ARA Conference 2024: ‘Climate and Crisis: Tackling It Together’ - Climate Advocacy and Education
The 2023 ARA Conference, held in Belfast, took the theme ‘communities’ and to build on this we now want to address the major crises and challenges facing our communities and our profession, learning from our community and building stronger responses, together. The Climate Crisis is the challenge of an era with the responsibility to take action falling upon us all. Our profession must respond, learn from best practice and find new ways to contribute to the global effort. Our work faces other crises not least funding and resourcing challenges. We are better tackling this together too, and we want the conference to be a catalyst for this.
At our conference in Birmingham (28-30th August 2024) we have a full programme of talks and workshops and as usual we have divided these into ‘tracks’ or ‘streams’ to make it easy for delegates to navigate the programme. In many previous conferences we have had dedicated tracks for ‘archives’ and for ‘records management’. This year is different. The Climate Crisis affects all aspects of our work, so we have the following tracks on offer this year:
Climate Advocacy and Education
Conservation
Passive and Sustainable Storage
Digital Recordkeeping and the Cloud
Forward Planning for Climate Change
Sustainability of the Recordkeeping Profession
Climate Collecting
In each of this series of articles I will look at one particular track.
Climate Advocacy and Education
No matter how passionate you are about mitigating the climate crisis and taking steps to make your own life, and your workplace more sustainable there will always be some need, particularly at work, to have available to you some good arguments as to why change is necessary.
The Climate Advocacy and Education track starts off on Wednesday August 28th with a presentation from the ARA Environmental Sustainability Group – led by Georgina Robinson- and provides a perfect introduction to the theme with their talk entitled “Getting started – Practical steps towards environmental sustainability”. You can read more about the group here.
The group follow this up in the afternoon session with specific help for advocacy for recordkeeping professionals in their presentation: “Advocating for Environmental Change: Strategies for Information Professionals”.
There is also plenty of practical advice available in panel sessions and presentations across the three days of the conference on: carbon literacy training, working with others collaboratively and using records and material found in archives to advocate and educate more widely, as well as a session on Education for Climate Emergency.
You can find full details of the programme here
You can book your place at our 2024 conference here
Early bird rates end on 1st May 2024.