Case Study: YMCA Victoria

With a clear environmental sustainability strategy, and a comprehensive emissions baseline and tracking, YMCA Victoria (‘the Y’) is now working on decarbonising the facilities the Y operates, such as early learning, camping and aquatic centres. Here’s how the team set themselves up for progress.

Company size

6000+ staff and volunteers

Industry

Community Services

Location

Victoria and South Australia, Australia

About YMCA Victoria

YMCA Victoria oversees a broad portfolio of community-oriented services from aquatic centres to after-school care programs, across Victoria. With roughly 6,000 staff and volunteers, the Y delivers services at more than 150 locations every day. YMCA Victoria’s management also operates the state-of-the-art South Australian Aquatic and Leisure Centre (SAALC) in Adelaide.

Before Working with Climate Zero

Community services organisations – particularly those with diverse operations such as YMCA Victoria – face unique challenges in emissions benchmarking and tracking.

With varied facilities, from large energy intensive aquatic centres to small after-school care programs, it was difficult for the Y to have a clear understanding of its carbon footprint to identify efficiencies and opportunities on the path to decarbonisation.

Why YMCA Victoria Looked for Help

YMCA Victoria needed the right support to help the team with navigating the complexities of its carbon baselining and assist the Y to develop a plan to reduce its environmental impact and position itself as a proactive carbon reduction partner to communities, local councils, schools, and government bodies alike.

It needed:

Detailed organisational and operational boundary scoping.
A thorough baseline emissions assessment.
A science-based emissions reduction strategy.
Customised emissions data collection to accurately measure and manage its carbon footprint ongoing.

YMCA Victoria’s Decision-Making Criteria

YMCA Victoria needed sustainability partners who could simplify the seemingly complex path to decarbonisation. Initially, it engaged Build Enviro and Rewild Agency, who completed a baseline emissions assessment and developed an emissions reduction strategy to identify opportunities to reduce the organisation’s climate impacts.

From here, YMCA Victoria needed the right carbon accounting platform to measure and manage emissions moving forward. Its decision-making criteria for a carbon accounting partner included:

Configurable locations with the ability to track various facilities.
Robust accurate software configured to track facilities’ specific energy usage and waste patterns.
A local team to ensure smooth implementation and ongoing support for staff.
A user-friendly interface that staff could easily navigate.
List ItemClear reporting features to monitor sustainability progress.

Benchmarking performance

Given the variety of services the Y offers, accurately being able to benchmark performance is a challenge as industry comparisons for a leisure centre or a childcare facility do not apply neatly across the board. As a result, the team had to tailor data collection, modelling approaches and emissions intensity metrics to each business unit, ensuring that the Y’s baseline was both accurate and actionable.

After Working with Climate Zero

The Climate Zero platform enabled Build Enviro, Rewild and YMCA Victoria to analyse complex utility data, identify emissions trends and highlight high-impact facilities and business units. This helped inform the emissions reduction strategy, including decisions around priority facilities to target for renewable energy solutions and internal policies and reduction projects.

With the strategy and tools in place, the Y is able to focus on implementation, using Rewild Agency and Climate Zero to measure emissions and report to stakeholders – demonstrating leadership in carbon reduction and progress towards decarbonisation.

Importantly, the organisation has now also appointed a Sustainability Manager to oversee and carry the work forward, leveraging Rewild Agency and Climate Zero’s expertise for guidance and specialised data analysis when needed.

“Build Enviro, Rewild Agency and Climate Zero have been invaluable partners in our sustainability journey to achieve our Environmental Sustainability Strategy and goals. They translated what is extremely complex, into clear, achievable steps, helping us collect, understand and now act on our emissions data in a way that fits our wide-ranging services We especially appreciate their hands-on support and ability to make complex concepts feel accessible to all stakeholders. We’re excited to keep working together to further advance our climate and wider sustainability journey and better serve our communities.”

Dan Coathup

Chief Risk Officer, YMCA Victoria