RAAY (Royal Adelaide Art & Yoga CIC)
Organisation Bio
RAAY is a Yoga studio and artspace in the heart of the Adelaide Street neighbourhood in Stonehouse. Housed in a grade II listed building in a conservation area, RAAY's home was, for 125 years known as the Royal Adelaide Arms pub. Now it's a warren of quirky spaces that lends itself to interesting creative ventures. In the yoga studio, Nic offers breath awareness classes, one-to-one yoga sessions, and a variety of workshops for yoga practitioners and yoga teachers. Upstairs, Matt makes and sells paper, using a range of recycled materials, some collected from other organisations in the area. There are also periodic exhibitions, workshops and other art-related activities.
About our climate journey
Through our approach to sustainability and conservation, we strive to have a positive impact on the environment. Our energy is sourced from a renewable supplier. We have an electric cargo bike for transporting materials, and we also use it for remote creative activities (like our paper-making demonstration at the Union Street Party). We re-use wastewater and collect compostables to be used in the Adelaide Street community garden patches. Rainwater is collected for use in paper-making. We power the building down when we're not there, and all our lighting is low-watt LED bulbs. We use Who Gives A Crap loo paper. Many of our consumables (file folders, staples, etc), as well as materials we've used for in-house projects (re-covering chairs, handstitching slippers for the yoga studio), have come from Scrapstore. We use eco-friendly paint for decorating. We look to and are guided by principles set out by campaign groups such as ECRA/Ethical Consumer, CAT/Centre of Alternative Technology (net carbon zero), Friends of the Earth. Our curatorial decisions are sometimes guided by these principles as well. One example is an open exhibition we held that asked artists to use WGAC loo paper wrappers as raw material. As this list demonstrates, we try to shape the business according to our approach to sustainability so it is a constantly evolving process.
