Vanessa and Heidi - Sustainable Attainable

Heidi Roland and Vanessa Lansdown are two professional Northern Beaches mums making a real difference through their campaign, Sustainable – Attainable: The Cool Community Campaign.

They recognised enormous damage was being done to the environment through over-consumption. However they knew people felt daunted by the need to make significant lifestyle changes.

Heidi and Vanessa used their backgrounds in behaviour change – Heidi is a physiotherapist and Vanessa is a psychologist – to develop a program to help their community take action on climate change. Heidi had just attended a corporate sustainability conference where she had met a delegate running a grassroots program in the US addressing the issue.

Fed up of feeling overwhelmed and powerless to address the problem, they set about creating a process that reconnected people to each other and to the challenges we all face. And that for them was the key. As Heidi said, “We are all in this together and addressing this great challenge will require everyone to have ownership of the problems and the solutions”.

Heidi and Vanessa believed the Manly area was a great place to start a grassroots project. As Vanessa said, “It’s an area where community is valued and it has a great natural environment that everyone wants to conserve and continue to use and appreciate”.

Both Heidi and Vanessa recognised that facts and debates about climate change weren’t producing significant behaviour or lifestyle changes. They noticed three common responses to climate change among friends and acquaintances:

• some were attuned and taking action;

• others failed to engage in discussion and when pushed, declared themselves to be overwhelmed by the enormity of the task ahead; or

• they decried any strategies that required an alteration in lifestyle.

Sustainable Attainable provides a step-by-step framework for action, to inform, connect and create momentum, enabling people to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 20% and their waste by 30%. 

“The idea is that no one has to do everything but we can all do something. People can participate at an individual level or in a team reducing their emissions together, be it with friends, neighbours, church groups, playgroups - to tackle the problem of climate change with positive solutions, fun and a community spirit that everyone can be part of,” Heidi said.

Heidi and Vanessa believe that team participation helps maintain and increase the motivation to change and ensures people feel that they are not the only ones making changes and that they can see a wider and bigger result for the environment.

To get involved in the Sustainable Attainable campaign, email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it