Sustainability
What is Sustainability
Sustainability encompasses many aspects for you, and your children’s lives. Its is more than environmental education or nature play it is the core of all decisions that are made to ‘live lightly’ and build respectful relationships with all sentinel beings.
This includes the concepts shown below in the Ecological Footprint and Social Handprint. It is a holistic approach about how you manage your staff, operate your centres daily activities and respond to challenges to show resilience. Sustainability isn’t something you ‘do’ on Wednesday mornings before lunch, or added to your list of things you need to do in a day.
Planning to change purchasing habits, choices of activities for children to connect them to country, how conversations are carried out and care of each other are some of the sustainable actions to prepare everyone to live well together.
In addition to these practices, fostering a culture of sustainability within your community can amplify the impact. Engaging families in discussions about sustainability and sharing resources can create a ripple effect, encouraging everyone to adopt more sustainable habits.
Sustainable Schools WA
Sustainable Schools WA is a program in over 530 primary schools and high schools in WA. This program involves all aspects of schools to truly embed sustainability across the years and complements the Caring for Country Together framework.
LGSWA was deliberately developed to include the SSWA framework so there is consistent messages for children and educators across their schooling. We reference this in all our resources, workshops and incursions along with the Early Years Learning Framework and the WA Curriculum.
Sustainable Schools WA has arranged ‘sustainability’ into 5 fingers and 5 toes and asks you to look at ways to reduce your ecological footprint and increase your social handprint.
It is important to not look at these digits as separate aspects; often if you are working on one of the ‘toes’ you will automatically be achieving one of the other fingers or toes. For example if you buy things in bulk, not only are you reducing your waste but you are also reducing your costs and increasing your ‘economics/built environment’.
You can now download the new early years handprint and footprint posters for free by clicking on the images below.
For more information and sustainability resources, please visit our resources pages (members area).
If you have any examples of how your centre, service or school has displayed one of these aspects please let us know about it - we would love to share your success and inspire others!
