Making your hall a hub for community sustainability
01/26/2022
Continuing our series looking at sustainability and village halls and community centres, we look at how halls can become a focal point for community change. Different from making practical changes to the building, this is about leading and inspiring people in the community to think about their own decisions and to make it easy for them to make eco-friendly adaptations.
Where better than a community hall to host events or meetings? In a small community, who else can galvanise local people to lobby for change or set challenges for everyone to work to? Bigger changes can happen if a whole community switches the way they shop or sources their food.
Here are some ideas for different ways community organisations can use their spaces and influence to make it easy for people to come together to make positive changes. This can take drive and commitment but can have significant impact.
Make your hall a venue for others to drive change
How can you use your space to support groups of people coming together? Is there a local climate action group or a campaign team working to protect a piece of land? It can be hard for them to find places to meet or host consultation meetings. Could you amend your hire policy to let them use your hall at a reduced rate?
Can you give noticeboard space or share social media messages to help them reach more people? You could ask hall visitors to make a pledge about small changes they're willing to make to drive the community commitment?
Become an organiser of events
Many village halls and community centres run markets where local producers sell their food and goods. This helps to reduce food miles, plastic packaging and helps the local economy. What other events could you host to encourage people to reduce, reuse and recycle?
Could you help establish regular events to encourage local recycling? – like jumble sales but without any money. These could be organised round a certain type of item, for example a clothes swap (such as a Swish event) or school uniforms.
Could you organise for a local expert to come and run an eco-friendly workshop in your hall? They could give a talk about ways to reduce waste in homes and encourage people to reuse and recycle. Or you might be able to encourage gardening projects in your local area, to plant native or fruit bearing trees that don’t need lots of watering.
Help facilitate others in your area
In your role as a hub for your community, what can you do to facilitate the sharing of resources? Can you use your noticeboard or social media to connect people who are giving away unwanted items with people who could use them instead? Schemes like Freecycle (for furniture) or Olio (for food sharing) already exist. Can you signpost people towards them or set up your own hyper-local version?
Top tips
Here are some things to consider when planning how your hall can become a hub for community sustainability:
- Find out what activities are already happening in your community, where are the gaps and what might people want? You could run a survey or set up a poll on social media to find out.
- Before starting anything new, you should consider all potential risks, document these and take action to prevent any problems. See our guide on risk assessments.
- If you are introducing new activities or using your space in a different way, you should tell your insurer to discuss how this might affect your policy.
- Set targets and monitor the impact you are making. You could start a climate committee to ensure you are doing everything you can.
- Sharing details of the changes you’re making will help others to see how your work is making a difference, and may help inspire them to make changes themselves.
Every individual effort that is made can help contribute to a big impact on climate change.
In 2020, we spoke to two village halls about how they responded to the climate crisis. Gilling East and Whittington Village Halls made improvements to reduce their carbon usage and create hubs for people making changes locally.
We’d love to hear about activities or initiatives you've started in your community hall, to be at the centre of change for the local community. Tag us on Twitter @ZurichVolSec.
Find information about our village hall insurance here.
