About

Students of Sustainability conference (SoS )2012 will be held on Dja Dja Wurrung Country from Wednesday the 4th to Sunday the 8th of July in Victoria, at La Trobe University’s Bendigo campus.

SoS is a five day camping conference for anyone interested in creating a more ecologically & socially sustainable world. It will be a week full of workshops and forums on a range of topics, demonstrating how theory and practice can be used to make positive social and environmental change.

SoS is completely organised by volunteers, mostly from the Australian Student Environment Network (ASEN)

The conference began in Canberra in 1991 under the name “Students, Science and Sustainability”. This first conference attracted 300 students to discuss matters of sustainability with respect to students and science.

Throughout the past twenty-one years, interest and enthusiasm for the conference has grown, and the number of participants has steadily and exponentially increased. As SoS moves around the country, it spreads its unique, life-affirming, change-making energy to the University and community that hosts it…

Each year students, community members, Indigenous activists, academics, public intellectuals, environmental educators and social change agents of all stripes and from all over Australia are invited to participate.

There is a range of educational, practical and participatory forums, workshops, excursions, entertainment and lots of time drinking chai with new friends.

The vision is to provide a conference that will bring together diverse groups of people to share inspiring and thought-provoking experiences, which encourage positive discussion and action aimed at creating ecological, political, economic and social sustainability in the world. SoS provides an opportunity for us to become empowered with the confidence, practical skills and motivation, required so that humanity can have a healthy relationship with the earth and all of its diverse ecosystems.

2012 will be the twenty-first year of the SoS Conference, and the second time since 1997 that the conference will be held in a regional area. The conference is being organised by a dedicated groups of students largely based in Bendigo and Melbourne. Around 500 hundred students and community delegates from all over Australia, representatives from a variety of universities, TAFEs, High Schools, business, government, and community groups are expected to participate in the conference.