"Creative Climate Leadership means uniting different struggles and causes in the fight for climate justice. The performing arts can bring people together in this fight, creatively and compassionately, by engaging audiences on the places and communities they care about."
About
Helena is an actor and leading member of Equity for a Green New Deal, a network of the performing arts trade union Equity. She is passionate about making connections between employment justice and climate justice. As vice-chair of E4GND, Helena’s recent projects have included a marketing campaign encouraging Equity members to switch their pension to ESG and fossil-free funds, and working with the Theatres Trust on sustainability standards. She has represented Equity at the TUC Young Workers’ Conference and spoken on a sustainability panel at the International Federation of Actors’ Conference. She is currently working with a group of CCL alumni to make the upcoming Theatre Green Book conference, to be held in autumn 2023, more accessible for freelancers.
Project Highlights
Divesting the Equity Pension Fund
Members of E4GND have been pushing the union’s pension provider Aviva to offer greener, ideally fossil-free, pension fund options to members since 2015. Divesting pension funds is not a glamorous step for an organisation to take, but it’s incredibly important and massively impactful. Our activist network lobbied the union to get behind this fight and in March 2022, we secured the movement of the entire default fund (worth over £120m) to a fund with a ‘greener’ tilt. However we are still pushing for the default fund to be divested from the top 200 fossil fuel companies and we hope to have a positive update on this soon. We are also planning to write a case study for our pension fund divestment, to share with other trade unions and arts organisations who may wish to do so but have been told it’s impossible. It’s not impossible!
Working with the UK Theatre Green Book
To ensure our union is part of the conversation around sustainable theatre practices, Equity for a Green New Deal has established the Sustainable Theatre working group and are currently working with the Theatres Trust to implement the Theatre Green Book.
We are keen to work constructively with the Theatre Green Book and we want to see more ambition and urgency from theatres in working towards Advanced Green Book standards. There are currently no theatres working to Advanced standards in the UK – we want to change that!
The Theatre Green Book is an evolving document that we want to make changes to. Our Sustainable Theatre working group has produced a report identifying these areas of change which include recommendations for more use of the worker voice, as well as highlighting accessibility concerns and a general aim to raise ambition and urgency throughout all three volumes. Read our feedback report on the Theatre Green Book.
Creating a Manifesto for our Network
Equity as a union declared a Climate Emergency in October 2021. We believe that climate and employment justice should be at the heart of Equity’s activity as a trade union.
Our manifesto sets out our 5 main objectives:
+ Empower members throughout the UK to fight for green and accessible workspaces
+ Work with Equity to ensure sustainable practices within their offices and operations
+ Campaign for our pension fund and art institutions to cut ties and sponsorship deals with the fossil fuel industry
+ Push the Arts Council and publicly funded bodies to make funding dependent on genuine sustainability
+ Engage with other unions to fight for well-paid green jobs (in our industry and adjacent sectors)