Friday Jul 21, 2023
A warm welcome to Queensland Women: Inspiring stories from Environmental Champions (QWEC)
This is a podcast series showcasing the vital environmental protection and advocacy work of Queensland women, many of whom have made important contributions to this vital work across the Darling Downs region of S.E. Queensland.
PURPOSE: This podcast project was produced in conjunction with the Queensland Women’s Week (2023) event, and it supports the goals of the Investing in Queensland Women and Queensland Women’s Strategy 2022-27 initiatives. Particularly as those initiatives aim to increase the empowerment and recognition of the achievements of women and girls in Queensland. As a long-standing community environmental education and capacity building organisation in Queensland, Householders’ Options to Protect the Environment (HOPE)Inc.(Australia) is delighted to produce this series as a celebration and fuller acknowledgement of the vital contributions that the women of Queensland and the Darling Downs region have made, and are continuing to make, toward protecting and conserving our nature and natural systems in this place.
BACKGROUND:
In 2023 we believe that Queensland women and girls are still not sufficiently recognised for their contributions to protecting our environment, or for the integral part they have played in our environmental support history. We believe that without their tireless but often underacknowledged efforts, many environmental and socio-ecological protections and reforms would not have achieved the level of success they have today.
HOPE Inc. is producing Queensland Women: inspiring stories from Environmental Champions (QWEC) to help bring wider recognition to the work and stories of inspirational regional women, and the beneficial impact their environmental advocacy, championing and leadership work has made across the Darling Downs region and in Queensland more widely. Women have worked tenaciously in these various places, and elsewhere, to help lead and inspire, implement policies, and to enact change to preserve and protect our nature, our ecosystems and natural places— our waterways and landscapes, forest cover, oceans and mountains, and the precious wildlife that reside within those places. And through those environmental protective processes, they have also made valuable contributions to maintaining community human health and wellbeing, based upon crucial human need for access to clean air, potable water, nutritious food and a healthy natural world around us.
Podcast guests will share some of the successes, struggles, and hurdles they have had to overcome in their mission to protect our environment. And by producing these podcast interviews, (HOPE)Inc. (Australia) wants to raise community awareness of the multiple benefits of having more women in crucial environmental decision-making and leadership positions.
There is a misconception in our society that success and meaningful leadership opportunities exist only in the realms of the male-dominated corporate sector centred in large cities. This could be one of the many barriers to female representation in leadership across Australia. This podcast showcase of the successes and impacts made by Queensland women in achieving important environmental protections highlights a possible alternative path to leadership for regional and rural women across Australia. Our podcast guest stories help demonstrate that women can become influential leaders at any point in their lives, be they 20 or 70.
FORMAT: Each podcast guest interview is structured around variants of some core questions:
How did you develop your interest in environmental advocacy and protection work?
What are some of your environmental achievements? What are you most proud of?
What are some of the challenges you faced in your career and how have you overcome them?
What exciting new environmental projects are you working on ?
Do you have any advice, and particularly for women, wanting to step up into conservation, wildlife protection or other environmental support roles?
DISTRIBUTION: Episodes of (QWEC) will become available from late June 2023 onward and we hope the series will be promoted widely across relevant networks. The episodes of the series should become available on various platforms including: PODBEAN, SPOTIFY PODCASTS, GOOGLE PODCASTS, STITCHER, PLAYERFM and APPLE PODCASTS. Contact details for any responses to the series will be made available in the resource and reference show notes accompanying each episode. We also ask listeners to consider giving us feedback through podcast app ratings and comments sections - and perhaps in more detail by using our short, online listener survey as detailed below.
HOW TO ACCESS OUR PODCAST SERIES LISTENER SURVEY
Our Queensland Women Environmental Champions Podcast Series - listener survey is available now on Survey Monkey and consists of only six simple questions which should take only about five minutes or less to complete.
This survey has been created to enable our podcast audience to give the series producer, Andrew Nicholson, more detailed feedback than is usually available via podcast app rating scores and comments. We want to keep improving this series, and we value any ideas, insights or comments listeners might have which could help us do that. All feedback received will be treated as anonymous data and will only be used for the strict purpose of helping better design future series episodes.
The listener survey can also be found at this full link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Z8VML53
In closing, we hope that you enjoy this series and that it makes a contribution towards stimulating further conversations, and, ultimately, direct actions, geared toward achieving greater environmental protections in our region and elsewhere.
Andrew Nicholson - series producer (July 2023)
Email: newworldviews@gmail.com