Bianca Sands
Staff - Community Resilience Manager
Bianca brings a comprehensive set of skills from her background in health promotion, community development and engagement. After 10 years dedicated to homeschooling her daughters, Bianca is using her flexibility, resilience, organisational skills and the capacity to think strategically to focus on climate action.
An experienced communicator, Bianca understands the importance of people feeling seen, heard and valued, and is able to connect with people from diverse backgrounds. As a parent she also knows first hand the challenges that parents face in day to day life, the motivation to act to protect our childrens future and the desire to be part of a movement for change.
Bianca lives with her family on beautiful Butchulla country.
“I am a Mum to two teenage daughters - first and foremost, they are the reason I am here. In the past 3 years, I have watched and debriefed as my daughters have become increasingly aware of the changes we are seeing in our own backyard - we were visiting family on the south coast of NSW when the 2019 new years eve bushfires were bearing down, we’ve witnessed nests of dead turtle hatchlings being dug up after they were cooked in extreme temperature sand, and we’ve seen the bleaching and degradation of the patches of coral reef in the bay not far from where we live, not to mention the wet weather events of 2022.
After two decades of knowing about climate change, taking lots of individual action in my daily life and how we’ve raised our family, it hit me really hard last year how naive I have been in relying on successive governments and other leaders to heed the science and the mounting evidence of severe weather events. 20 years ago, I thought surely they’ll act with caution, surely they’ll take the advice of the scientists and shift our trajectory. It’s been humbling to see how wrong I was.
In 2021, I joined Australian Parents for Climate Action as a volunteer and very quickly I knew I’d found my tribe. In a tumultuous time of escalating severe weather events and reports highlighting the gravity of the situations we face, I can’t tell you how much it’s meant to be part of this amazing community, particularly during the 2022 election campaign - facing the challenges together and being inspired to live with active hope for a better future for our kids has made a huge difference in my life and to my mental and emotional wellbeing. I feel privileged to work with this amazing team and to contribute in some way to a safer, healthier future for all.”