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Carbon Literacy’s October Pioneers Event

December 2019 by James Boyd

Tuesday 29th October saw us host the latest Carbon Literacy Pioneers Network at Innospace on Chester Street, in Manchester. These events provide a platform for facilitators, trainers and consultants who deliver Carbon Literacy, to meet and share various tips and experiences from Carbon Literacy (CL) training, as well as an opportunity to find out the latest news of what we’ve been getting up to here at The Carbon Literacy Project.

The event opened with a brief meet and greet introducing everyone in the room, before moving on to briefly mention the exciting things that have happened since our last Pioneers Network; such as 11,000 people now being certified as Carbon Literate, and over 22,000 actions being pledged across 10 nations! This event was also a great opportunity for us to speak about the updates to our CL ‘Knowledge’ E-Learning which will be ready to roll out next Spring. We informed the group that it would be really helpful for us to have some feedback, so if any trainers are interested in proofreading the newer components, please email info@carbonliteracy.com to let us know. We also had a chance to discuss the Carbon Literate Organisation (CLO) Awards that we will be hosting in March 2020. If you’d like to find out more about the awards, and how to apply, please click here. The deadline for applying is 6pm on the 31st of January, so if you haven’t already, make sure you get your applications in soon.

Following on from this, we discussed the exciting decision for the Scottish Government to invest a further £300,000 into the Climate Ready Classrooms Initiative. This initiative, being delivered by Keep Scotland Beautiful and accredited by The Carbon Literacy Project, provides a one-day Carbon Literacy course tailored towards young people, as well as their teachers, headteachers, CLD practitioners, youth workers and children’s workers. The course aims to develop their knowledge of climate change as well as its causes and impacts, enabling people to live a more sustainable lifestyle at home, school and in their local area, taking action against climate change amid the current climate crisis. Since the scheme began in 2018, over 200 learners and 18 educational professions located throughout Scotland have been certified as Carbon Literate. To read more about Carbon Ready Classrooms, click here. We also took the opportunity to invite any of our trainers to write a guest blog for our website, as we love to hear how Carbon Literacy has been rolled out within different organisations – be it activities, implementation of actions, or even interesting points of discussion raised during training; if you are interested in writing a blog please do get in touch via info@carbonliteracy.com,

At the previous Pioneers event, we had asked trainers to communicate the qualities they thought made a good Carbon Literacy Trainer. This time, we were able to run through the completed ‘Code of Conduct’, based on suggestions from the last session. In producing this, we hope to help trainers continue to deliver excellent standards of Carbon Literacy training.

The event concluded with a lively discussion on the best tips and resources that trainers find most effective when delivering Carbon Literacy. This provides a great opportunity for everyone to come together and share a range of techniques used to engage learners and really get them thinking about what it means to become Carbon Literate. We also shared many helpful resources for our trainers to use which can be found searching the hashtag #CLResource on Twitter.

We will be holding our next Pioneers event in April 2020, so keep an eye out for the confirmed date. With some big dates coming up, we hope to bring you even more exciting news about The Carbon Literacy Project in the new year.

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