Gone are the days when the term "sustainability" belonged to the birkenstock-brigade. Its a word that is having increasing currency to all of us.

'Sustainable' is more than a buzz word, its the way we will do things in the future. (We don't have a choice about that if we want to all live happily ever after on planet earth).

The Sustainability Trust was established 4 years ago to get things moving in this direction, to do tangible things in the community that bring us ever-closer to a sustainable future.

It is not an advocacy group, it does stuff. The Trust is pragmatic, progressive thinking, upbeat and always pushing the possibilities and opportunities inherent in creating a sustainable life rather than scaremongering and telling people all the ways in which things are bad.

The trust is currently rolling out a range of services and voluntary behaviour change projects in the urban and sub-urban community in the Wellington and Porirua region; targeting energy use, transport, waste in the communityand water.

The brand needed to reflect that the trust has a friendly face and progressive thinking behind it. The Trusts starting point is with people and our community, providing new choices for the way we live, rather than focusing on the harm we cause to the environment (which is inherent in the concept of sustainability anyway).

It was agreed early on that the brand couldn't be green: they didn't want to exclude the possibility of working with any sector of society. Sustainability is a-political. It is as much about business and the notion of quality, as it is about the environment, and for this reason needs to engage every sector of society in a non-judgmental way.

For this reason, we felt that the language needed to be accessible, but professional. Instead it is bright orange, to reflect the Trust's optimism and boldness.

The brand has been applied to business cards, a website, as well as exhibition graphics for the new Environment Centre in development.

The second major banding challenge for the Sustainability Trust was branding its individual projects. To maximise the effect of their projects, the Trust need to be very visible in the community on a very limited budget. The Trust wanted to be able to have a recognisable brand that could be applied to a range of different projects, but that would be flexible, thematically diverse and have broad appeal to a range of different audiences.

The Trust don't have the budgets to do a branding excercise from scratch each time they embark on a new project, so the solution was to develop a mark; 'an emblem' which is able to be adapted to fit the the values and actions within each project stream.

We needed to consider versatility of application for this mark to further reduce design costs. It has been designed to be aesthetically pleasing, to encourage people to wear teeshirts and carry bags with it printed on the side which broadly and proudly spreads the message: making small changes has big effect.

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