Fourth Big Ambition

This story was told in a story circle at the Learning History workshop in February 2008. 

Read a fascinating story that tells how, by getting a mix of people together in the same room, climate change and sustainability became the fourth big ambition for Sheffield.  

Fourth Big Ambition 

a story from the 'Breaking the Mould' story circle

I’m quite involved in environmental strategy and partnership working, and I’m particularly involved with the Local Strategic Partnership (LSP). And one of the successful innovations I think that we got going was having linkages through the local strategic partnership between different structures. So, within the LSP families we called it there are number of different boards. The main board which we are all accountable too in theory is the monitoring board. And it’s the great and the good.

That is the main board that is responsible for developing the community strategy we call it the city strategy. And I coordinate the environment board which is the board that is responsible for the action plan on climate change. But one of the real difficulties we had in a number of years is in trying to influence the city strategy, trying to get the bigwigs who are at the top table to actually take this seriously and think about this as a key priority.

And one of the real notable successes in a policy term was getting one of the 4 big ambitions within the city strategy, to be a low carbon ambition. So getting Sheffield to be an attractive, sustainable, low-carbon city is now in the 4 headlines. I think that that actually is a real measure of what Sheffield has gone through for a number of years certainly since I have been there. And it is also a measure of the trust that has been developed across the city in terms of climate-change environment and the people that are working on that.

But the reason that it came about was because we got everybody together in a room - well not everybody - we got a number of different people together in the room. It was chaired by the partnership director. And she brought members of her main top-board with members of our environment board. And we had business people there, some very well respected, trusted individuals. And we are talking about the economic master plan and we are talking about developing a strategy, or a task, or an action that could come out of the city strategy.

And we wrote “The Big Ambition” which was for Sheffield to be an attractive sustainable city, and the priorities that went within that ambition. And we got that within the economic master plan. We got it within the development framework and that was a real major success.

So it is a question of, I guess now, having got that success how we then take that forward and what the implementation would look like.

 But it was very interesting to see different characters who in the past might have poo-poo’ed climate change and carbon reduction, now seeing very seriously. And I have got another little story that links to that which was again strengthened through the involvement of the business sector and different personalities.   

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