INSPIRE

Located in the gallery space of the historic Strathnairn Arts Homestead, Café Stepping Stone founders Vanessa Brettel and Hannah Costello are doing more than serving fantastic vegetarian food. Their business model employs migrant and refugee women to give them hospitality experience, learn and improve their English and obtain a Certificate III in commercial cookery or hospitality to advance their skills further.

Could your money help save the world? Dave Rae, Financial Advisor at Ethinvest, believes it can. He talks us through why it’s important to invest ethically and how we can go about it, from identifying what issues are important to you to changing your super fund investments and making informed decisions on our everyday purchases.

New York’s famous High Line Park (which used to be a train line) and London’s Tate Modern (formerly Bankside Power Station) are great global examples of adaptive reuse projects – an approach that breathes new life into empty or unused structures and places. Stuart Harrison, Architect and Good Design Advocate, talks about the key considerations and examples of adaptive reuse both globally and locally.

Walkability, green spaces, access to nature. These are some of the elements that, if incorporated into our community, can enhance our wellbeing. Imogen Featherstone, Planning Development Manager and Tulitha King, Community Development Manager from Ginninderry, talk about how this development has created the infrastructure that allows for greater community interactivity and events.

While Australia is home to some of the world’s most dangerous snake species, they play a vital role in maintaining our delicate ecosystem. Dr Gavin Smith, Associate Professor in Sociology, despite hailing from Scotland, has gained a local reputation as being a ‘snake whisperer’.  Through his research on the Eastern Brown snake, he hopes to help humans and snakes to coexist better.

No matter your age or ability level, play is important for your health, wellbeing and sense of community. Through her Play, Creativity and Wellbeing Project, Dr Cathy Hope is partnering with Ginninderry to push the boundaries of traditional park infrastructure by creating vibrant, fun spaces that cater to everyone’s needs.

Australia is the second-largest consumer of textiles globally, with 93% of non-renewable, non-degradable, and synthetic materials ending up in landfills, taking hundreds of years to break down and releasing carbon emissions. But Emma Batchelor, Author of Building a Conscious Wardrobe (and other fun things), shows us how to enjoy fashion in a sustainable way.

Frogs are the most threatened species group globally, and their declines and losses of species have been described as the single biggest threat to our biodiversity. But Anke-Maria Hoefer, ACT & Region FrogWatch Coordinator with the Ginninderra Catchment Group explains how we can all do our bit by volunteering to become a FrogWatcher. It’s easy and fun.

A return to work after a career break can be daunting for anyone. And research shows that these career interruptions are much more common for women.

With this in mind, Ginninderry has created a program specifically aimed at getting women back into the workforce, in partnerships with Empowered Collective and the ACT Government Office for Women.

Head of Ginninderry’s Community, Training & Employment, Emma Sckrabei, says that the program is free for eligible women and is part of the suite of courses offered by Ginninderry’s award-winning SPARK Training and Employment Program.

Run by Deborah Fulton, CEO of Empowered Collective, it’s designed to support women who are entering or returning to the workforce, and is made up of three separate workshops, covering the essentials for women hoping to return to work.

As Australia rapidly moves towards a renewable energy future, the excess energy that household solar panels are currently producing is creating instability for the grid. But community scale batteries offer a solution, bridging the gap between large utility-scale grid storage systems and costly household battery systems

According to Michael Jansen, Managing Director of PowerTec Engineered Solutions, they offer energy storage for around 100 households, with power capacities up to 5MW and have the potential to play an integral role in Australia’s transition to a decentralised grid.

Ginninderry is trialling Canberra’s first community-scale storage battery and Jessica Stewart, Ginninderry’s Sustainability Manager, says that they will pass on learnings to help lead the way for other community batteries to be built around Australia.

Urban agriculture is already taking off in our cities, our suburbs and our backyards – challenging the big supermarkets and the energy and waste generated by industrial agriculture.

Ginninderry is trialling Canberra’s first commercial-scale urban indoor growing facility that deploys cutting-edge vertical-farm technology designed by ambitious Sydney urban-agtech start-up InvertiGro. Jessica Stewart, Ginninderry’s Sustainability Manager, says that the modular units are designed for the highest quality and productivity of crops, in the least amount of space by using less water and energy than any other hydroponic system.

Ginninderry’s unit grows over 200 plants every few weeks, and regularly supplies the nearby Café Stepping Stone with leafy greens, herbs, and some vegetables. And with larger systems able to yield between 180-200 metric tonnes of crops per year, vertical gardening is a gamechanger for urban agriculture.

Zuleka Chan, Project Officer at SEE-Change which runs Canberra’s only e-bike library.

E-bike sales have been rising steadily across the world with Deloitte predicting that 130 million electric bikes will be sold between 2020 and 203[1]. And is it any wonder? They’re easy to use – with an in-built electric motor and rechargeable battery that boosts riders up hills and long trips, environmentally friendly and Covid travel-Safe.

Canberrans have embraced the trend, due to great bike path infrastructure, and SEE-Change – Canberra’s only e-bike library – is giving people the opportunity to borrow an e-bike and try for themselves. Zuleka Chan, Project Officer at SEE-Change says that 81% of people who borrowed an e-bike from their e-bike Library went on to purchase their own. Here Zuleka give us some tips on what to look for when choosing an e-bike for you.

One of the biggest causes of the world’s most challenging problems is our ‘take, make, dispose’ consumption patterns that deplete our natural resources and fill our land and oceans with harmful waste. But people such as Monica Andrews and Tuli King, Ginninderry’s Community Manager, are helping to make small but meaningful changes. Armed with a host of practical skills from sewing right through to soldering, Monica and her husband John are teaching people in the community to mend, restore or transform their items so that they can continue to be used.

One of these cafes is hosted by Tuli King within the growing neighbourhood of Ginninderry, where residents bring along everything from jumpers that need darning to broken lamps in an effort to avoid these items from going back into landfill.

Our suburbs have not been created for wildlife to coexist. The clearing of mature trees leaves many birds and animals without a home. Conventional gardens with lawns, garden beds and European flora don’t offer much food or habitat for our native wildlife. And our beloved pets can harm or scare wildlife away.

However, according to Matthew Frawley, Ginninderry’s Landscape Manager, there is now a trend towards creating natural habitats in gardens that encourage native wildlife such as birds, bats, lizards, frogs, bees and butterflies to return to our urban environments. And it’s easier than you think.

According to The Australian Loneliness Report released by Relationships Australia in late 2018, one in four people experienced an episode of loneliness, while one in two people said they felt lonely for at least one day each week. And that was before the spread of COVID-19 which has left people across the world feeling more socially isolated and lonely than ever before.

That’s why feeling like you belong to a community is so vitally important. In this episode we talk to Nick Tebbey, National Executive Officer at Relationships Australia and Tulitha King, Ginninderry Community Development Manager about how we can create a sense of community, no matter where we live.