Background.
The Sustainability Street Approach (SSA) was devised and developed by Vox Bandicoot and is now run and managed by the not for profit Sustainability Street Institute. The SSA is described in the manual “Sustainability Street: It’s A Village Out There”. In essence, the Approach is characterised by highly local, very social, personalised and optimistic engagement with environmental sustainability. It is driven by Deep Sustainability and by Dynamic Capacity Building*.
* Deep Sustainability: fosters a beyond the 101 tips and the “checklist of duties” approach to understanding our lives and humanity as part of the ecology of the planet. DS includes an Earth/Biodiversity focus, values clarification and appling imagination and creativity to devising solutions which are locally suited.
* Dynamic Capacity Building: derives from developing connections and relationships with others in the community based on the recognition that we are all learners and we are all teachers. It differs from the Capacity Building which is delivered by practitioners, agents and officers. The CommUniversity is the practical manifestation of this. Dynamic Capacity Building is also a function of the “relevance and control” that people find in the SSA. Ultimately, a Sustainability Street Village – “is defined by and thrives according” to the ideas and energy of its participants.
Since 2001 over 200 local Sustainability Street Villages have emerged throughout Australia. |
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Sustainability Street shifts ...
from being something a community does ...
to becoming something a community is ... and we must ... because,
If we accept that the ecological sustainability issues that we now face, unquestionably provide both the greatest challenge to & the greatest opportunity for all of us, in all of human history … and they do …
AND … If so many of the solutions are out at the global technological and economic level - and especially at the local level, where amazing reductions in impact can be achieved … and they are …
THEN … why are we not seeing the world palpably and excitingly change with the depth of imagination and effect needed, and with a hint, just a hint, that we may change in time?
Put it this way, if we know what to do, and the need to do it is now at crisis level urgency, then why are we still marking time and losing hope? The Sustainability Street Approach (SSA) is an attempt to answer that question. So far, governments haven’t solved it, Science is yet to make the telling breakthrough and the Economy is only just beginning to tinker at the edges of true costing and paying for ecological “externalities”.
Clearly, it’s time for people power!
The SSA is a social, non-ideological and very human scale response, fostering the skills, imagination and capacity of local people to take control of the issues and answers relevant to us. The SSA is completely defined by and thrives according to the ideas and energy of local people. The SSA is way, way beyond the 101 tips mentality.
It is founded on an education program which provides an integrated, wholistic and values based understanding, which in turn creates transformative experiences! Literally life-changing results! It is about “relevance to and control by” local people.
The SSA is an innovative green-print enabling us to influence local and wider culture, through building community, based on increasingly sustainable living and Earth respectful choices and sharing that with others, just next door!