Cumbria Action for Sustainability's story
Do you want to get your facts straight about climate science, carbon footprints and solutions?
Carbon and climate literacy training provides a clear understanding of climate science, an awareness of carbon costs and impacts of everyday activities and also the ability and motivation to reduce emissions on an individual, community and organisational basis.
The accredited training course is inspiring, informative and interactive, taking learners clearly and concisely through the science of climate change, causes, impacts and solutions. It also covers the global, UK and Cumbria picture, what is happening locally, and how to get involved.
The session presents learners with a clear framework for understanding the climate crisis, how soon we need to act, the scale of that action, and their part in the bigger picture.
Learners leave the session more confident in their knowledge, better able to articulate what needs to be done, and with an increased sense of agency around their ability to be part of that change, on an individual, community and organisational level.
They also leave with the ability to develop their own action plans, and to develop their own training sessions for others.
The session is delivered by expert trainers from Cumbria Action for Sustainability (CAfS). CAfS Co-Chair the Zero Carbon Cumbria Partnership, and run Cumbria's carbon and climate literacy training programme. Their certified carbon literate trainers bring decades of practical emission-reduction expertise, in-depth knowledge of local activity and best practise, as well as significant training experience.
Bespoke courses can be developed for any audience, and can support and help to communicate or to develop the decarbonisation plans of organisations are communities.
Useful learnings from Cumbria Action for Sustainability
We started this project in response to huge demand from individuals and organisations for interactive, empowering training that taught knowledge. Individuals are taught the ability to express and apply that knowledge and the ability to weight up and make decisions about carbon impact in any situation that life throws at you, at home, at work or in the community.
Always start from the question of 'what am I trying to achieve?' Are you trying to teach just knowledge? Or is it also about building ability to articulate knowledge? Or building agency and ability to take action? Have you considered a range of different learning styles? Are you aiming to communicate a top-down climate plan or are you aiming to engage a community or workforce to feed in ideas and co-develop the plans/design your training programme so that it is built around achieving your aims and avoid becoming a tick box exercise?
Involve your audiences in the design of the programme and in the development of materials. Stay true to your key central messages, but ensure that you integrate sector-specific or audience-specific information, developed by/with that audience to ensure that delivery has the highest impact.
Assess in advance how much marketing and administration time will be needed as this is significant and needs to be included in any budget.
The training is a mix of taught content, videos, breakout discussions and interactive exercises, some of which are very reflective, others of which are quick-fire, fast-paced question and answers. All of our specialist trainers are very experienced in working with groups of mixed knowledge levels and we use a real mixture of delivery to ensure all learning styles are engaged.
Cumbria Action for Sustainability's metrics
Numbers attending the training.
Delegate feedback after the training.
Polls to assess changes in concern levels, knowledge, confidence, motivation, sense of agency, ability to take action.
Pledges are made by individuals and organisations and we follow up to see if they are actioned and delivered.
