We harness the best aspects of humanity to help avert the climate crisis, so we can secure an environmentally-healthy future for ourselves & future generations.

Who is this community for?

• For people who care about the environment, who want to protect our future from climate disaster, and who are keen to enjoy the big health and wellbeing benefits of environmentalism and sustainability in their own lives and as part of their real-world communities.

The purpose of this community:

• For community members to be able to quickly crowdsource helpful guidance and advice on topics relating to low-emissions living
• To provide engaging and useful guides and content that supports community members to achieve a completely net zero emissions, environmentally-healthy lifestyle by or before 2030
• For community members to act as accountability buddies for each other, making it easier to stick to emissions-reducing habits through moral support, shared effort and encouragement
• To provide coaching and support to community members to help them accurately identify and capitalise on their spheres of influence in their own lives to help rapidly decarbonise our society.

What members gain from belonging to this community:

• A brains-trust on in-depth low emissions living topics that cater to community members' specific circumstances and needs. For example, DIY insulation at home to reduce energy usage, cradle-to-cradle capsule wardrobes for fashion lovers, repairing electronic goods to extend their life, permaculture for beginners to grow vertical herb gardens in an apartment, and much much more
• Social accountability, momentum, behavioural modelling and inspiration to keep us all on track
• Through collective action, seeing the proof that making small incremental improvements to our behaviour and consumer choices over time as part of a group leads to big compounding positive environmental impacts
• A sense of hope, empowerment, personal agency, solidarity, meaningful purpose, joy and belonging.

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One Small Step Community Guidelines

Please Do:

• 👏  Provide positive reinforcement and encouragement when people make efforts to learn about sustainability, and when they make efforts to take actions that reduce their environmental impact.
• 🎉 Celebrate the small wins. A core component of lasting behavior change is rewarding the desired behavior, and we can all help each other bed down sustainable habits by celebrating small movements in the right direction. The small wins matter and lead to much bigger compounding changes over time!
• 🧠 Share your knowledge. Sharing what you've learned from your personal experiences can be really helpful for others in the group on a similar journey or perhaps a few steps behind you. We are all learning and figuring out low emissions living as we go.
• ☝️ Use 'I' statements. Speak to your own personal experience. We're all different. So what works great for one person might not work for another person. An example, an 'I' statement looks like: "I found using a light bleach and water coating on the top soil of my indoor herb garden completely eliminated fungus gnats and did zero damage to my plants."
• 🌱 Keep the focus on what we can do right now. Collectively, our personal annual emissions savings (from reducing and switching our energy usage, lowering fuel & waste, greening our homes and diets, and massively reducing all the unnecessary first-hand stuff we buy every year) make a much much much bigger difference to our society's carbon emissions than modern discourse would have us believe.
• 🔎 Search for your question or issue before posting a new topic. You can search for and find other community discussion spaces that are relevant to your topic. Or, if there isn't a current discussion that matches what you want to discuss, you are free, welcome and encouraged to create your own dedicated discussion in a separate space!
• 🙌 Treat each other with kindness, respect and humanity. Try to bring your best self to this group. This is the obvious stuff. No snarkiness, no personal attacks, no verbal abuse.
• 🤜🤛 Express thanks and gratitude. It's particularly nice if you can circle back after benefiting from someone's help to let them know how their help benefited you specifically. Tried and tested a tip from another member that worked? Received words of support from a member that helped keep you motivated? Let them know.
  

Please Don't:

• ⚪ Engage in any shaming or guilting. This space is dedicated to lifting each other up, caring for ourselves, for each other and for our environment. We guarantee that sharing your own experiences, including your challenges and how you’ve overcome them, will be much more effective in shifting other people's behavior than calling them out, criticising them, guilting them or ridiculing them.
• ⚪ Change the discussion topic within a specific community space that's dedicated to a particular topic. For example, if you're posting in the 'Green your finances' space, please keep your posts related to green finance, and don't start posting about, for example, how to compost your dog poo.
• ⚪ Debate the science of climate change or question the scientific consensus on anthropogenic / human-caused global warming. If you're just learning about this or are skeptical but want to understand more, please email the group admins and we'll answer your questions, and send you some useful resources to take a look at.
• ⚪ Swear or use offensive language. Some of us like to swear and that's great, but it increases the risk of comments being misread or being perceived as more aggressive than they otherwise might be, so please ensure you keep your language free from the swears.
• ⚪ Engage in depressing doomsday posts. Most of us already know and are daunted by how big of a job it'll be to reach net zero emissions globally by 2050 or sooner. For our group to be the most effective it can be and have the biggest real-world positive impact, it's best to keep our focus squarely on our process: using our spheres of influence to decarbonise ourselves, our homes, our communities and our workplaces. We want to cultivate a mindset in this group of practicality, empowerment, determination, support, real-world impact and hope.
• ⚪ Post irrelevant promotional materials. You are encouraged to post about great environmental initiatives that you want to support and bring to the attention of the community. But advertisements for businesses that don't materially support users to reduce their environmental impact will be quickly removed by our moderators.
• ⚪ Post personal information about other members of the group, or anyone else, without their express written consent. This includes people's phone numbers, addresses, bank details and email addresses. The whole community can see this information. We also encourage you to ensure that any personal contact information you want to share with other members is shared privately in a direct message.

What we'll do if your posts breach our community guidelines:

• If your posts gets flagged as potentially breaching community guidelines, one of our admins will review it.
• If, after the admin's review, we are of the opinion that it's breaching a community guideline, we'll let you know.
• We'll then explain to you which aspect of the community guidelines we believe it runs counter to, we'll give our reasons for this assessment, and we'll give you an opportunity to amend your post, with support and guidance from us on how you could potentially do this.
• We use a 1-strike system for verbally abusive posts. For any members who engage in verbal abuse of another member, for example swearing at that member, calling them hateful names, or denigrating them publicly, we'll swiftly remove your offending post, and give you 1 warning. If you engage in verbal abuse of a member a second time, you'll be removed immediately from the community and banned.
• If you repeatedly breach community guidelines, for example repeatedly posting spam messages, we will give you a warning and then, at our discretion if you breach community guidelines again, we are within our rights to remove you from the community immediately and ban you from re-entering.
• We're not always going to get this right, but we'll do our best to be clear, transparent, fair and accountable to this community.
  

We invite and welcome the community to engage in and provide feedback on these guidelines on an ongoing basis. This is a living, continuously evolving group, and rules that once worked for the group may no longer fit it over time. Or there may be issues that arise that warrant a change to the guidelines to better accommodate the group's needs and to better adhere to our community's values.

We'll review these guidelines regularly to ensure based on community feedback and to ensure they're aligned with and reinforce the community's values, and that they support our community to achieve its shared goals.