Sustainble September Eco Festival 2015

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1 2016 Doherty Award Nomination - Category: Innovation in Special Events, Division C Sustainble September Eco Festival 2015 Event brief 2. Grow Blacktown City s reputation as a Council committed to environmental sustainability issues. Situational analysis In 2015 Blacktown City had the largest population in New South Wales. Over the next few years this population is expected to grow to over 500,000 people. This growth will place more strain on the area s natural resources. To ensure our community continues to thrive into the future we need to educate our residents about our local environment, build community capacity for change, and empower people to take action to protect our natural assets at the grass-roots level. 3. Build community capacity for residents to take action towards living more sustainably. Blacktown City has a number of community engagement programs that are designed to encourage residents to adopt more sustainable living practices. These include our sustainable living workshop series, stormwater engagement program, and clean cities strategy. As part of a review to improve our practices, research was conducted with participants of these environmental engagement programs in late This research highlighted the need to create greater awareness of these programs, reposition them for greater appeal to a wider audience, and improve accessibility for residents. Goals Blacktown City has been a leader in offering innovative environmental engagement programs for residents. But with a growing population, including a large CALD and migrant population, mix of established and brand-new suburbs, and diverse socio-economic demographic our programs are often targeted at niche audiences and don t get the profile and recognition they deserve. The Sustainable September Eco Festival was created to put a spotlight on these programs for a whole month, build Council s reputation in environmental engagement, and grow our audience of engaged residents. Three goals were established as part of the event brief. These were defined as: 1. Engage with new audiences by exposing them to the diverse environmental education and engagement programs offered by Blacktown City Council. Target Whilst many of our existing environment programs are targeted to specific niche audiences, this event s mandate to attract new audiences to our programs, meant we needed to cast our net wide and appeal to as many residents as possible. We created a program of events with diverse appeal from family activities, to hands on workshops, and tours. We specifically targeted the large number of young families with children as they have been a difficult group to engage with our existing environmental programs, often as they are time poor and many existing environmental programs including buscare and community gardening have limited appeal as a family activitiy. Parents were also identified as a group who had the greatest potential for behaviour change because of their influence over household consumer spending, and lifestyle behavioural choices within the family unit. Event Plan / format With the need to appeal to a wide cross section of the community, a bold decision was made to create a comprehensive event program that spanned a full month. This would allow for a variety of different activities that would appeal to a broad cross-section of residents. Events were staggered over a 4-week period building momentum towards a headline event at the end of the month. Strategy Strategy development The Sustainable September Eco Festival 2015 has its origins tied to the Blacktown City 2030 Community Strategic Plan. One of the strategic directives outlined in that document is to provide a clean sustainable environment. The event forms part of Focus Area 2 under this directive, which states we will encourage healthy and sustainable living opportunities for the community.

2 This statement provided the starting point to devise a comprehensive program of over 40 activities including hands-on skills workshops, environmental tours, educational activities, family events, plant giveaways, and environmental displays. Events included in the festival program were specifically designed to cover key environmental engagement themes outlined In the Blacktown City Environmental Sustainability Framework, including: water and catchments, land and biodiversity, climate and atmosphere, the local food system, and building sustainable communities. Communication and stakeholder involvement Planning and delivery of the festival was coordinated by the Environment section, with input from other sections including Civic Events, Children s Services, Blacktown City Libraries, and the Blacktown Arts Centre. A resident stakeholder group was also formed to assist in developing ideas for events to be included in the festival program. This group was made up of volunteers, and community participants from our existing environmental programs, and they formed the backbone of community volunteers who helped to develop some of the major events during the festival. $22,000 was made available which needed to cover all external costs for all events and activities held. Existing staff with the support of volunteers managed all events during the festival including the delivery of a number of workshops and engagement activities. The budget was broken down as follows: Item Cost Workshop facilitators and expenses $3,200 Equipment hire $11,100 Entertainment $2,500 Environmental displays $2,800 Materials $2,400 Total $22,000 Communication With no media budget, getting awareness of the festival was only possible through Blacktown City Council s own free media channels namely the council website and social media presence. The scope of the festival was large with over 40 activities and events. This could not have been achieved without several partners who offered their services free of charge or at discounted costs. This allowed us to deliver on our vision of creating a festival to showcase sustainability in action and be a catalyst for change within our community. Partners included Michael Mobbs, Harvest Hub, Ooooby, Sathya Sai community, Lalor Park Community Garden, Showground Community Garden, SydWest Multicultural Services, Department of Primary Industries - Forestry Science Unit, Greater Sydney Local Land Services, and the Riverstone Local Dig Men s Shed. A number of community volunteers also gave up their time to participate in the event organisation or contributed to the community education activities and citizen science events. Budget Funding for the festival came from our operational budget for environmental engagement. A total allocated budget of

