Knowledge exchange with our community
How ACH has changed by being involved with the Community Climate Action Project
In this blog post, Jah Caballero, Project Officer at ACH, outlines how they are creating opportunities for refugees and migrants in the environmental sector as well as learning from their lived experience of climate change.
At ACH we provide tailored integration services for refugees and migrants including housing, training and employment opportunities.
In 2020 we co-produced our community climate action plan with the refugee and migrant communities of Bristol. This experience has shaped the way we’ve run our programmes and how we are approaching this conversation. We’ve seen climate become increasingly more important to both funders and service users. Many of our service users have direct experience of the impact of climate change on their countries of origin.
Refugees and migrants don’t have a huge carbon impact, so some people have asked why we were targeting them for our green employment and business courses. Part of the reason is because this is a community that is not being included in conversations or decision making, and that are underrepresented in the environmental sector. It was important for us to work with employers around exploring ways in which they can diversify their workforce and, to retain, progress, and hire refugees and, migrants in those workplaces.
What has changed?
Traditionally at ACH we have offered careers advice and business advice to refugees and migrants who would like to secure employment but also move into starting up their own businesses. Before the Community Climate Action Project, we didn’t necessarily consider intertwining sustainability as a part of those conversations or explore the green sector for career options.
Working with Bristol Waste and other organisations in the sector enabled us to support people into those roles and to learn about why sustainability is so important. We’ve also linked up with the West of England Combined Authority Green Skills initiative, who offered workshops around how existing businesses can become carbon neutral.
We’ve also incorporated sustainability into our celebrated cooking entrepreneurship programme, which brings people together to share their cuisines, increase their skills and start up their own food businesses.
Getting our own house(s) in order
At ACH we are a social landlord so we own and lease a number of properties. We’ve reviewed our properties and obtained updated energy performance certificates. We’re exchanged our older properties for more energy efficient ones and are also looking at ways that we can reduce bills through energy efficiency as well as working with our landlords to make improvements to existing properties.
We are engaging with our tenants on reducing their costs but also ensuring that their homes are warm and safe and they are nice places to be.
Next steps
We have four offices across the West Midlands so our aim is to expand the work of this project and to take it up into those parts of the country where we haven’t delivered it before, as well as expanding the work in Bristol.
We’re about to embark on a new project with the University of the West of England looking at the embodied lived wisdom and lived experience of our service users from their respective countries of origin and how they can share that knowledge for keeping Bristol cool as the UK continues to warm up.
We’re also delivering a number of smaller scale projects involving taking our service users, out into nature and introducing them to parts of the parts of the area outside of the city where they wouldn’t usually spend their time.
Our advice
- Start now.
- Make sure there is organisational buy in from all levels of the organisation.
- Make sure you listen to those with lived experience of climate migration.
- Learn from best practice through existing networks and partnerships such as Bristol Climate & Nature Partnership.
Resources
- Our organisational story of change (video)
- How to write a sustainability course
- Community climate action insights report
We have released a series of resources over the last few weeks to share learnings from the Community Climate and Nature project. You can find them here.
The Community Climate Action Project is coordinated by Bristol Climate & Nature Partnership and funded by the National Lottery’s Climate Action Fund.
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