Canterbury Christ Church University - Green Impact Assistant

Background

Building on the success of the Sound Impact scheme (focused on greening university unions), in summer 2008 NUS partnered with the University of Bristol to adapt this model to green departments within the University. Green Impact University of Bristol was run over the 2008/09 academic year, attracting 50 departments covering 3,000 staff. Like Sound Impact, Green Impact was very successful in delivering measurable change.

Green Impact is an environmental accreditation scheme that encourages pro-environmental behaviours by staff. It empowers sustainability champions within their workplace, helping them gain recognition for their environmental efforts, whilst playing on the competitive spirit of staff working in teams. It provides people and their departments with a tangible framework for improving their environmental performance, breaking down complex environmental issues into more manageable bite-sized chunks.

Green Impact forms part of the NUS’s wider strategy to support students’ unions by supporting them to green their own operations, their institutions and the wider community. All NUS environmental programmes seek to generate sustainable income for students’ unions by paying them to get involved in local delivery of our central projects. The environmental programmes are also committed to providing volunteering opportunities for students that will help with their employability, especially through skills that support the transition to a low carbon economy.

The scheme is all about practical actions that tackle common bad practice. A number of departments are audited to determine what common bad practices exist across an institution, and then a list of practical actions is developed to address them. These actions are carefully chosen so that any member of staff can do them on behalf of their team or department. From recycling, to investing in more efficient equipment, to encouraging biodiversity, or Fairtrade, the scheme covers a broad range of issues under the sustainability umbrella, all tailored to an individual institution to cover local policy and process.

• Green Impact provides a mechanism for finding, engaging and empowering environmental champions bottom-up, enabling them to take targeted practical action through the framework, in so doing tackling common bad practices;
• It is a tried and tested way of getting staff to buy into to top-down environmental targets and policies;
• It helps give keen green staff something to get their teeth into

As a result of the success of the Bristol pilot, NUS secured funding from Defra’s Greener Living Fund to roll Green Impact Universities out to 18 other universities through a partnership with the EAUC. Green Impact is the backbone of NUS’s wider Degrees Cooler campaign, through which 300 teams and departments, covering 15,000 staff, are taking part in Green Impact this year. StudentForce for Sustainability lead on a resourcing project designed to help deliver the three behaviour change projects through placing Greener Living assistants at these Universities and are now supporting this Green Impact Assistant at Canterbury Christ Church University as the Green Impact programme rolls out further.

Canterbury Christ Church University:

Canterbury Christ Church University is the largest centre of higher education in Kent for the major public services. It now has approximately 17,000 students based in five Faculties: Arts and Humanities, Business and Management, Education, Health and Social Care, Social and Applied Sciences.  Our 1,450 staff contribute to the University’s work at our five campuses: Canterbury, Broadstairs, Folkestone, Medway (in partnership with the Universities of Greenwich and Kent with Mid-Kent College) and Tunbridge Wells.

The University is in the process of implementing of an environmental management system through the EcoCampus scheme (Silver phase completed).  The University has published stretching carbon management targets as part of its carbon management plan published in 2011.  A carbon reduction of 35% on a 2009 baseline by 2015/16 has been made.   Performance in the People and Planet Green League has improved consistently year on year moving up to 31^st in 2011 from 56^th in 2010.

An Environmental Champions network already exists and the Green Impact project will provide the key focus for engagement in environmental sustainability throughout the University in order to support central university initiatives and legislative targets.

Objective

This post will involve a coordinating and supportive role to ensure the effective implementation and impact of the Green Impact project in order to achieve an increase in the pro-environmental behaviours of students and staff within the university.

The GIA will provide added capacity to enable successful delivery of the University’s Green Impact project by the specified completion dates.

This is a 6 month part-time post that will deliver the Green Impact objectives but also enhance the capacity and impact of the environment team across Canterbury Christ Church University as a whole.

Additionally, and as time allows the role will support the Student SwitchOff scheme and help the Students’ Union with Go Green Week.