Greener Living Assistant

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 was the backbone of NUS’s wider Degrees Cooler campaign, through which 300 teams and departments, covering 15,000 staff, took part in 2010/11. 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 Greener Living Assistant at Jewel & Esk College in Edinburgh as the Green Impact programme rolls out further