About
“When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure.” Rudolf Bahro
WWF Scotland is part of the UK arm of the WWF Global Network, the world’s leading environmental organisation founded in 1961 and now active in over 100 countries. WWF works to bring about a One Planet Future in which both people and nature thrive. To do this we work on three key challenges; Safeguarding the Natural world, Tackling Climate Change and Changing the Way We Live.
The Natural Change Project is part of WWF Scotland’s work on Changing the Way We Live and is one of the projects that contribute to our UK-wide work on Strategies for Change.
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Project
Growing evidence shows that many dominant approaches to encouraging sustainable living do not result in long-term, large-scale, social change. This is because they do not address the deep seated social, cultural and psychological structures that hold many unsustainable patterns of behaviour in place.
Research suggests that behaviour change can best be influenced in the long term through psychological approaches that work with people’s personal values and sense of identity. Carrying these approaches into mainstream policy, planning and delivery, in a diversity of sectors is fundamental to securing a healthy, sustainable future.
The Natural Change Project was developed in 2008 as an innovative response to this and explores how experiences of the natural world inspire people to live sustainably. In addition to this personal process, Natural Change also equips participants with the skills, insights and motivation to lead others towards a more sustainable future.
The Natural Change Approach brings together a small, influential group of people to participate in a programme of wilderness workshops. These combine personal development, experiential learning, mentoring, reflection time, group discussion, and a deep exploration of leadership and social change processes.
The Natural Change Project 2008-2009 took influential individuals, from a range of professional sectors on a series of workshops in natural settings. These participants blogged about their experiences and the findings from this project are set out in the reports Natural Change : psychology and sustainability and The Ecology of Experience: Six months on from the Natural Change Project.
The new Natural Change Leadership Programme 2010-2011 works with a group of influential people from the education sector. These are people who are responsible for leading in a time of unprecedented challenges and rapid change. They will blog about their own experiences of the Natural Change Approach during the programme, widening the debate about sustainability and exploring responses to the natural world. The new programme runs from September 2010 until May 2011… and beyond! There will be regular blogs from all the participants and the Project Team, where comments are invited.
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Programme
The programme consists of a series of workshops run over a period of six months. An orientation day will be followed by two wilderness residential workshops either side of a one-day interim workshop in Edinburgh. The group will then meet again for one day after the last workshop to ‘close’ and evaluate their experience. Mentoring support is offered throughout, and after the programme.
The online communications resources, including this website and team blogs deepen participants’ experiences and allow them to communicate to their professional and social networks. This creates a fertile context for transferring their learning beyond the programme itself.
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Report
In Spring 2011 a new report about the Natural Change approach will be published and will explore the programme design, criteria and outcomes – based on the participants’ experiences and relevant literature. Themes will include: examples of the types of changes that can emerge and how they relate to underlying psychological processes; lessons about personal and social change processes which can be transferred into policy and strategic planning; and an outline of theoretical perspectives on the approach.
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References
The programme is based on, and supported by research from a diversity of fields, and over ten years of professional practice in experiential approaches to change. If you would like an academic reference list, please contact David Key and Margaret Kerr.
Please see the links and books pages of this website for useful references.
