In 2021, Coventry began it’s programme as the UK City of Culture. This diverse, modern city was tasked to reimagine the role culture can play in bringing people together.
The Coventry City of Culture Trust are committed to cultural programming that is environmentally responsible and promotes environmental awareness. As such, they wished to develop a ‘Green Code’ for their activities – a sustainable and adaptable framework to encourage behaviour change and benchmark best environmental practice, supported by a range of resources and toolkits. The Green Code would need to adaptable and easily adoptable for a range of cultural institutions both large and small.
The Brief
The Coventry City of Culture Trust commissioned the Kambe Events team to develop and deliver a series of workshops with ‘CW10’ (Coventry & Warwickshire 10 major cultural organisations), to build towards the establishment of and adoption of the Green Code amongst their respective organisations, and to create a framework to allow a successful roll out, across the region.
The Kambe Events team were also tasked with supporting the communications planning for any relevant announcements of campaigns.
The Process
We began by reviewing the CW10’s existing policy docs, their Green Code draft and current recommendations.
We also surveyed CW10 on their existing processes and analysed the data.
We then ran a series of workshops with CW10, covering how to monitor and measure baseline data, how to create a green action plan and what to include in it and tips for behaviour change.
We also followed up with numerous live, online zoom ‘surgeries’ for every workshop topic, with industry experts, where attendees could bring questions about their action plans.
The Result
Delivery of the following workshops, with follow up, dedicated ‘surgeries’ on each topic to support CW10 with the development of their Green Code:
- An accessible introduction to the key environmental issues of our time and how people can be part of the change within their lives and their work – covering climate change, mass extinction, mass pollution and the power we have to make a change!
- Sustainable event delivery – covering impacts, what to consider, easy wins and how to monitor and measure results.
- Food and beverages – covering certifications, minimum standards, carbon footprints and packaging and waste
- Procurement and supply chains – covering issues and impacts, worker’s rights, materials and impacts, policies and supplier management.
- Waste management – covering where waste goes, how to manage recycling, effectively using the waste hierarchy to manage recycling and hard-to- recycle materials
- Carbon (Energy and travel) – covering net-zero, going ‘beyond energy’ to understand and reduce your footprint, and how to understand carbon jargon!
- The theory of behaviour change – and how to apply this theory to important issues. Understanding the psychology of behaviour change, the infrastructure to apply it, and how social influence’s inform people’s actions.
- Understanding audiences – How to delve into the needs and values of your target audience, to design effective environmental solutions
- How to develop an initiative – ideation sessions, to help develop a successful and effective environmental initiative
- Communication – covering how to communication environmental issues to target audiences in an inspiring and engaging way
Finally, we created and presented several status update reports, on the development of the green code.
We then developed a legacy plan with CW10, capturing the findings and recommendations for the Green Code.
