How to Continue the Journey
Congratulations!
Achieving SAS Plastic Free Communities status is an amazing first step, as we work to free where we live from single use plastic. Your Community award is yours to keep and something to be proud of. It’s the basis of continued and effective grassroots action on plastic pollution, tackling it at source by working with local businesses, influencing local decision makers and mobilising your whole community.
By focusing on the top offenders list, all of those individual and community actions add up to massive change. So, going forwards the aim is to build on the foundations you have laid locally, and to maximise your community voice as part of the powerful Plastic Free Communities national network you are part of.
Your New Next Steps Guide
In your Resource Hub, you’ll now have access to your Next Steps Guide, which will give you the guidance to grow locally, and how to tap into our national campaigns to bring about change at government and industry level.
The toolkit still focuses on building on the five steps , our tried and tested routes to change, and links them to our national plastic pollution campaigns. It also outlines how you can get your own localised projects and campaigns off the ground. This second part is up to you and your community, and it’s always inspiring to see the amazing actions you go on to lead.
Your post award journey is designed to be rolling program that forms the basis of your ongoing action each year. It isn’t compulsory. But we also know that you won’t want to stop here! All we’d like from you is for you to update your dashboard with what you’re up to locally so we can mark you as an ‘active’ Community on our map.
Your New Awarded Dashboard
As before, your Dashboard is the key to scale your work into national change. By telling us what work you are doing to build on the foundations of your award, you feed into SAS work to trigger change right up to the corridors of power.
You now have a new Awarded Dashboard to work on every calendar year, it’s much the same, but with some extra functions 👇
- No progress bar, percentages or targets – You don’t have to complete every step, just tell us the work you are doing and we’ll mark you as active.
- Updating your Dashboard – You can still upload through the year and we’ll look at everything when you do, but we won’t approve whole sections until the end of the year. Once a year is over, the dashboard is saved down and won’t be able to be updated, and all your work will then go into your new year dashboard. All your work will be viewable still 👇
- Viewing previous work – In each section, there’s a button to show all your previous work over the years in one clear list. We are continually working on more ways to help feedback your impact and work, so you can share with your community.
- Working with Local Decision Makers – The Council Motion step has now been changed to ‘Working with Decision Makers’ and here you can tell us about any work to with your council, politicians and decisions makers.
- Projects and Campaigns – Many awarded communities go on to start plastic free or environment projects and initiatives, either related to plastic pollution or wider environmental issues. Here you can tell us about them if you do. Remember – you’ve got an ace local network now of businesses, allies and your council to help action what you would like to locally.
- The Annual Report – Some communities like to send us an Annual Report. You don’t have to, but if you are doing one for your steering group anyway then we would love to see it. This option will appear in Dec at the bottom of your dashboard, so please do update your dashboard throughout the year first.
- SAS actions – If you, your steering group or your council completed an SAS actions as part of a project or event, you can tell us about this in each section. These include taking part in SAS citizen science, completing a survey, attending a protest or march, signing a petition or writing a letter. If you would like to get involved with any current SAS actions you can head here>