Ro Coroneos
Alisa Hitchcock
SOCIAL SUSTAINABILITY
All this requires building partnerships – establishing cohesion, Ro Coroneous, Manager of Community and Social Strategy, says: connections, co-operation, a community of interests to collaborate “What has been a real privilege here is the tacit permission from on projects. Barangaroo South’s role is to set up these structures, Lend Lease to experiment, to trial things. I’ll think ‘we should do X, which will later be taken over and run by tenants. But it is clear that Y, Z’. We’ll try it. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. That’s the initiatives will have more impact if tenants and residents work OK. We’ll learn from that. It means we get to do a few things first.” together. So far the response from the initial tenants – Tobin, HSBC and Lend Lease – has been most positive and such partnerships “It can be scary. You have to think through what you’re trying to could become a precedent for other businesses to transcend achieve. But we must push the envelope. Where can we be leading traditional competitor boundaries.
edge in a meaningful, strategic way? Leading edge is exciting and it’s what we should be about.”
The commercial tenants see engaging in something like this as an opportunity for cultural change. It makes them ask what they stand for in the community, what their place is, what positive impact they can have in the community.
For Alisa Hitchcock, the Community Development Manager, the biggest buzz has been reaching out to school students. From next year, Barangaroo South will be launched as a case study to support NSW students studying geography in years 7 to 12, with the potential of reaching up to 60,000 students a year. Using an online e-learning portal, they will examine the project in terms of its relevance to sustainability, urban growth, historical geography and urban dynamics.
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