Scottish Funding Council renews EAUC-Scotland funding for 2023/24

30th March 2023

We are pleased to announce that EAUC’s bid for funding for the next phase of its work in Scotland has been approved by the Scottish Funding Council (SFC). We will deliver our new outcome agreement ‘Supporting a step-change towards environmental sustainability at Scotland's Universities and Colleges’ from 1st April 2023 up to March 2024. 
 
The success of the bid comes as a result of work undertaken with SFC over the past six months to develop new ideas about further accelerating the sector’s response to the climate emergency. This process was informed by feedback from members through our regional workshops, events, surveys and through our Advisory Group. It also referred to the results of SFC’S sector survey in 2022 and reflected our own understanding of the higher and further education sector’s sustainability journey, community motivations and the Scottish Government’s national priorities. 
 
On 31st March, we will officially reach the end of our ‘Accelerating action and leadership in Scotland’s colleges and universities to respond to the climate emergency’ programme. This 3-year outcome agreement, again funded by the Scottish Funding Council, has enabled EAUC-Scotland to collaborate with and support the Higher and Further Education sector in its sustainability journey. Since April 2020, we have delivered close to 100 events, training sessions and webinars reaching nearly 2000 people, including over 200 Carbon Literacy Training delegates. We were part of the working group that developed the Scottish Government’s guidance on Public Sector Leadership on the Global Climate Emergency, and prepared a briefing paper on how it impacts the FHE Sector. We are confident that this programme has helped create a culture of understanding of the significant role the sector has in responding to the climate emergency, as well as supported sector staff to take action to improve sustainability within their institutions and communities. 
 
The new SFC-funded programme is designed to create opportunities for colleges and universities to form new collaborations and develop innovative approaches in their response to the climate emergency. The programme will focus on supporting transformative leadership and the empowerment of sector communities, building capacity in institutional structures across the sectors, developing a place-based response to the climate emergency and further strengthening the collaborative sector voice. We will also work with SFC and key partners to progress Learning for Sustainability in learning, teaching and research and support SFC on its own strategic framework and the national framework through harnessing the ‘Team Scotland’ approach. 
 

Responding to the confirmation of funding, Charlotte Bonner, CEO of the EAUC, said:

   


The EAUC-Scotland team would like to express its thanks to our Outcome Manager, Hazel Dalgård, and to her Capital and Climate Change colleagues at SFC for giving us the opportunity to again work with and support the sector during this next chapter. In addition, we would also like to thank our previous Outcome Manager, Jennifer Jamieson, for her support over the previous programme, and all the sector staff and key partners who provided letters of support for the bid. The new outcome agreement will be published on our website from early April 2023 and will contain all the details on what the sector can expect from EAUC-Scotland over the next year. 

If you have any questions about the new programme, please get in touch.