’ve got estimated savings in the order of 270 million litres a year at the moment so it’s really exciting.
Probably the negative that I really found with the program was the negative attitude that many schools had towards the government program being presented to them. They assumed automatically that it was political rather than environmental.
Pan to Closeup:
Jenny Bicknell
City of Booroondara
Hi I’m Jenny Bicknell from the City of Booroondara I’m a Council Sustainability Education Officer and I work for Parks and Gardens Waste Services and also the Environment Sustainable Living team. One of the exciting things that I’ve seen in the last 10 months in my role is that schools are really becoming demonstration centres for sustainable living and they are providing really effective leadership to the community with certain groups that we’ve had trouble engaging with to date, so I see that as a really…
Off Camera
So like whom?
Jenny Bicknell
Well an avenue to working with families. One of the negatives I guess, or one of the difficulties, is working out how to resource the total number of schools we have.
Closeup:
Eric Bottomley
CERES
I suppose the positive thing is that we won the tender in Victoria to deliver across the state to the number of 100 or more schools. And that was comforting in the middle of a recession, to have money in the till. The less savoury thing is we used to have a you know really great well balanced comprehensive program but in the hands of your men gets kind of dismantled and made partial.
Pan to Closeup:
Sherin Halliday
DPI Landlearn
I’m Sherin Halliday from Landlearn, we I suppose, our successes that are great are our garden program and alot of people are seeing agriculture has got a place in sustainability education, which is really good for us, and the garden program and connection to the land has been taken up by the teachers really well. The negative is probably with the climate we’re working under financially, whether DPI see sustainability in agriculture education being as important as we think it is. It’s always a big threat to us as we go forward to this next lot of funding.
Pan to Closeup:
Pen Lynch
South East Water
I work on the government funded Water Learn it Live it Program which was a nice compliment when (inaudible) was around. We look the more the educational side of what we’re doing with water in schools. The good things that I see is lots of enthusiasm and lots of school initiative, they’re doing a lot themselves, and I know that everyone sitting around this table can see that as well. So it’s nice to be able to give them the assistance where it’s appropriate and where it’s needed. I guess on the bigger scale the negatives though, we seem to be surrounded by lots of politics at the moment, and lots of clatter, so it would be nice to have some streamlining in the whole scene, in the whole big picture of things.
Closeup:
Bridgid Soames
VAEE
One of the highlights has been actually getting the tender or the contract with Sustainability Victoria. One of the difficulties has been office staffing and resourcing, which has been quite difficult in my role, especially engaging with schools, and I hope that changes since we’ve got a new EO.
Closeup:
Cathy Oke
Firestarter
I’m from Firestarter, we run the Kids, Teaching Kids Youth Environment Conferences around Australia, and we link in with a lot of the Aussie networks across Australia, many of you around this room are either – or I’m also running the Resource Smart School Awards on behalf of Sustainability Victoria. Many of you around the room are either sponsors, judges, educators, in fact if you haven’t RSVPed for the awards on Wednesday the 18th, let me know today. No, I think that’s one of my positives is the networks – we don’t go into the schools and run the environment education programs as such, we get to showcase what a lot of you guys are doing within schools, either at our events or through the Resource Smart Schools, so I think that’s definitely a positive. Another positive I think is, having been involved for many years and visited many many schools and seen the kids present on their environmental understanding at our events is that that base level of understanding is just getting better and better and so much stronger and I mean I think that’s a reflection of your programs and what you guys are doing within schools, is that that level of understanding is improving.
Negative, I’m not really sure if I have a negative. My negative is I think that young people are so often too underestimated in their ability to express their beliefs on the environment and their ability to voice their concerns and their solutions. That’s very frustrating to me when you meet – whether it’s sponsors or government people or even caterers who don’t understand that kids are actually way brighter than you reckon.
Closeup:
Peter Preuss
Greening Australia.
My name is Peter from Greening Australia. Positive is that we’ve been involved in delivering the biodiversity module of aussie and that’s been going well. The negative is because that’s been going so well is I haven’t had time very well to put into the toolbox. I presume everyone knows that that’s the big conference next year. I’m going to put in a plug for that. If you want to be a participant or a workshop presenter or whatever, contact me. But I’m going to sneak in another positive too and that is…
Off camera:
Hang on, I see you’ve…
Peter Press:
No Jessie’s back for one day a week and going to help with the Toolbox.
Closeup:
Glenn Davidson
Planet Savers
I guess a highlight for me is working with Paul and Eric, the original architects of Aussie Vic, Sustainable schools, it’s good to see… kicking some goals after how many years Eric, 8 or so, I guess another low light that’s on Eric an my mind at the moment is we’ve got a federal government talking about a 5% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and we’ve got schools doing 60% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. It’s just one of those interesting political moments and if we just let schools and communities get through it I think we’d be in a far better spot, really.
Closeup:
Nick Abroms
City West Water
Look I think the success is just the number of - we’ve only been running for s little under 4 years now and we’ve got over 270 schools in the program so I think that’s great, not only that they’re in the program but seeing what all these schools are doing when it comes to water conservation is amazing. I think one of the difficulties would be at this stage managing the number of schools that are in the program because we’ve got a very small team of 4 people and only 3 really on the ground in the schools so it makes it quite difficult when we’ve got that many schools on board now.
Closeup:
Donna Livermore
Zoo Victoria
...From our perspective is the ability to really create passion in kids and we’ve just taken this up recently with a lot of our community conservation programs, you know kids are so passionate about helping orangutans and now rather than just talking about it we’ve got a real vehicle for them to be able to do that and create this behaviour change and sustainable behaviour change. I think one of the frustrations is to get more out into the schools and to work much more closely with the schools. We see them for 45 minutes - the kids - but really we want to create more of these partnerships between us, schools and the wider community as well.
Closeup:
Kathy Overton
CFA
The positive thing I suppose that’s come out of this year is that there’s an incredible amount of change and opportunity within the organisation for looking differently at how programs are delivered to schools, so we have an opportunity to develop new programs and go places where CFA hasn’t been before, hopefully that’s alot involving the environment, tying fire to the environment and climate change…we’re actually, like, the result of all this stuff. The issues would be just pretty well getting support to have the development of programs to that extent within the organisation.
Closeup:
Kerry Archer
South East Water
I’m Kerry I look after schools and community education at South East Water so Pen and I work together but Pen focuses entirely on schools whereas I also look after community events and community presentations as well as schools-based stuff. We’ve had lots of positives this year but one thing that we’re trialing at the moment is an early childhood education program and we’ve got a lady called Sonya on two days a week for this term just trialing it out and it booked out within a week and from that comes the challenge of actually convincing our organisation that education is life long, it’s not just about going and seeing one kid once in their educational journey, that it’s an endurative process.