Forthcoming Summer Season

With snowdrops and crocus plants in full flower, Mother’s Day passed, and longer days, spring feels imminent, and the summer doesn’t seem quite so far away.  Planning for the G&A summer season is well underway starting with the appointment of a team of interns who will be helping us to run Green and Away this year.

Each winter Peter, our chair of Trustees and myself as coordinator, advertise, then select and interview candidates to join our internship program. This is the fifth time we have run the programme and each time we are astounded and humbled at the talents and range of experiences of the applicants.  Some of them have packed more into 20 years of life than most 40 year olds and are an inspiration.  They are sure to be the leaders, movers and shakers of the future and we are proud to have them working with us this year.

This season we will be expanding into new areas.  We are hosting The Pantaloons for two outdoor theatre performances and having seen them twice before we can definitely recommend putting the dates into your diaries.  Our smile and laugh muscles hadn’t worked so hard in years when we saw them perform all 40 Canterbury Tales in one evening.  This time they will be performing Sherlock Holmes on 17 July and  A Midsummer Night’s Dream on 11 August.  Tickets available from their website at The Pantaloons and later from our office on site.  We have limited tickets so do book well in advance for performances that will have you laughing and chuckling all the way through and then sending away with a feel good factor of 10 out of 10!

One of our quirky breakout spaces

We are hosting 5 conferences and events this season too.  Details are on our website.  We aren’t quite fully booked so if you are looking for an unusual quirky venue that has a lot to offer, then look at our website page Hiring Green and Away for more information.  Not only are we different, we have a lot to offer including a professional service, beautiful site, home cooked organic food, homemade cakes and bread, charming conference spaces and all at a very reasonable price.

The reason we can offer such good value is that all of the staff are volunteers including our trustees, managers and the coordinator .  They all work for Green and Away because addressing issues around climate change are essential if we are to avert the worst effects scientists are predicting, and we passionately believe that it is time to stop polluting and desecrating our home, the Earth – and because what we do is fun.  The way forward is to build strong communities, support  and respect each other, be adaptable and flexible.  This approach does not bring a smugness from having a low-carbon footprint, instead it gives us something most of us have lost – a sense of belonging and connection to each other and to the earth.  Many people have commented that spending time with us brings a shift in their perception and that there is so much more to business and life than ‘the bottom line’!  Working together in a way that takes account of nature and being in harmony with it is not hard but brings its own gifts of beauty, appreciation and friendship.  We hope more people will come and experience the magic of Green and Away…

We hope we won’t see this much water again in summer 2013

Summer at Green and Away

Site Preparations

Our first conference is still a month away but the preparation for the summer season is revving up now.  Next week the early birds will be on site to get the essential infrastructure ready for the volunteers arriving on 21/22 June.  The empty field will start to fill with people and equipment until we have built Green and Away in time to host the first event on 6th July.

Erecting the bar

In all it takes about 3 weeks to build the site up with about 70 structures, plus plumbing, electrics, toilets and everything else necessary to make life comfortable for our delegate guests.  We pride ourselves in providing a high standard on the site.  Too many people have been put off camping in Britain by the weather but we want to show people, that living under canvas can be a comfortable and enjoyable experience whatever the weather.  We don’t go in for the hair shirt approach to life – we would rather aim for the luxurious!  If it does rain, then there are umbrellas at the exits from every structure, coconut matting walkways are laid to avoid mud and drying facilities available for the wet kit.  We can even provide spare wellies for those who forget to bring them! There is plenty of undercover space so no-one needs to sit out in the rain, nor does one need to cower in a a tiny tent where you can’t sit upright!  We are planning for a long, dry summer but you can never be sure so we have a plan B for wet weather.

Our luxury rent-a-tent accommodation

We take a long time to build the site because we put in so many finishing touches, it’s the attention to detail that is important.  Our guests can feel the care and concern we have for their well being and start to relax possibly in a way that they don’t at other venues.  The feedback we get is that we provide a great place for a conference, people enjoy themselves and want to come back.

Improvements

We want Green and Away to be the best there is so we listen to what our customers say.  There are somethings we can’t change because of being outdoors or because of following our environmental ethos, but being tented means we are very flexible.  We can move things, build them differently, add bits on or take bits away.

This spring we have continued a refurbishment for our composting toilets that started last year.  We have a new department called Hospitality and Housekeeping to provide a more integrated service to delegates. And it will be our first year of hosting a Woodworker In Residence who will be available to provide workshops and demonstrations of woodworking skills.

Come and visit

Green and Away is the ideal place for a summer conference and we would like share it with more people.  Using our site is also a way of showing your commitment to CSR.  We will be hosting a Private View on Tuesday 10th July to show conference organisers what we can offer.  Please get in touch with us for more details. Email info@greenandaway.org

Some of the G&A team celebrating a successful season

Sustainable Practices and Environmental Audits

This summer we plan to carry out an environmental audit and to assess our carbon footprint.  We don’t expect this to be a straightforward business as most of the parameters are designed with buildings in mind, not tents.  We are very fortunate to be offered some expertise from one of our supporters who works at an environmental consultancy which will be a great help.

