John Scheffer:

Sustainability Victoria has been the best organisation I've ever worked with.

Anite Roper:

One of the interesting things of having a young cohort of people is Sustainability Victoria was, at that time, they wanted to change the world and they wanted to do it today.

Claire Ferres Miles:

Because we know that in order to accelerate the transition of our energy grid, and our waste and resource recovery sector, we can't keep doing things the same. We have to try new things.

Stan Krpan:

To focus on waste and resource recovery, to develop a statewide infrastructure plan – which we did – that paved the way for other things like the circular economy.

Matt Genever:

Sustainability was such a new and emerging topic back in 2005, and now it's much more mainstream. And I think, to be honest, we've played a hand in that, in making sustainability something that people can touch and feel and understand.

Tracy Jackson:

The people who work at SV are super passionate about what they do. They deliver incredible outcomes.

Claire Ferres Miles:

There is something unique about SV. The entire staff has the same belief.

Cyrelle Field:

That kind of familiar place where you want to be because you know that you're with like-minded individuals; That you're there to support one another.

Kim Johnson:

I'm proud to be part of the passion to be honest. As I said, I didn't come from an environmental background, so learning all this stuff was actually a big deal.

Anite Roper:

It's easy to align people around common goals because everyone who works at SV is passionate about sustainability and about making change.

Matt Genever:

I look back on the, you know, the literally thousands of projects that we've been involved with over the last 20 years ,and there's so much impact I see across Victoria.

Shannon Smyth:

That's the goal in working at SV, that our impact stretches far beyond what our name might suggest.

Stan Krpan:

Clearly one of the biggest programs that SV ever led and developed was the establishment of Solar Victoria.

We were asked to do that because of SV's reputation and it's strong brand for engaging with stakeholders, engaging with industry and being trusted to deliver.

Voiceover from advertisement:

The average home produces over 200,000 balloons of greenhouse gas every year.

Ian McNicol:

One of my roles was to crunch the numbers and work out how many black balloons individual activities saved. And people did become a bit obsessed with that. Must admit, I think I probably got a bit sick of doing the calculations.

But people today, even today, still remember the campaign, and every now and then you hear people talking about, you know, energy saving in terms of black balloons.

Voiceover from advertisement:

And reduce your impact on climate change. You have the power to make a difference.

Cyrelle Field:

A million of students in Victoria go to a school every day.The opportunity to have that positive impact on not only them day-to-day, but on their futures as well. It's a powerful way to get up and go to work in the morning, being involved in a program that can have that much impact.

Claire Ferres Miles:

When I joined SV, unfortunately the majority of Victorians didn't know how to recycle. And so we didn't want to tell people off or tell people that they've done the wrong thing, but really about giving them information about what does the right thing look like.

Stan Krpan:

In our Healthy Homes project, which was really about demonstrating the link between health and energy efficiency in a more comfortable home – not only that you can save money in a house like that, but it's more comfortable – but we're just astounded at some of the human stories.

Heather:

I used to dread getting each bill because I'd know it'd be very high over the winter.

Matt Genever:

A thousand vulnerable, high health-dependent households that we made their lives better, not just by a little bit, but by a lot.

Heather:

It's changed my life. I can afford to live here and pay my bills and I very rarely see the doctor. My upgrade has just really made life much more comfortable and pleasant for me.

John Scheffer:

Victoria is extremely fortunate to have an organisation like this. As far as I know, there is no other organization that does anything on quite the scale that Sustainability Victoria does.

Claire Ferres Miles:

Working grassroots, hand in glove with community and with industry partners, I think is it's happy place where it provides its best value. That's the work I think SV should continue to do.

Shannon Smyth:

Just working with markets to identify new opportunities and grow those opportunities, predominantly for recycled materials. That work includes the partnerships with universities and industry, to not only investigate what's possible, but then demonstrate also what's possible as well.

Matt Genever:

You don't get that from, you know, large scale regulatory change or legislative change. You get that from an organization that's on the ground working really closely with communities and households to make their lives better. That's what we've done for 20 years and that's what we need to do for another 20years to bring sustainability into every single household, every single Victorian's lives.

20 years of changing what's possible.