SEDA Conference / Day 2
Day 2: A Decade to Make a Difference
The priorities of the young generation who will be managing worsening climate change, focus on getting them involved now; benefits of having sustainability / ecology / biodiversity / growing plants involved in the school curriculum and as a part of everyday housing; SEDA's focus on health and wellbeing; wider sustainable design with health and wellbeing focus: being more proactive about campaigning and speaking up.
CHAIR
Chris Stewart
former Chair of SEDA / Collective Architecture
speakers
Amelia and James Daw
Plastic Free Dunfermline
Amelia and James were so moved after watching the SEDA screening of 'Plastic Oceans' that they vowed to take some action to reduce their single-use plastic usage. Starting at home they succeeded in reducing their personal plastic and they wanted to share this knowledge with other people in their community. Plastic-Free Dunfermline was created. Fast forward three years Dunfermline has recently been awarded 'Plastic-Free Community' status by national charity, Surfer's Against Sewage
Vas Piyasena
The Lost Woods Project
Vas Piyasena is an associate at Hoskins Architects who are based in Glasgow and Berlin. He is also a member of a new community group called From Little Acorns Grow (FLAG) who aim to teach children about natural climate solutions by engaging in small direct actions. FLAG believe that the creative arts have a fundamental role to play in economic, social and environmental improvement, utilising it to engage with people and inspire direct action.
In March 2020 FLAG’s pilot project The Lost Woods provided acorns, growing materials and teaching resources to every primary school in Glasgow for children to grow their own oak saplings and learn about the importance of trees. This October FLAG, The Green Action Trust and Glasgow City Council are inviting every Glasgow primary school to get involved in helping to transform a 13 hectare site in the south east of Glasgow into The Glasgow Children’s Woodland.
Kim Stoddart
Garden Organic / The Climate Change Garden
Kim is a gardening journalist and author with a strong background in social enterprise and ethical business, who writes regularly for a range of publications including the Guardian, Telegraph, Grow Your Own and Country Smallholding magazines, and is editor of The Organic Way magazine and the Garden Organic representative for Wales. She has been running gardening courses and workshops since 2014, about a more resilient form of gardening and climate change grow-your-own, from which 20% of all profits go into my social enterprise, providing therapeutic gardening opportunities for a range of marginalised groups.
Her background as a social entrepreneur, working with charities and companies with an ethical and environmental focus. She also works with housing associations on community projects to involve residents with the management and production of their greenspaces.
Tomas Gärtner
Bau-Biologie
Tomas worked as an Architect in Germany before moving to the UK in 2007 to join a multidisciplinary practice of Architects and Mechanical Engineers. As a director and lead architect he was responsible for the practice’s large scale, multi residential, commercial, care and leisure facility Passivhaus projects and also lead on some of the practice's government funded climate change research projects. Tomas’ passion is finding creative and innovative responses to deliver healthy, socioecological and life enhancing environments.
In 2018 he joined SE3Design as managing director and principal architect. SE3D are an integrated design lead team of architects, project managers, cost consultants and Passivhaus designers specialising exclusively in healthy, human centred high performance design.
Tomas is a regular speaker at conferences like the UK Passivhaus conference, AECB conference and Ecobuild and has been working regularly with the RIBA to deliver the sustainability seminars on their Core CPD programme since 2018. He is a chartered member of the RIBA and ARB, Certified Building Biologist IBN and Certified Passivhaus Designer CEPH.
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