Empathy cafés are a connective community building actividad that practices reflective listening.  In a small group of 3-4 people, take turns listening in response to a prompting question. You will learn to listen out for, and hear the other persona, reflecting what they said, which can be helpful in resolving conflict, and gives the listener the opportunity to see the speaker's perspective. Reflective listening helps the speaker to feel seen and heard and can support your nervous system to relax and it's verdaderamente easy to learn. ​

Members and Supporters are invited to attend our BSFG General Meeting at 7:30pm on Thursday 29th September at the Benalla Uniting Church meeting room.

At this meeting we will gather member’s suggestions about waste management/minimisation strategies to take to the proposed Council working group. We will also address Council’s promised review of the Climate Change Adaptation Plan (should it be Mitigation Plan?)

Rescheduled from our July meeting, we will show 'Together We Grow' from Happen Films.  'Common Unity' is the organisation featured in the film which runs for 39 minutes. Jordan and Antoinette, who are Happen Films, attended the Swanpool Environmental Film Festival in 2018 for the screening of their feature film 'Living the Change'.
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We apologize that Cr Laura Binks, Mayor at Strathbogie Shire, was unable to attend this month because of her hectic work schedule, and will be coming to our November meeting instead.

A light supper will be served at the conclusion of the evening.

Please RSVP your attendance to bsfginc@gmail.com   We hope to see you there,


Judy Schwarzman
Secretary, BSFG

The U3A Sustainability group has been most fortunate to have group member John Lane take up the convenor’s role, following on from John Lloyd, who convened the group for 13 years before his recent move to the Bendigo area. 

Trained as an urban and regional planner, John brings to the role a 40-year career in a range of environment related jobs, mostly in policy and strategy as well as managing various programs covering land use planning, pollution control, natural resource, coastal and catchment management, climate change mitigation and adaptation and biodiversity conservation, work which took John from Victoria, to Cape York Peninsula, southeast Queensland and a number of small island states of the southwest Pacific. 

Initially sharing his role with former CSIRO scientist Frank Dunin (who also moved away recently), John’s sessions are thoughtfully planned and engaging.  In July, for example,

​“The Sustainability group began the preparation of an integrated sustainability index that attempts to integrate the social, environmental and economic elements of sustainability; a replacement for Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that is currently used in Australia which focuses only on economic indicators. The New Zealand government is preparing a draft Wellbeing Index. Our index is based on the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the primary organising system. We had a go at drafting 'targets, measures, indexes and scores for these goals. We discovered it's not an easy task.

The group also looked at what was needed to achieve a net zero carbon energy system for Australia. We compared two approaches from advocates to 'electrify everything' on the understanding we will eventually achieve carbon-neutral electricity production. The first was a bottom up (household up) approach proposed by Rewiring Australia and the second was a top-down approach proposed by the Clean Energy Council. We then considered these pathways with the Federal government's policy it took to the last election. We found that the new government's policy generally matched the primary steps each of the advocates propose.”  John Lane, U3A Sustainability Group Report, U3A Newsletter.

The U3A Benalla Sustainability group meets twice a month, on the first and third Fridays from 10 to 12 midday, in the U3A Meeting Room at the Seniors Community Centre.  Check the Sustainability group’s page on the U3A Benalla website for more information.