3 Facebook events were created for each activity within the program. Events were also created on the Eventbrite platform, which was used to take bookings. The festival program was included as part of a dedicated edition of our Sustainable Living Blacktown e-newsletter that at the time had a distribution list of over 2,500 residents. Press releases were also prepared and distributed to local media who picked up the story with several articles listed in local papers throughout the month, and coverage by local radio station SWR FM also helping to spread the word. Printed programs were also distributed to our 5 branch libraries, 25 council run childcare centres, local community gardens, and leisure facilities. Ensuring we reached as many people as possible without a media budget required the coordination and cooperation of multiple partners, and staff from across the organisation, all of whom were willing to generate word of mouth for the festival with the residents they already interacted with. Events targeted at specific audiences were promoted through partners we worked with. For example SydWest Multicultural Resources enlisted participants to a number of sustainable living workshops targeted at culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) and newly arrived migrant groups. Our partnership with Sathya Sai community helped to recruit over 200 participants for a citizen science activity during the festival. Building momentum thoughtout the month was greatly enhanced with the the cross-promotion of events and activities, with many participants getting involved in multiple events throughout the festival. We also staggered three main events Bat Night, Pop-up Garden Party, and Farmers Market and Family Fun Day on different weeks with each getting separate media coverage from local press, keeping the conversation going from week to week. The festival attracted over 6,500 residents across more than 40 separate activities. Posts about the festival on Blacktown City Council s facebook page attracted over 295,200 views. Delivery The ambitious festival program had something for everyone. There were workshops covering sustainable cooking, organic gardening, using recycled timber to make furniture, worm farming and composting, handmade natural beauty products, natural fertilisers and pest control, and seed propagation. There were opportunities to install wildlife nest boxes, and help track the presence of an endangered species and do some real science in our fishing bat program. There were guided walks into native bushland, frog-spotting tours, and bird-watching activities. There were native wildlife displays, environmental arts and crafts, and environmental story telling as part of several family friendly activities. There were expert talks including one by sustainability guru Michael Mobbs who discussed resilience in our suburbs. There were environmental displays on solar power and energy efficient lighting. There were tours to discover local food, and the local water catchment. There were opportunities to help transform a car park into a thriving and productive pop-up food garden. We engaged with local schools with several hundred students participating in a catchment field day to learn about protecting out local waterways. We also engaged with migrant communities through targeted workshops on health and environmental sustainability. These activities attracted new audience, some of whom had never been to a council-run event before. Many of whom had never participated in an environmentally-focused event. Every activity had a specific educational outcome associated with it ensuring every participant expanded their environmental knowledge, and in doing so we expanded our community s capacity for resilience and environmental protection. Through the positive word of mouth and media attention generated by the festival s activities, we positioned Blacktown City Council as the leading council in Western Sydney engaging residents on environmental issues.

4 Innovation and legacy The Sustainable September Eco Festival 2015 was an innovative event for Blacktown City Council. It was the largest and most diverse environmental-themed event ever staged by the City. It provided over 40 separate engagement activities for residents to participate in during the month. The festival greatly expanded the reach and awareness of our environmental programs and raised the profile of Blacktown City Council s proactive involvement on local environmental issues. With so many events attracting a broad cross-section of our community, the festival has also grown our database substantially, and we have been able continue engaging this audience with our sustainable living e-newsletter and to invite them to subsequent workshops and events we have held. The success of the festival has ensured it will remain on Blacktown City s annual events calendar in the future, with the hope that momentum will continue to grow as we help to develop a strong environmentally conscious and resilient community that thrives into the future by balancing rapid growth in a sustainable way. Sustainability and accessibility Sustainability was at the core of this entire festival. Every event and activity during the festival had a specific environmental education outcome. This ensured participants not only had an enjoyable experience but also went away with a greater appreciation of our local environment. The activities were run with minimal environmental impact. Including a no-waste policy where stalls were not allowed to be selling packaged goods or non-recyclable containers. All organic waste was composted, or fed to chickens at our community gardens, all other waste sent to the UR-3R waste treatment facility where recyclables were extracted and the rest turned into compost. In terms of accessibility, we purposefully created the festival to appeal to as many people as possible, including the many migrants that live within our city. There were 4 dedicated events specifically targeted at migrant groups. Events and activities were also spread across 16 different locations throughout the local government area ensuring that the Festival reached everyone in our community and was not just centred within the Blacktown central business district. Evaluation methods Participant surveys were conduced after each activity, and face-to-face interviews conducted for the major events. This has provided valuable feedback on educational outcomes, expectations, and experience of participants, which is helping to tailor our environmental education programming for 2016, and also feed into future environmental engagement events. Post event evaluations were also conducted with all partners and stakeholders involved. This has highlighted opportunities to improve the festival experience in future years, for not only participants but also those helping with the delivery of its ambitious program on such a tight budget.

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