Green Gown Awards 2018 - Keele University - Finalist

Keele University is different, and we do sustainability differently!  In 2008/9 our Council committed to a ‘Deep Green’ vision. We committed to sustainability as one of our six strategic institutional aims in our 2010-2015 Strategic Plan, and in 2015 we articulated this strategic aim (one of only six) as embedding “sustainability in all that we do”.  And that’s what we do. 

From education, to the management of our grounds, to research, to procurement, and investments – in every aspect of the university’s mission and operations, we’re thinking about sustainability.   We don’t have a Sustainability Co-ordinating Office, we don’t have a Director of Sustainability. And we’re proud of this - because for us, to achieve our objective of embedding sustainability ‘in everything we do’, we need everyone to be doing it, at all levels, in every part of the university.

Keele is a community, and we drive towards being the most sustainable University we can be, through the whole community.  This is what it means to be a Sustainability Institution, not just this year, but every year.

Top 3 learnings:

1. Culture change happens from consistent high level messaging from the top.

2. Embedding sustainability in all that we do requires individuals to develop their own sustainability values to bring into their own areas of work

3. You don’t need a central sustainability office to make cultural change; distributed responsibility works!