News and Events 2012
November 2012
8 November: Louise Metcalf led an ARIES presentation at the Water for Life Showcase 2012 about the inspiring progress made during our current Advancing Sustainability Leaders project - Water for Life’s flagship year-long sustainability leadership program. The presentation covered what the program was all about, who was involved, how it was evaluated, what was achieved and how others could take part in the future.
October 2012
15 October: Robert Perey gave another of his fabulous ARIES workshops on Sustainability Leadership to members of the NSW Department of Corrective Services.
11 October: Jessica North gave a presentation to Ryde Council as part of the Macquarie-Ryde Futures Partnership.
August 2012
13 August: Robert Perey gave another one of his fabulous ARIES workshops on Sustainability Leadership to members of the NSW Department of Corrective Services.
July 2012
25 July: Louise Metcalf gave an ARIES presentation at the Liquid Learning Research & Evaluation Design Conference, Sydney.
Louise spoke about how you often have to work with people who have entirely different philosophical takes on the world, entirely different scientific backgrounds, and some who simply don't even like to collaborate, and you still have to make it all work! It starts and ends with leadership. Firstly, self-leadership where you have to be creative but also well balanced, a great listener and a terrific communicator, but you must also constantly question and challenge your own assumptions and thinking, you have to accept that your view is not the be all and end all, and that sometimes you will be wrong. Secondly, leadership of the team, because when people get answers they didn't predict and sometimes don't want, resilience can be a big problem, demoralisation can occur and people can start to fight over what they want rather than what they truly see, so having fun and getting people to relax while they focus on truths is important too. Finally, you often have to lead stakeholders, but this is usually a kind of held-back leadership style, where you don't pretend to have the solutions, nor do you direct, instead you constantly and very positively challenge the thinking of stakeholders, encouraging them to solve the problem in collaboration with others and with vision, rather than focus on limited perspectives.
Basically, leading sustainability projects is a challenge of leadership on multiple levels!
May 2012
7 May: Robert Perey gave an ARIES workshop on Sustainability Leadership to members of the NSW Department of Corrective Services.
April 2012
5 April: The ARIES Collection of international videos about sustainable development was launched.
March 2012
15 March: Anna Knutzelius gave an ARIES presentation at the Australian Zoo & Aquarium Association's Animal Welfare conference on the progress of the ARIES project Animal Welfare in Zoos.
February 2012
13 February: Robert Perey gave an ARIES workshop on Sustainability Leadership to members of the NSW Department of Corrective Services.