Creative Change Project team (clock-wise starting at the bottom left): Flora Wong, Joel Spence, Pearly Black, Emma Heard, Matt Hsu, Brydie-Leigh Bartleet.
About the team
We are the Creative Change Project, an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship project led by Professor Brydie-Leigh Bartleet. The Creative Change Project aims to explore the role that community music can play in building more equitable societies. Over the next 3 years, we will be working closely with Australia’s community music sector to map current approaches and diving deeply into the impact that key programs are having in communities across the country. As a team passionate about social equity and social justice, environmental sustainability is one of our core values and we were excited to take up the Green Impact challenge!
The Creative Change Project is about harnessing the power of music to build equitable societies. From the project’s inception, Professor Brydie-Leigh Bartleet has been committed to embedding principles of social, cultural, and climate justice in all aspects of the project’s design and implementation. We aim to not only ‘talk the talk’ but also ‘walk the walk’ in relation to our topic area. Green Impact provided a tool for us to audit and track our project’s environmental impact and challenged us to further minimise our environmental impact and embody the social justice values espoused by our project.
We began by using the Green Impact Toolkit as an auditing tool, capturing all the actions we as a team were already doing. This includes things like being conscientious consumers (personally and on project related purchases in particular), creating minimum waste and being careful with our waste management, prioritising active travel and offsetting our carbon footprint when air travel is required. Through this audit, we quickly achieved Silver Award Level!
We then challenged ourselves with other actions identified in the toolkit related to the UN’s SDGs and as a result, have increased our knowledge of, and commitment to, supporting diversity and inclusion, health and wellbeing, and biodiversity in our local environments. This allowed us to stretch to a gold level award.
Participating in Green Impact provided a framework for important conversations about the First Nations’ lands we live and work on, and opportunities to share stories about our families, homes and gardens. We believe that music and the arts have tremendous scope to contribute towards the ‘cultural localisation’ of the UN’s SDGs (a term used by the #2030 Culture Goal campaign) and are committed to advocating for this both at Griffith and within the wider, global music discipline. Engaging with Green Impact has helped ensure our project is aligned with Griffith’s wider contributions to addressing the SDGs and connected us with resources available within our university.
Participating in the Green Impact challenge is just the starting point for our team. We will use our list of actions to build a blue-print for our ARC project moving forward to ensure we are acting in the best interests of our communities and our planet in all aspects of our research.
To find out more about our project visit creativechange.org.au
