Who are you trying to help? What issue are you trying to address?

At Waste Watch (a national charity) we have been busy working out our new approach to enabling communities to live more sustainably through our Sustainable Lifestyles network.

As a starting point, we recognise that what we are all doing right now isn’t working. Instead we need to trial, innovate, collect evidence and advocate for new approaches to social change.

Our Sustainable Lifestyles programme is a framework for innovation and has four founding principles:

• valuing society and the environment,
• wasting less and living more,
• collective change and
• collaboration

At the moment we don’t have all the answers. For it to succeed we need like-minded individuals and organisations to increase its impact, and join us in a collective call for change. We currently have 125 members but need funding to promote and expand the network.

We urgently need a sponsor for Sustainable Lifestyles to fund the programme including resourcing an online community, funding workshops, research papers and the sharing of ideas and experiences.

We have released our first discussion paper entitled Working from Values. In it we call for more to be done to engage communities by appealing to, and building on, our more altruistic or common values.

We believe this approach provides a solid foundation upon which we can create change on the scale required.