PHOTO: Thank You breakfast at Fisher Rd SSP with (from left to right) Fisher Rd SSP Principal, Arianne McCombie; One Meal Composting Supervisor and 2024 Northern Beaches Volunteer of the Year, Dave Lye; Eco House and Garden’s Rachel Kernaghan; One Meal Northern Beaches Founder, Kim Williams and Fisher Rd SSP Teacher Matt Tonkin.
2024 was another huge year for the Eco House and Garden, delivering a total of 113 events that reached at least 3200 people from students and teachers to community groups and retirees.
Some highlights of the year included hosting two school Waste and Sustainability Professional Development Days and two Early Childhood Educator Professional Development Days. We were originally only going to host one event for Early Childhood, but after the first was booked out with a waitlist, we made the decision to host a second. These professional development days touched Primary and High school teachers, childhood educators and waste industry leaders as far away as Forster and Newcastle.
We delivered 13 Community workshops throughout the year and trialed some new formats for our Compost and Worm workshop. Our standard 3-hour Compost and Worm workshop was trialed in a new format, where 2 x 2-hour workshops were held on separate days – Composting 101 and Worms 101 – so that the public can attend a shorter, specialised course. The team and participants enjoyed the new format and we will continue to offer all of these formats throughout the year in 2025 so aspiring participants can choose which formats suits them best. Other workshops held this year included Small Scale Edible Gardens, Pruning and Propagation, Waterwise Wicking Gardens and The Art of Building Soil.
Next year the Eco House and Garden plans to be equally as busy with new workshop ideas being developed – Organic Pest Control, Hügelkultur Beds, variations on our Pruning & Propagation workshop and more .
We are excited to embrace and support at least 4 new schools and children’s centers into our School Waste Reduction Support Program (SWRSP) in our shareholder LGAs. They will join Avalon PS and Fisher Rd SSP/One Meal Northern Beaches. This year sees us finishing up our 3 years of support to Narrabeen Sport High School and Belrose Children’s Centre. The purpose of the SWRSP is to support and mentor schools and educational centres on their journey to reduce their overall waste footprint in a sustainable manner that allows the school or centre to eventually take on full responsibility for managing this reduction. We congratulate them on their achievements during this period.
This year we also reconnected with Mater Maria Catholic College to revamp their existing but forgotten compost systems when Covid got in the way of operations. They are now operating a 9 bin system, managed and led by the school’s SRC students, a model set up in a high school setting and “the jewel in the crown of Organic Waste Management in NSW high schools” – Pete Rutherford.
This year we introduced the Eco Stewardship Award, a perpetual trophy provided by Kimbriki to the schools that we have been closely involved with, to award to a child/student or group that they feel has shown commitment and engagement in a waste and/or sustainability issue at their school or centre in the end of year celebrations.
The SWRSP wouldn’t be possible without the huge support of our sponsors – Australian Native Landscapes, Tumbleweed and WaterUps. We would like to thank them for their generous support of these schools and centres and look forward to our continued involvement with them.
A massive thank you goes out to the hard-working staff at the Eco House and Garden, ecologists and educators Angie Penn, Jake Bennett, Paul (Wyld) Cannings, Abbey Ryan, Te Jenkins and Rachel Kernaghan. Kimbriki has also said a final, bittersweet goodbye to Peter Rutherford this year, who has been instrumental in the construction, management and continued success of the Eco House and Garden since its inception back in 1999. Peter has still been working with us since his retirement from managing the Eco House and Garden, of which we have been extremely grateful for but is now set to embark on a new life away from busy Sydney. We wish Peter a fulfilling and joyful retirement away and thank him whole-heartedly for his meaningful and impactful contribution to rethinking waste and pursuing sustainability, here in Sydney’s north.
We hope you all have a happy and healthy festive season and continue to Rethink, Reduce, Reuse and Recycle at this time of year and we look forward to seeing you in 2025. The Eco Garden is always open via the gate at the back of the Eco House whenever Kimbriki is open, so feel free to come and have a wander and explore our new Discovery Trail and learn about all aspects of sustainability and ecology.
Warm regards
The Eco House & Garden Team
