Are you a sustainable living guru? Or, like me, are you just someone who has experience of living a more sustainable life that you wish to share with others? Either way (or anywhere in between) one way of letting others tap into your experience and learn from what you have done is to conduct some workshops in your community. This is a very rewarding thing to do, sharing your hard won knowledge and experience with those who are just staring out so if you are in a position to do it, it is worth considering. I have found it to be a huge amount of fun!
Setting the Boundary
Living more sustainably is a wide field covering many diverse subjects so to stop yourself from getting caught up in trying to cover too much it is best to draw a circle around the topics that you wish to cover. Ideally these would be topics that you have experience in that others wish to learn about (funny ‘bout that!). While my original efforts were around trying to interest people in low energy cooking, the subjects that people seem to have the most interest in were about vegetable and fruit gardening and food production in the backyard in general. This caused me to develop the workshop series ”Eating the Suburbs – producing food in and around the suburban house”.
Funding
Sustainability is somewhat of a flavour of the month with local councils at the moment so they may be interested in funding your workshop(s). Talk to their sustainability coordinator, they will probably want you to develop and put in a submission about what you can offer and what the participants can expect to get out of the workshops. If you don’t get funding it is not the end of the world if you are focussing on low cost ways of helping people live more sustainably. The workshops that I run don’t use lots of resources and what they do use are sourced reasonably cheaply so that even without funding you could run the workshops charging participants $5 to $10 to cover the cost of materials. If you are charging for your time that is a different matter, but for me it is about getting the message out to as many people as possible rather than making money, but either way running sustainability workshops is unlikely to make you rich!
Venue
If you are working with councils then they usually have one or more community cottages or neighbourhood centres that you can use and you may be able to get their use for free. These can be somewhat underutilised and sometimes they are so busy you will need to book in advance but even if they do charge it will be only a nominal fee if you are acting as benefit to the community rather than a commercial enterprise. You may be lucky and your area could have a sustainability training centre like the old chook research station at Seven Hills that is now a sustainability training centre for Blacktown council. Talk to them and see what is available.
Short of council owned venues there may be churches or community halls in your area that could be available or even your own or someone else’s house. In any case the things to look for in a venue are –
- Space – for people to sit, stand, move around and complete practical activities. Some of the practical activities around food production are a bit messy so having an outdoor area to conduct things like making veggie box gardens and potting things up would be good.
- Climate control – it is really difficult to concentrate on what the presenter is saying when you are freezing to death or sweating like a pig so if you intend conducting presentations at times that are outside the mildest weather in spring and autumn some form of heating and cooling is important.
- Tables and chairs – most venues will have chairs available, and you need to make sure that you have enough, but even three or four folding tables will make the workshops flow much better. You will need one to set up and present from, one to set up any practical activities on and one for tea and coffee (more about this later). If you do intent to have an outside activity then a fourth table already set up outside, or just the third one if there is no inside activity as well, will make your job much easier.
- Tea and coffee facilities – this makes for a nicer before and after session discussion time and break time if you are going to have one. Most of the venues will have a kitchen of some description but even if there isn’t you can provide an “el cheapo” jug and boil it on the table right there in the room. A cake and few biscuits also goes down well.
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Projector – while the possibility exists that one will be available it is quite probable that the venue will not have a projector so to make your life easier it would be better if you can provide your own. In one community cottage we have access to a projector but in the other we don’t so for a few hundred dollars we bought a small one about the size of a cigarette packet (a Samsung Pico projector) that does not even need a computer to run it, it works directly off an SD card or flash drive. One thing that will help is if the venue has a blank, light coloured wall that you can use as a screen otherwise bring along some butcher paper to use as a screen, whiteboards tend to be a bit too reflective.
Timing
Once you have decided on the material you want to present you then need to think about your target audience, which will to a certain extent determine when you run your sessions. Mothers with young kids and retirees will be available during the day, working people without kids will be available of a night after work,(but they will be tired) and weekends almost everyone will be available particularly if you want to run longer one-off sessions or multiple sessions during the day.
