Collaborating for Impact

Along with Waverley Council’s Second Nature Team, our current members include incredibly passionate, hard-working and generous volunteers from these local groups:

• Plastic Free Bronte
• Seaside Scavenge
• Protect Our 1
• Transition Bondi
• Sydney Eastern Suburbs Boomerang Bags
• Happy Fish Bondi
• Responsible Runners
• Wilderness Society – Eastside Group

Check them out, sign up to be a volunteer or follow their news.

In 2017, triggered by a desire to help the community give up single-use plastics and keep our beaches clean, 25 people representing 10 community organisations and Waverley Council, found themselves in a room trying to reimagine the way of working better together.

And so, we did.

With the help of an external facilitator we started by learning about the ‘Collective Impact’ framework and adapting its 5 main key conditions as a base for our new collaborative realm. Mainly used in social development context, this is the first time Waverley has adapted components of this innovative approach to the environmental context.

Together we have designed, developed, implemented and evaluated community waste education activities for our community. We’ve also learnt new skills on strategic planning, project management, fund writing, monitoring and evaluation and more. This has strengthen the capabilities of our environmental groups to achieve their goals.

Fast forward 3 years and together we have:

• Increased community engagement in waste education activities by 343%.
• Engaged over 4,000 residents, with 70% of bookings reaching new audiences.
• Reduced duplication of effort and reduced per head investment by 3%.
• Leveraged over $50,000 in in-kind support.
• Successfully built capacity of environment groups to achieve common objectives with 96% reporting increased capacity to work together and 91% developing additional skills to engage the community.
• Generated high (91%) levels of trust between partners, resulting in increased transparency, accountability and willingness to work together.

We’re working on our next activities as well as exploring interconnected environmental issues - climate change, urban ecology and food production and waste reduction and resource recovery - at the regional scale with neighbouring Councils and regional community groups. Stay tuned!

Are you part of an environmental community group operating in the Waverley LGA? Council is committed to work together with our community to enhance our environment and achieve environmental goals together. Being part of C4I will give you access to a broad network of like-minded groups, as well as capacity buildings workshops, skills and knowledge sharing forums and opportunities to co-design and co-develop environmental initiatives in partnership with other C4I members.

Please note, Council cannot directly support campaigns that are political in nature neither can we provide support to individual campaigns*. Instead we use collaboration, workshops and group meetings to build collective capacity and impact. For funding opportunities, please check our Environmental grants webpage.