About Carbon Makeover
‘Carbon Makeover' is a Knowle West Media Centre project that has been running since October 2007. The overarching aim has been to engender behavioural change around carbon reduction, with people who have not previously been engaged with environmental agendas.
Knowle West (KW) is an estate made up of 5,000 homes consisting of council stock, housing association and privately owned homes. It scores high in indicators of deprivation, ranking in the worst 10% in the country for housing, health, educational attainment and employment.
The carbon footprint of the ward was scored as one of the highest in the city - based on travel to work mode, waste produced per household, electricity used and locally produced food purchased. But times are changing in Knowle West. Local people have been looking forward to a good quality of life for themselves, their families and the whole community. People want to have a say in how this can be achieved which is where Knowle West Media Centre (KWMC) comes into the picture.
KWMC is a social enterprise that is rooted in the community; working to develop the creative, educational and social potential of people. Part of our work is to draw people from the community into processes of decision-making and becoming activists for positive change.
Environmental Action is one of four key areas of work that forms KWMC's creative program, where we believe local level awareness can lead to global change.
Local people involved talked passionately about the need for specific information for them and their families to be able to get involved in going green. In response to this need KWMC collaborated with CIVA and secured funding from the Wates Foundation to deliver a project on an estate in London and in Knowle West. Our local answer to tacking climate change, Carbon Makeover, was born!
Through collaboration we identified six themes - energy, health, nature, food, travel and waste. We identified how to engage people with the themes of Carbon Makeover through practical projects, support and media, and adopted a grassroots approach to defining what actions people would engage with.
Keys parts of our approach have included maintaining an inclusive person centered, bottom up approach. We listen to the participants so the CM is community guided. We use a mixture of media platforms to empower participants and get their opinions heard. Media is also used to get environmental messages out to the community by informing local people in a fun and accessible way, whilst still keeping the serious message of climate change threaded throughout.
We acknowledge that Knowle West isn't the usual choice for a project such as this, and thus we make the project locally relevant and find local solutions so participants feel a connection to the project. We also see the impact of Carbon Makeover as being bigger than an environmental change. We always bear in mind the social and economic impact of what we are doing, which in turn influences decisions on how the project is run.
Previously Knowle West has been known for its negative transferral of behaviour through the generations of families who all live on the estate. Carbon Makeover is helping to tackle that; it is initiating positive behavioural change alongside low carbon living that's already started to gather momentum and is positively transmitted through the families.
Carbon Makeover has been rewarded the title of ‘Carbon Positive Community' by the South West Carbon Positive awards, 3 young people have been presented with awards from Young Bristol and 4 female community campaigners have received ‘Women who make a difference' awards by Bristol Women's Forum, Our Plastic bag Campaigners and Energy champion have been presented with local ‘Hearts and Stars' award. Carbon Makeover has also been asked to present at several national conferences and most recently, represented the UK at the European Commission conference on ‘Social Fairness in Sustainable Development'.