If you opt for the after-work scenario it is important to build breaks and practical exercises into your sessions because standing up in front of your audience and just talking or worse yet, showing lots of slides on your projector (death by overhead) will put at least some of them to sleep no matter how riveting a presenter you are. After spending a full day at work their capacity to absorb new information will be diminished, particularly towards the end of the night.
In general terms I have found a two hour session that is composed of one hour theory presentation and one hour practical activity with a coffee and stretch break in between is ideal. It is long enough to get your point across and give them some practice without overloading people that may not have had any formal education for many years.
Promotion
Promoting your workshops will be made easier if you are working under the auspices of your local council but even if you are not there are relatively cheap easy things you can do to generate interest in your sessions -
One of the easiest ways to promote your workshops is to develop and print some flyers that say a bit about the workshops and give contact details, at the very least include a phone number but an email is good too. Once developed you can put a flyer up and leave take away copies in any of the following locations in your local area, assuming they give you permission, to get to your target audience -
- Doctors surgery
- Health food shops
- Day care centres
- Local library
Other ways you can get the word out is to see if you can get a press release put into your local School and/or community newsletter or approach your local papers that can be positively inclined towards community groups. Also try approaching a community radio station if one exists in your local area although even the mainstream radio stations sometimes have time set aside for community service announcements and could give your veggie gardening group a plug.
Paperwork
There are various bits of paperwork that can make your life easier (or cause a pain in the bum, depending on your point of view) –
Disclaimers etc. – if you are working with the council, local councils tend to be very bureaucratic ie driven by paperwork so it is highly likely that they will have forms that the participants will need to fill out, and quite probable you as the presenter too, that protect their bums in case of accident or whatever.
Insurance – when working with the council and even on council property you should be covered by their public liability insurance and likewise on church premises but rather than trust to luck, ask and be sure. Your household insurance will probably have a public liability component but here again, check to be sure. 
Sign-in sheet – The council will want records if for no other reason than to know how many people are turning up although sign in may be a requirement for insurance purposes as well. It is handy for you too and make sure that your sign in sheet has an option to put down email address, that way you can keep the group updated on any changes or problems and if you need them to bring anything for the next workshop an email reminder before the day is a good thing.
Photo release – if you are going to take photos and use them later for promotional activities or whatever, a signed photo release is a good thing to have in the files. The council may require one anyway.
Feedback form – or “Happy Sheet” as they are known by trainers. These are given out to the participants at the end of the workshop or at the end of the series of workshops give you an opportunity to gauge how your work has been received by your audience. A section of the happy sheet should be allocated to asking if there are other workshop subjects they would like to see and this is a good way of conducting market research with people who have already proved they are willing to turn up.
Conducting community workshops is a great way for you, the presenter, to give back to your community and connect with like minded people who are motivated to learn. It is also great for the people who attend because they are learning valuable life skills as well as meeting new people they can discuss them with. Everybody wins, so if you have ever thought of doing this sort of thing contact your local council and see what they say. Remember thought that even if they are not interested you can still go it alone, so good luck!
Note: In the Resources/downloads section of this site I will be progressively uploading the Powerpoint Presentations I use for my workshops as well as a running sheet for the first workshop series. I am also going to extract the relevant articles from this site and weave them into an E-book which will also be available. This may take some time so please bear with me.
November 2011 Update - All of the Powerpoint presentations that I use in this workshop series have now been uploaded and are available in the Resources section of this site, I hope that you will find them of use.
July 2014 Update - Through Permaculture Sydney West (PSW) I have been running some sustainability workshops for local councils and a friend of mine who is a corporate trainer (and is our current president!) has developed a couple of guidelines for our members to use when running workshops for PSW. The PSW workshop Guidelines covering suggestions on how to set up and run a successful workshop and the PSW Presenter Guidelines giving suggestions on how the presenter can make the workshops for informative and memorable. Both those guidelines may be downloaded here.
