Our Sustainable Neighbourhood

Our Sustainable Neighbourhood: an environmental tool for enterprising communities

Imagine what your neighbourhood could look like if the environment was at the heart of it.

Our Sustainable Neighbourhood is a practical, action-planning tool for resources. It builds on the Plugging the Leaks tool1 which explores money flows into and out of a community and finds practical ways to plug those leaks. Our Sustainable Neighbourhood focuses on the flows of resources into and out of a community – particularly energy, water and consumer products - and identifies enterprising ways to reduce, reuse, recycle and substitute those resources.

This approach supports people to take back the responsibility for environmental sustainability into their community. It assists communities who want to move towards more sustainable ways of living both at their local neighbourhood level, and also within the global environmental system.

Why is this tool different?

Several tools for improving environmental sustainability already exist, but…

. They often operate outside the neighbourhood level and are thus not seen as achievable by local residents and community members

1 www.pluggingtheleaks.org

1 . They are often fairly complicated and time consuming processes

. They do not look for enterprising solutions to local problems

. They do not enable a community-based and driven response to environmental issues

What does it do?

Our Sustainable Neighbourhood has five main objectives:

1. To map local renewable and non-renewable resources from source (where it comes from) to sink (where it goes) focusing the discussion on water, energy and consumer products.

2. To generate a shared awareness of local resources between community members.

3. To discover what and where local renewable resources are located.

4. To increase literacy (understanding) on environmental sustainability.

5. To discover enterprising ways to use and reuse local renewable resources, and the saving and substitution of non-renewable resources.

Our Sustainable Neighbourhood is based on a ‘Theory of Change’, that is:

Increasing the use and reuse of renewable resources, and decreasing use and wastage of non-renewable resources, can be achieved through enterprising local initiatives, and can lead to the overall improved social, economic and environmental sustainability of a local area.

The workshop is a 3 hour process from start to finish that brings together local groups of up to 30 individuals.

Who to contact

If you would like to discuss the process further contact Elizabeth Cox: Email: [email protected] Tel : 020 7820 6381