On Saturday 7 May, Katrina Szetey returned to Forrest to run a workshop for the Local SDGs program. Katrina has been working with the people of Forrest to learn what the community wants their sustainable future to look like. Recently, she has been working on a system dynamics model which describes how the “system” of the Forrest community works, but Katrina’s goal is to co-design this model with the people of Forrest to ensure all aspects of the system are represented.
The workshop on 7 May had excellent attendance with about 20 people. The aim of the workshop was for the attendees to design a model of how the major “components” of Forrest interact. These “components” were based on the Drivers of Change that were discussed in The Forrest and District Plan – things like population, housing, climate change, and inequality. The model is built by linking these components and describing how they interact, for example, housing interacts with population by limiting the number of people who can live in Forrest, because housing prices are too high, or because there is only a limited supply of housing.
The major activity of the workshop was to have attendees circulate around the room with posters which listed all of these components, and writing on them to describe how the components interacted. With 11 different components and posters, a lot of useful information was collected.
Katrina will now go away and use this second dataset to improve the model she has drafted. It will allow her to validate or refute the work she has already completed, and expand it to incorporate anything that had been missed. She is hoping to return to Forrest soon to present her results to the community.
