Flemington Green
Ongoing sustainable living activities for Flemington’s multicultural community
Flemington Green follows on from the success of the GreenTown East African program, where in partnership with Flemington Neighbourhood Renewal and with funding from Sustainability Victoria, we trained 13 local East African residents to be home sustainability assessors and deliver the sustainability message to hundreds of local residents.
This message was so popular that others living in the Flemington public housing estate told us they didn’t want to miss out, and we were thrilled to hear it. So together with Flemington Neighbourhood Renewal, we applied for and gained funding from the Sustainability Fund Neighbourhood Renewal grants, and Flemington Green ran from April 2011 to April 2012.
The aim of Flemington Green is to bring sustainable living education to more of the local East African community as well as the Chinese and the Vietnamese communities. Though workshops and field trips, at least 15 people from each community learn how to reduce their own environmental footprints and are given free products to help them get started.
Flemington Green commenced with workshops for the Vietnamese community in Aug-Sep 2011. A group of 18 women attended weekly sessions at the Vietnamese Welfare and Resource Centre on the estate, learning about saving energy, saving water (with help from our partners at City West Water) and reducing waste.
Vietnamese community liaison consultant Chi Nguyen helped translate each workshop, ensuring the content is presented in interesting and relevant ways to the participants. Chi is also helping promote Flemington’s recycling pilot program, which is going so well that Phase Two has commenced: now several blocks of apartments in the estate’s Holland Court area are involved and dozens of residents have the chance to recycle their waste. With Chi’s help, the contamination rates of these recycling bins are lower than Moonee Valley City Council generally finds in other areas, a very exciting outcome.
Flemington Green's second phase was the East African women's community workshops, which also included women from Turkish backgrounds. This group attended workshops on saving energy and water, and a field trip to SKM Recycling to learn more about waste and recycling.
The final phase was the Chinese community which saw a workshop on energy saving for 16 members of the Flemington Chinese Golden Age Group and a field trip to Brimbank Park in Keilor to learn more about local places of environmental significance as well as enjoy a walk in nature.
Now the project is wrapping up, participants are telling us they're learning more about the environment, and also really confident to talk to other people about ways they can help the environment - we've heard many stories of parents reducing their teenagers' shower time, people talking to their neighbours in the Flemington estate, women talking to their sisters about reducing energy bills... One of the nicest findings is that people from all three groups have said how much they value coming together with people from different cultures to help their shared environment.
Please give us a hoy if you require more info
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