As part of our advocacy and education work, our touring season for CastAway and Accelerate has ended, with our last performance at the start of October. Both shows reached almost 10,000 audiences over 22 performances, bringing our stories of plastic pollution in our waterways (CastAway) and how climate change is directly affecting the world’s fuel supply and energy production (Accelerate) to audiences across the country. Highly Sprung continue to develop new ways to tell compelling stories and inspire action around climate change using our environmentally charged spectacle work.
‘This Was Such a Unique Energetic & Intriguing Performance!!’ – Accelerate, Leicester
‘Your performance was so powerful our little girl is still talking about it and is dying to see more of your movement theatre…was such [a] brilliant message… [We] are doing a bit of research on reusable energy and the types of ways we can help reduce our use’ – Accelerate, SIRF
As we have welcomed three new Trustees and a new Chair to our Board, following a working group reshuffle, Trustee Emma joins myself (Zoe) in the sustainability working group, with the remit of reviewing our progress so far and working on drafting the action plan for 2026/2027.
Colleen, our new Learning & Participation Co-ordinator, alongside her role as Sprung Youth leader, and Nicola from Vortex Creates, who creates lots of our costume and sets, have both undertaken Carbon Literacy Training, to help inform the work that they do with us. We used the training from WMCA, which is currently offering free Carbon Literacy Training to those based in the Midlands.
Nicola reflects on the training: ‘I’ve really enjoyed it – both learning more and taking time to think about what I can do both as an individual and as a designer/maker and giving me time to explore the subject in a wider way. I like learning and have been caught in lots of other reading and googling.’
Colleen also shared: ‘I found the carbon literacy training very informative without making me lose confidence in what I can do to help the net zero goal. It can be quite harrowing thinking about how much is needed to make a difference in our journey battling climate change however, this training restored my faith in the fact that any difference is a big difference, no matter how small. The focus and discussion on how we can come together as a community with local people, aiming for zero carbon, was a highlight as it allowed me to reflect on my own work and how changes could be implemented.’
We are excited to see how the training helps inform our future work, both internally and with our trusted collaborators like Vortex Creates.
We have reached the halfway point of the financial year, and therefore our 25/26 action plan and we are continuing to work through our planned actions.
We’ve had internal training with the core team, as part of our Away Day:
- Looking at the new recycling system in the office, so we can recycle soft plastics and tracking how much we are recycling/sending to landfill.
- Thinking about how we can encourage Sprung Youth to use reusables – Colleen is thinking about how we can achieve this as part of her Carbon Literacy pledge.
- Considering writing our ‘procurement policy’ – we felt that buying guidelines might be more appropriate, as a small charity with limited we sometimes will have to consider cost and speed versus sustainability, so writing a set of best practice guidelines that we can aim to work within.
The action around reducing the carbon footprint of our website is currently on hold, as we are looking to carry out wider updates which will encompass carbon improvement, but this bigger piece of work is funding dependent, so we will review this at the end of this action plan year.
We have made process on work on reducing our digital carbon footprint – Cheryl has been hard at work archiving documents from cloud storage to an external hard drive, as well as deleting items that are no longer need, have been superseded, or in line with our GDPR retention policies. We also shared as part of our Away day training encouragement to delete old document versions or files no longer needed, as well as a call to action to check emails for old newsletters or promotions that can be deleted. Our Google carbon footprint has been dropping steadily since June thanks to our small changes, and we have reduced our cloud storage by 410GB already!
Next steps:
- Continue to encourage small changes – especially around digital decluttering
- As originally pointed out by the Youth Advisory Board – work on encouraging Sprung Youth to use reusables, especially when bringing drinks to the sessions.
- Using You.Smart.Thing for our Christmas show audiences to pilot tracking their travel choices
- Work on the next action plan 26/27 in the Sustainability Working Group – to be signed off by the Board at the start of April