Green Gown Awards 2014 - Student Engagement - University of Central Lancashire Students' Union

Sally the Slug - Innovative strategies for student and staff engagement

Since October 2013 the Students Union and the University of Central Lancashire have collaboratively run a range of innovative student engagement initiatives that have seen student numbers engaging in issues around sustainability soar. Supporting student-led initiatives and ensuring Senior Management and staff buy-in has allowed total involvement of the institution. This has allowed innovative engagement to develop via The
Green Ladder Project.

A new student council role has been created by students themselves and we now have an Environment & Ethics Councillor. Students too have established a new Go Green Society and Better World Forum all in the last 10 months, and the Union awarded its first ever Sustainability Awards to students for outstanding work.

An exciting new Campus Master Plan is currently being created and the University has made sure that students’ ideas and aspirations around creating a greener and lower carbon campus are at the core of the new energy saving campaigns. Working in partnership with Diabetes UK, 45 students have found 130 community members with undiagnosed diabetes.

Top 3 learnings

1 Use a range of different tactics in order to engage with a range of different students
2 Go to where students are and engage with them on their turf. Don’t expect them to come to you
3 Show students and academics that sustainability needs to be included in every aspect of University life and study.

Videos

• Video (click to hide)