An Update on Sustainability at Music Mark

On Earth Day 2024, we launched This Is Not A Rehearsal, our campaign to raise awareness and encourage action around the climate crisis in the music education sector. Alongside this campaign, we’ve been working on Music Mark’s approach to sustainability by working with Positive Planet to assess and reduce our carbon emissions. Here’s an update on how we’re doing from our Programmes & Engagement Director, Rosie Lowe. 

Why does Music Mark’s partnership with Positive Planet matter, and how has it shaped our approach to carbon reduction so far?

Our partnership with Positive Planet has been a really important first step on our sustainability journey. The team at Positive Planet have helped us develop the way we track our carbon footprint and encouraged us to go further to improve the quality of our data. This data has allowed us to identify and consider how we go about reducing our impact, enabling the setting of ambitious net-zero targets for the organisation. The most important first step has been tracking and interrogating the data, allowing us to understand our impact. These insights have strengthened communication across our staff and board, ensuring everyone is aligned and understands the concrete actions we must take to drive meaningful change.

Looking at Music Mark’s latest Carbon Reduction Plan, what feels most significant about the progress we’ve made so far  -  both in emissions terms and in how the organisation now thinks about sustainability?

The single biggest area of change across the 2 years we have tracked is, without doubt, business travel. As a team of remote workers, an element of travel is always going to be inevitable  and vital, but the steps we have taken to consider how and why we are making those journeys have made a huge difference. The team is, without doubt, our biggest superpower here; their commitment to thinking sustainably and providing the data has allowed us to make such huge leaps in this area, representing a 62.5% decrease across the two reporting years. This is something we will continue to focus on, ensuring new staff members are carbon literate and share the team’s ethos and commitment to ensuring the environmental impacts of our work are acknowledged and, where possible,  reduced.

Business travel and data quality stand out as areas where we’ve seen meaningful change. What practical steps made the biggest difference, and what lessons might other organisations take from this?

As I mentioned above, raising the profile of sustainability within the organisation, at both staff and board levels, has had a real impact on both choices and willingness to provide the data we need. Key practical steps have included providing carbon literacy training to all staff, integrating sustainability metrics into board meetings via our dashboard, and improving data collection processes, particularly for travel. These initiatives have deepened our understanding of both the reasons and methods for reducing our carbon footprint, empowering every team member to contribute to meaningful change. The collective commitment of our staff continues to be the driving force behind our sustainability progress.

How have training, internal engagement, and initiatives like This Is Not a Rehearsal helped embed sustainability into Music Mark’s day-to-day work and culture?

Our carbon literacy training really opened our eyes to just how many perspectives and experiences we have in our team. It’s helped us come together, as individuals and as an organisation, to understand what environmental responsibility means for us and our membership. Having a shared language and confidence has made it a lot easier to make good decisions, too. The “This Is Not a Rehearsal” campaign enabled us to deepen our engagement with sustainability, showcase sector-wide best practices, and drive internal improvements. Insights from the UCL report have also highlighted concrete actions to further embed sustainability across our operations and the wider sector, with more to come in the coming months.

As Music Mark looks ahead to the next phase of work with Positive Planet, what are our priorities, and what excites you most about what’s coming next?

As we move into the final year of our initial partnership with Positive Planet, our top priorities remain improving data quality and strengthening sustainable decision-making throughout the organisation. We are enhancing procurement processes to ensure our partners value sustainability and provide the data needed to track and reduce our environmental impact. Ongoing staff training and sector-wide support will aim to further embed sustainability best practices and learning across the network. We are committed to developing and implementing robust sustainability policies that make it clear that environmental responsibility is central to Music Mark’s mission. I am excited by the opportunity to further accelerate Music Mark’s progress towards Net Zero by 2050,  and look forward to working with the membership and wider sector to do this too.

Don’t forget to visit the This Is Not A Rehearsal webpage to explore more news, training & events, resources and research to support you on your sustainability journey. If you’d like to stay up to date with training and resources related to the climate crisis within the music education sector, click here to sign up for our ‘This Is Not A Rehearsal’ newsletter.