The Green Team at Moonah Hub

The Sustainability Team, known as ‘The Green Team’, are based at Baptcare Moonah Hub in Hobart and are all about promoting environmentally friendly and sustainable practices in their office, the wider organisation and the local community.

We asked Jess Miller, their enthusiastic and determined leader, all about the team and what they do. Read more below!

How did the Sustainability Team get started?

It all started when back in 2022, our CEO came to visit all the Baptcare Tasmanian sites and offices.

During question time at Moonah Hub, I asked about sustainability in the workplace and whether there were any policies in place at Baptcare regarding this.

Being new to the organisation I wasn’t sure what, if any, kinds of policies were in place  to be more sustainable. Was there an organisation-wide sustainability plan to reduce waste, lower energy costs etc?

After question time, I was approached by my colleagues Tracey Smith (current Green Team member) and Andre to be the head of a new committee at Moonah Hub – the Sustainability Committee. The Green Team was born!

How many members do you have?

We have six members at the moment, which is the biggest membership number we’ve ever had. We want to the team to keep growing!

What is your main goal as a team?

We want to assist people learning about sustainability and integrating small sustainable changes into their lives at work and hopefully at home too. Small changes can make a real difference. They can also save money on things we don’t necessarily need to spend a lot of money on.

Our major goal is to influence policy at Baptcare and have sustainability integrated into Baptcare’s policies and practices.

What type of things do you do as a team?

We’ve maintained a quarterly seasonal sustainability newsletter and have now moved into a weekly email to ensure that sustainability is considered more regularly.

Now that we have more people in our team, we would love to go to some local tree planting days, activities with local Landcare groups and Clean Up Australia Day. We’d love to get involved with Moonah Mates who do clean-up projects in the Moonah area.

We ran the sunflower growing competition over summer to much success! We want to do this again as well, hopefully with more participants across Baptcare. Perhaps we could get a rivalry going with an office in another state, which would be fun.

We’ve also tried to encourage less waste in the kitchen at Moonah. Making sure the washable kitchen crockery is used, encouraging people to bring their lunch in a re-usable container and not always using the disposable cutlery and plates for events.

We’ve been thinking about some other potential ideas for the future so stay tuned!

 

What do you enjoy most about being in the Green Team?

I really enjoy feeling that we are making a difference to the environment and sustainability practices at Moonah Hub. People actually come to me now and ask me about recycling!

What about sustainability is important to you?

It is important to me because the planet is dying and we aren’t looking after it. There are so many things we can do and if we don’t think climate change impacts us, it does. I can’t swim or fish at my local beach anymore because of the pollution caused by Tasmanian salmon farms.

What are you most looking forward to doing with the team in the coming months?

I can’t wait to be able to get together with the team as a group to participate in and do something hands-on for the community.

Most members are from the NDIS team here in Hobart. I would love to see this expand to other parts of Tassie, Victoria and SA.

I’ve experimented with providing sustainable activities and sustainable mementos at expos over the last year and I hope that we can do more of this. We have tried activities like sensory rice play as well as recycled seed pod making at our stand. We use less plastic merchandise; people then engage in conversation and this sets us apart at expos.

I love to crochet and bringing my loves for crochet and sustainability together is nothing short of perfect.

I made a whole heap of love heart crochet keyrings using wool scraps and offcuts of fabric which otherwise would have gone to landfill. I gave these away at our stand at the Pride Festival last year. They were such a hit that I spent the next year making loads of them with another team member and we gave them away instead of plastic merchandise at the Pride Festival again this year. Super popular and sustainable – it’s a cool and inventive way for people to remember Baptcare when they visit us at an expo. 

Any final thoughts?

We’d love more members to join the Green Team!