Green Gown Awards 2020 - Queen’s University Belfast - Finalist

Creating our Vision for a Greener Future 

‘Creating our Vision for a Greener Future’ is an exciting collaboration between Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) staff, students and the public focused on creative exploration of pressing socio-ecological issues as a basis for climate action within and beyond QUB. Informed by community arts and transformative pedagogy, our ‘Green Arts’ team developed an innovative non-formal educational methodology to engage wider society around co-creating visions for a sustainable future to help inform climate action.  

Funded by QUB’s Green Fund, ‘Creating our Vision for a Greener Future’ began when a staff member and four students collaborated to co-write our short play ‘Anna’s Journey’ as a mechanism to communicate multi-level socio-ecological issues, prompt critical thinking and, hopefully, action among those who engaged with our project. The play became a cornerstone of six community-based workshops we facilitated across Ulster, attended by over 200 people of all ages; learning from our project is also shared in an accessible journal article (Slevin et al. 2020). 

Top 3 learnings:

1. Arts-based methods help people learn about socio-ecological crises in engaging, fun and non-threatening ways. 
2. Creative approaches can ‘make the global-local’, revealing unsustainable multi-level practices while fostering opportunities for change. 
3. Group-based, collaborative processes result in more successful outcomes than traditional ‘talking at people’ approaches to public engagement. 

Videos

• Video #1 (click to hide)