Green Gown Awards 2017 - University of Worcester - Finalist

This is the eighth Sustainability Report for the University of Worcester. It describes the institution’s most significant environmental aspects and how these are managed and mitigated in order to fulfil our commitment to continuous environmental and sustainability improvement.

This year the Sustainability Committee undertook a series of workshops including how to create successful change management conditions for innovation, developed at Harvard University. The Sustainability Committee, as well as keeping under review the most useful reporting metrics and the best

benchmarking tools for the University, ensures it is constantly reviewing global best practice to keep us at the forefront of sustainability reporting. We were particularly proud to have had our Sustainability Annual report 2014-2015 as a finalist in the Green Gown Awards 2016.

A new project with The WikiRate and the University of Michigan is an exciting development. The WikiRate Project is an EU-funded, crowd-sourced online platform promoting transparency on sustainability performance; to share organisation’s data in a structured and dynamic way. Our pilot aims to look at university reporting on both side of the Atlantic to bring HEI sustainability data into the public domain.

Top 3 learnings:

1 Include students, staff, governors and the local community in developing your vision.

2 We cannot do this on our own, little by way of innovation occurs in isolation and the University of Worcester is open to collaboration and collaborative models.

3 Create many scaffolding opportunities, so colleagues across the Students’ Union and University can connect with their discipline/area of expertise.  When it’s interwoven and inspirational more people can feel inspired to balance economic efficiency, social equity and environmental accountability.