When we started Green and Away every aspect of the project was considered from a sustainable angle, from the food, to the toilets, to heating the showers.  The criterea has always been that we make the least environmental impact we possibly could.  However if you are a prospective organiser looking for a venue, the guidelines for choosing an eco-conference centre ask, amongst other things, to check if grey water is being used to flush toilets.  We don’t use grey water for toilets as we have composting toilets not flush ones.  This means our water usage is much lower but we are also not causing energy use outside

A G&A composting toilet

our conference centre, normally used in disposing of the sewage, and we should have plus marks for producing a compost that can fertilise trees therefore giving a net gain!  We don’t use disposable plates, cups and cutlery, we use second hand ones we have bought from a car boot sale thereby lengthening the life of the utensiles and reducing the embodied energy per item per year of use.  We wash everything by hand so no electricity is used and we heat the water with solar power when the sun shines or wood if it doesn’t – both carbon neutral systems.  We do encourage the use of public transport although country buses are notoriously few and far between.  Some conference organisers arrange a mini bus pick up from the station which enables more people to use public transport.

The problem with standards is that they have to have arbitary fixed boundaries around the business.  This means that one is not really taking in the cradle to grave impacts of each system in use.  For example the embodied energy used in solar panels along with the implications of mining precious minerals could mean that the units are very carbon hungry in their manufacture but very sustainable in producing electricity.  So how easy it is to compare solar electricity with a coal-fired power station electricity?

Some years ago, one of the executives of an environmental organisation was taken to task for driving a ‘gas guzzling volvo’ as this did not seem to fit with the image of sustainability he was trying to portray.  His answer was that his volvo was over 15 years old and had at least another 10 years of life left in it.  If it is run to the end of its life and one takes the embodied energy of manufacture plus fuel used into account, a volvo looks quite sustainable.  What is not sustainable is buying a new car every two years and scrapping them when they are only four years old for some relatively minor damage.  It is quite a shock walking round a car reclamation pound and seeing how many quite new vehicles are being broken up because they have a pranged wing.

Solar Hot Water heater

Our culture of replacement over repair and trading up for the next new model is making far more demands on the earth’s resources than is sustainable.  We really need to lift our viewpoint from what is immediately in front of us and see our activities in the context of the wider world view.  Not everything that looks green is green and not everything that looks consumerist is a problem. Ultimately we need to rethink how and what we use, how we can extend the life of useful things by repairing them.

A brand new Eco-conference centre filled with sustainable gadgets may look attractively green but how can that compare with Green and Away’s recycled, repaired, low tech, low impact approach?  We will have to see what our carbon footprint shows us and if this is a meaningful tool for measuring sustainability.

 

Being an environmentally sustainable, eco conference venue

Green and Away was founded over 20 years ago when being green, eco or sustainable was something that only sandle-wearing bearded hippies understood or did.  Now most businesses are looking to improve their environmental and CSR credentials by assessing their environmental impact and trying to minimize it.

Whereas most businesses have had to scale down their environmental impact, Green and Away has never had to.  We started from the humble beginnings of a few tents and a tap in a field, and have grown organically in harmony with the sites we use. Because the aim was to be sustainable, sustainability and low impact eco technology have been a central feature of our existence.  Over the years we have grown and incorporated eco technology where we can.  We power the site with solar panels and wind turbines and heat water with solar and waste wood.  We have always looked at ways to keep our carbon footprint as low as possible.  We were charging a carbon offset fee for car drivers and calling it a tree fee right from the beginning.  This income from car drivers has paid for planting trees on the sites we have used and elsewhere.

We have always aspired to being the most sustainable conference centre anywhere and we think we are. We have sustainable policies for travel and transport, food and drink, buying equipment, composting, water use, and sewage. What really helps in being green is having very little money!  Lack of finance makes one look for resources that are re-used, recycled, reinvented, borrowed, second-hand or from nature. In the early days there was no way of measuring this but now there are ways to work out ones carbon footprint so  this summer to find out what it is.  However, are there standards that will help us assess the environmental impact of our crockery collection bought from car boot sales?  Or for the acquiring of donated old velvet curtains for seating? No doubt there are ways of measuring the use of grey water to flush eco toilets but what about when there is no water usage in composting toilets?  It will be an interesting project to carry out and we look forward to the results and hopefully a clear green conscience.

Hello from Green and Away

Welcome to the Green and Away blog.

This is where you can find out the latest news about Green and Away and what a great  sustainable eco-venue can offer to organisations and businesses.

Organisations such as Friends of the Earth, The National Trust, Sustrans, New Economics Foundation and Resurgence have all held conferences with us, some coming back every year. Our unique venue is only open for a few summer months so to experience the ultimate in sustainable conferencing you need to book soon.

Volunteers for Green and Away can find out what is happening on our Facebook page

For summer 2012 we are offering our facilities to smaller groups (around 15 to 20) for team meetings, seminars, training, Away Days and team building events. Our quirky meeting spaces are just the places for creative thinking and research has shown that the more unique a venue is for meetings and conferences, the better your delegates remember information given to them.  What about a cosy yurt for your next seminar or the strawbale sitting room?  We look forward to meeting you!