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Over the last two years, Blue Cabin has sharpened its focus on sustainability. We have formed an environment working group, attended training through Going Green Together, published our environment and sustainability policy and achieved Silver Investors in the Environment accreditation.
Two of our sustainability champions, Amy Armstrong and Jane Gray, share three challenges we’ve faced in our sustainability journey so far.
When we started out on our journey, we looked into various different ways of calculating an organisation’s carbon footprint. We found that a lot of carbon calculators are great if you’re a building-based venue, but that they didn’t work as well for a small charity like Blue Cabin, where we all work remotely.
It was useful to experiment with the different tools out there but we quickly realised that not everything is going to work for every organisation.
After exploring different options we have decided to use Investors in the Environment’s own carbon calculator. It’s a simpler option which gives the right level of detail for us and doesn’t add too much complexity. We will be using this to collect data on our travel as an organisation, and to identify any further ways we can reduce our impact on the environment through our travel choices. We already encourage the use of active travel, and use of public transport and car sharing where possible. But, we know that those options aren’t always possible, for lots of reasons (caregiving, geography and location, materials and equipment needed for sessions to name but a few).
When we started to look at things like travel and energy use, we realised that, as an organisation where people work from home and a lot of the team are freelancers, gathering data was going to be difficult.
When we looked into how we could calculate energy usage based on people working from home, it became clear that we’d need to ask people for a huge amount of information, like their energy bills and the size of their home working space.
This felt intrusive and we made the decision that, as a trauma informed organisation, that we do let people know how they can make a positive difference, but that we won’t be asking our team to reduce their own private energy bills, for example. Everyone’s circumstances are different and it’s not a case of one size fits all.
Instead of gathering individuals’ data, we will share information about ways to reduce energy usage within the home, such as these top tips from the Energy Saving Trust.
We’re a small organisation and sometimes it feels like the changes we can make might be too small to make a difference. However we’ve learnt that, even if our carbon footprint is small, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take action.
We can make a difference but we’re being realistic and not benchmarking ourselves against other cultural organisations which might be much larger, or have multiple venues. We’re not setting unrealistic targets, we’re focusing on raising awareness, shifting habits, and improving processes to drive meaningful change.
