- Posted on June 12th, 2025
CoDa Dance – Data into Use: Weaving Ecological Responsibility with Human Wellbeing
For Arts Council England and Julie’s Bicycle’s annual report 2023-24, we feature over 50 practical examples of cultural organisations taking climate action including in depth case studies like this one. Check out the full interactive report here.
This case study was written by CoDa Dance – a multimedia dance company specialising in dance and neurology. They outline their intersectional approach to environmental responsibility, utilising comprehensive data to measure their ecological footprint while deeply weaving in human wellbeing and sustainable working practices.
We are living in a time of climate and biodiversity crisis, where those who have contributed the least to its cause are experiencing the most detrimental impacts, which expresses the deep injustice at the root of the climate crisis. We feel a duty to the global community we are part of to take meaningful action, improve our ecological impact and ensure we are doing our part in contributing to a more just and ecologically conscious society.
Data into Use
Over the last year, we have been expanding our understanding of environmental responsibility, gaining a stronger sense of our impacts, how to measure them, and exploring what it means to respond to the climate and ecological crisis through an intersectional lens. Bringing in climate justice facilitator Marla King to support us has helped us understand that planetary wellbeing and human wellbeing are fundamentally interconnected. Deepening the discourse at the intersection of environmental responsibility, access, inclusion and wellbeing feels central to the approach CoDa wishes to take when responding to the climate crisis.
Establishing some baseline data for our organisation’s ecological impacts felt important in supporting how we better understand our impacts as a company and subsequently track our improvements as we implement changes. We also wanted to collate data in a more holistic way, which feels essential when exploring responses to such a pressing, complex and interconnected issue. We have started practising ways of gathering information that expresses both quantitative and qualitative aspects, with the hope it can allow space for nuance, human experiences and process to be acknowledged as well.
This year, we have been establishing baseline data for our ecological impacts in relation to travel, energy consumption when working from home (as CoDa is not a building-based organisation), materials use and entire lifecycle, as well as collating more qualitative impacts (e.g., through the Beyond Carbon questions, board away day reflection session planning, exploring ways of shifting CoDa’s culture to have ecological responsibility at the heart of our processes etc.).
Learnings and Outcomes
The Beyond Carbon Questionnaire was a very welcomed reflection point for us, both to celebrate actions taken by CoDa so far and to help shape strategies around implementing some additional actions in the coming year.
The data we have collated plays an important part in deepening our understanding of our ecological impact, and therefore inform how we evolve our plans, decisions and strategies in order to improve upon these impacts. It has also been an empowering process for staff to see how previous plans aligning with sustainable practice have had a positive impact on CoDa’s work being more environmentally conscious, and as a result improving our impact.
This information is supporting us in shaping our learnings to be shared through an advocacy programme we hope to develop, along with further developing our environmental policy, action plan and green rider to be woven into our installation project work.
This data has also informed our feedback to our board members, shaping provocations around how we are held accountable, how we take our environmental responsibility further and support the process of this rippling out beyond CoDa’s work and through our spheres of influence. We also share our environmental performance externally with our key stakeholders and aim to share this more widely in the coming year. We are putting plans in place to improve the collation of this information, to support the process for the team and ensure better accuracy and smoother processes in gathering information. Below are some of the actions we are taking and exploring to support this:
- We are exploring a different process around travel expense receipt claims to help gather the travel information more accurately and smoothly for freelancers we work with. It involves an expense claim form that asks for the qualitative and quantitative information we need which they can fill in and attach their receipt to. It is the hope that this will help prevent a need to back track for specific bits of information. We aim to trial this to see if the administration involved isn’t feeling like too much of an ask.
- We are also exploring whether a monthly travel data input session for our general manager is useful for keeping on top of collating the data into the ecological impact spreadsheet we use to collect this information. (Little and often rather than boom and bust!)
- When collating working from home data, there were a few part-time/freelance staff members we were unable to get accurate data for, so this year we are making sure to find out the energy tariff of all staff, as well as their weekly working hours/commissioned hours and what percentage of that is home working.
- We will be adding questions regarding environmental responsibility into our annual surveys that go out to our audiences, to gain more understanding about audience actions and feedback on our impact regarding environmental responsibility.
- We have created a Materials Inventory Data Collation Advice/Protocol document for staff members purchasing materials on behalf of CoDa to help a smoother process to gather this information. The hope is that this supports all members of staff who may purchase materials to know what information about the purchase they need to retain. In the previous year, there was a lot of backtracking needed which proved challenging to gather all the information needed, so the hope is that this process will limit the need to collate data retrospectively which proved more time consuming and challenging.
- Through the work on the installation R&D, we are in an exciting place for calculating the environmental impact of this installation when it begins touring, and better understanding how it will vary depending on venue. Through the green rider, it is our hope we can implement practices in collaboration with venues to improve the ecological impact through different measures, and try to gather data from venues themselves based on their building infrastructure and working practices.
We still have so much to learn and improve upon, and definitely faced challenges in the process. Shifting practices takes time to adjust to, especially when we feel strongly about these shifts being implemented in a way in which we have the capacity to support. Our challenge is to balance our ambitions with the fact we are a typical small arts organisation with only x3 full time staff. We therefore need to focus on what we can do at this time, knowing we will return to explore what has not yet been feasible to implement.
Culture and Staff Empowerment
We believe a key part of this work is ensuring that our team at CoDa feel empowered to take on these responsibilities and feel confident that they can implement meaningful change in the way they work. We aim to distribute environmental responsibility throughout our team rather than individualising it, to help ensure our practices are sustainable also from a wellbeing and capacity perspective. Something that has supported in sharing these responsibilities has been through including environmental sustainability in artistic/production briefs and open calls.
CoDa are committed to practices that embody an opting out of the grind culture, meaning that we deliberately leave gaps between residencies, and staff engage in shorter working weeks to allow for rest and reflection, and ultimately support our wellbeing. This is incredibly important to CoDa as a disability-led company. We recognise that working with lived experience can be challenging, so time to regulate our nervous systems between intensive research periods feels essential. It is also important to highlight the connection between slower and more spacious work processes and improved ecological impact.
“The one thing we do know from lots of years of data and various papers and so forth is that the countries with short hours of work tend to be the ones with low emissions, and work time reductions tend to be associated with emission reduction.”
– Juliet Schor, an economist and sociologist at Boston College who researches work, consumption and climate change.
The study ‘Stop the clock – environmental benefits of a shorter working week’ also highlights similar connections between shorter working weeks and improved environmental impacts. The intersections of wellbeing, disability justice and ecological wellbeing are deeply interwoven and is something we are interested in researching in relation to our ways of working and communicating more about in the future.
“As a company who values human welfare above all else, it’s essential that we play an active part in responding to the climate and ecological crisis. Our experience in the past year has shown us that steps we have already taken, such as shorter working weeks for staff, can have a positive effect on environmental impact as well as staff wellbeing. We have started to build solid data and root sustainability into all our processes, with an awareness that capacity to achieve our ambitious aims will always be a challenge. We continue to explore how caring for people and caring for the planet can be mutually beneficial as we push for change.”
– Katie Sheasby, CoDa Dance General Manager
Header image: Participant interacting with CoDa’s immersive technology – Credits: Cave & Sky