Green Gown Awards 2018 - University of Leeds - Highly Commended

The Student Sustainability Architect programme is an innovative collaboration between staff and students to develop projects addressing specific sustainability challenges across the University and wider community. Unlike other volunteer based student “green champions”, our Architects are employed on a part time basis, forming a valuable part of our wider Sustainability Service and embedded within our team. They are supervised by staff teams throughout the University and work collaboratively to research, design and deliver innovative tangible projects that have real and visible campus wide positive social and environmental impacts.

The programme enables students to develop professional skills, gain valuable work experience and interact directly with University staff to initiate and influence change using the campus as a learning resource. Since its conception in 2014, the programme has employed 18 students, who have all gone on to secure successful careers in the sustainability sector, hugely benefiting from the experience gained as Student Architects.

In 2017-18 we have supported 6 architects with roles ranging from; promoting student citizenship with our community team and working with campus catering to reduce food packaging and waste, to identifying sustainability opportunities within the curriculum and research.

Top 3 learnings:

1. From the start, Student Architects are paid, core members of the Sustainability Team.
2. Targeted projects with service/discipline staff, provide tangible results across the University and wider community.
3. Through collaboration, students have freedom to develop ideas, learn new skills, and build experience.

CO2t savings 2017/2018: 13.17 CO2t (Estimated based on Architect projects which have direct Carbon saving) 

CO2t savings over the life cycle of the project: The majority of our Architect projects have not been focused around carbon saving measures and are more social value based. However, 21017/18 we have seen the above direct carbon saving benefit.

Videos

• Green Gown Awards 2018 – Tomorrows Employees – University of Leeds – Finalist (click to hide)