📫Letter 18 — To Jamie Saye, Sustainable Arts in Leeds (with reply)

Culture as a civic engine of hope

Date: 30 October 2025
Recipient: Jamie Saye — Co-founder & Executive Director, Sustainable Arts in Leeds (CIC)

Context

The fourth letter of Week 3 of One Letter a Day turns to Sustainable Arts in Leeds (SAIL), the community-interest company helping the city’s creative sector meet the challenge of sustainability. Since 2018 SAIL has trained hundreds of artists and organisations in carbon literacy, built networks of collaboration, and shown that environmental learning can be treated as a shared public good.
This letter asks whether that educational mission also shapes the cultural imagination of Leeds — how the act of greening creative practice might influence the stories we tell about the future.

Letter

Dear Jamie,

I am writing as part of One Letter a Day: a year-long civic experiment to reopen grounded conversations about the climate emergency, starting here in Leeds. Each day I write to someone whose work shapes how we think and act on this crisis, and publish both letters and replies to encourage wider dialogue.

This week turns to the organisations that sustain civic attention — the networks and hubs through which hope becomes practical. Sustainable Arts in Leeds (SAIL) is one of them: a collective effort to help the city’s cultural life navigate the transition, and to show that decarbonisation and creativity can reinforce rather than constrain each other.

Founded in 2018 and developed through your long experience in technical and production management, SAIL has taken on a task that few others were equipped — or incentivised — to do. In most sectors, sustainability advice is a commercial service; in the arts, it becomes a civic one. By training creative professionals, gathering data and sharing expertise, you have built an infrastructure that treats environmental learning as a shared public good rather than a private transaction.

Yet there is something larger implied by that mission. When hundreds of artists, designers and venue managers are trained to think ecologically, the impact cannot stay backstage. Ideas travel. Awareness changes what is made, how it is staged, and what audiences come to expect. Even without setting out to commission climate-themed work, SAIL may already be shaping the cultural imagination that surrounds the transition.

So my question is this:

Beyond the measurable reductions in energy use and carbon footprints, do you see SAIL’s educational work influencing what the sector chooses to imagine and create? Is nurturing that contagion of ideas — helping art itself to carry a new sense of possibility — part of your vision for the years ahead?

I ask because every society needs places where hope is made visible. If industry provides the machinery of transition, culture provides its meaning. Your work stands at that junction — between practice and imagination. And we are clearly in a crisis of imagination when it comes to the climate emergency, in need of other stories and imaginaries as well as other systems.

With gratitude for your work and the hope it cultivates,

Vivien Badaut
One Letter a Day
one-letter-a-day.uk

📨 Reply from Jamie Saye / Sustainable Arts in Leeds

Hi Vivien,

Thank you so much for reaching out, it was lovely to read your email and feel like someone actually understands what we’re trying to do and thinks it’s worthwhile!

In answer to your question, yes I fundamentally see us as trying to challenge the way the sector is operating, and are attempting to fix the systemic issues that make the sector unsustainable. For example, we’ve been seeing first hand the linear model of take, make, consume, waste that plague the creative and cultural industries, and in response set up the resource hub to try and divert valuable material away from waste streams and back into reuse. Since February, we’ve rehomed 483 items and saved approximately 4.8 tonnes of material, worth around £34,000 from the skip.

The hub is having an additional impact too, as we can’t possibly house everything that everybody needs, so it forces flexibility and creativity when delivering projects. For example, we’ve had people take things and repaint them to fit their intended aesthetic rather than have something made bespoke, or people have taken things away to be adapted, cut down, reshaped etc.

To your second point, there’s a quote by poet Lucille Clifton which is “We cannot create what we cannot imagine,” and given the immense reach of the culture sector and our innate ability for story telling, we have an obligation to help everyone imagine a more sustainable future. However, the only way we can do that meaningfully is by first building trust and being  sustainable ourselves (i.e practicing what we preach!)

Please do let me know if you have any other questions. As you can probably tell I’m quite passionate about the subject!

Kind regards,

Jamie Saye (he/him)

Executive Director | SAIL

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Tomorrow’s letter continues Week 3’s exploration of community-level resilience, focusing on Rainbow Junction Community Cafe and Food Share, where repair, reuse and hospitality meet.