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SLAH Sustainable Living At Home
SLAH was a behaviour change program for City of Port Philip residents, continuously improved over 9 rounds from 2001 to late 2008.
The format of SLAH was a series of 5 program workshops run over 3 months, attracting between 60 and 80 households participating in each round. The workshops focussed on practical actions around energy, water, waste, travel and spending. In addition to expert presenter information, householders inspired each other via group activities and discussion to implement actions relating to each theme.
Incentive products were supplied at each workshop (e.g. CFLs, worm farms) to encourage retrofit or behaviour change action.
Behaviour targeted
Changing values as well as targeting behaviours to help households live more sustainably.
Target Group
Households in the City of Port Phillip
Methodology and tools
Participants self-reported actions done or planned to do, with estimated energy and water savings calculated from actions done. Post-workshop 'dartboard' surveys quickly and visually evaluated each workshop.
In SLAH 9 we used video to capture reactions from participants especially on how they felt about changes made and new actions.
Key Findings
SLAH 9 participants saved an estimated:
102 tonnes of greenhouse emissions
4493 kilolitres of drinking water
and 415 cubic metres of waste
from
288 Retrofit actions
and 1120 Behaviour Change actions
recorded from the 3 Action Challenges
Participants loved the food (very important!), greatly appreciated the information presented and incentive products, and enjoyed the facilitator (Geoff Brown). The videos also show that one thing stood out overall - the sense of belonging to a group of people who had common feelings about the challenges of sustainability and could inspire each other.
Key Lessons
Concentrate on providing a space that encourages participants to positively inspire each other into action. Our community is generally aware of sustainability issues (maybe less on sustainable consumption) but crave practical action know-how more than more expert information.
One thing removed from an early round of SLAH was energy auditing and getting billing data. It's a lot of effort and hard to achieve much in a 3 month program.
Focus more on participant interactions, and making it enjoyable, so that particpants feel a part of something and that they are achieving and growing as a group.
Name
Julian Donlen
jdonlen@portphillip.vic.gov.au
Website
http://www.enviroehub.com.au/index.php?nodeId=308
Outside of IF 8
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