We have received good numbers of original ideas, but also plenty of unions asking for help developing ideas. The Fund is partly there to scale up and roll out successful initiatives, so in this spirit, below is a bank of projects to inspire you, comprising ideas you have brought to us, and ideas we have for you. It is an illustrative list designed to inspire, rather than a closed list, but feel free to pick and mix to create a programme that suits your students and institution, or just use it for inspiration.
There are also some additional notes below that may help you when developing your applications. This should all be read in conjunction with the guidance in the business plan and the FAQs.
With students, not for students
If you are reading this as a member of staff in an institution (rather than a students’ union), and intend to lead on developing your union’s bid for them, please ensure your ideas are developed with students, not for students. Build on their energy, and listen to their ideas, as that will make for more engaging and successful projects. Projects need be delivered in partnership with institutions, but must be student-led.
We encourage different types of application:
- Project-specific bids = an application based on one idea or project
- Patchwork bids = lots of small initiatives
- Collaborative, city-wide or regional bids = sharing staff resource / projects across students’ unions, especially engaging FE students’ unions and students
- Replica bids = we encourage students’ unions work together to, where appropriate, submit similar bids so that we can pilot projects at multiple locations, or simply scale up tried and tested models as quickly as we can
Taking to scale
We like projects that have the potential to be scaled up and rolled out to benefit other students’ unions. For example, if developing an online green guide for your students, or a new app, the value is in the template being something NUS can make available to all students’ unions.
Think big and bigger
Be as ambitious as you can. We would rather fund 25 large scale transformational projects that reach every part of an institution than 100 small projects that just engage small numbers of students and staff. You can handle this, we will help you! The sky is the limit.
Under-represented ideas
As of the end of April, we have had not many discussions on projects based on engaging academics in sustainability; engaging slow-to-respond institutions in sustainability; ethical procurement; cradle to cradle products; international projects.
Ideas bank
Big
- Replicate the Green Lancaster / Green Office model of a well-resourced student-led sustainability unit greening the entire institution bottom-up, ultimately funded by the institution
- Replicate the Eco-NSU model, empowering and funding students to develop their sustainability engagement projects
- Replicate the Future Factory model within students’ unions, getting students (rather than staff) out to help challenge conventional business models and to green business
- Create your own Students’ Green Fund for students to apply to deliver their own sustainability projects. This would be similar to the Student Green Fees model that is common in the US (NB: we are NUS, so we certainly don’t advocate charging students additional fees, instead we could provide seed funding, after which the institution should fund it by ring fencing c£2-3 from existing tuition fees per semester)
- Replicate the Halls Green Fund model at Manchester, where c£280k of existing dormitory fees is ring-fenced each year for green projects by students
- Engage students in private rented accommodation in domestic sustainability by developing something like Student Switch Off or Green Impact for student homes, maybe deploying SMART meters to create competition, and developing ways of harnessing live meter data to change behaviours
- Engage students in private rented accommodation through student-led energy audits in the community, like Energy Action by Change Agents, maybe using a heat loss camera to identify leaky student homes, or an engagement tool like an interactive eco-student house
- Engage with the main energy companies to install free insulation to student or community homes through the ECO scheme, or maybe create your own reverse auction for renewable energy supply for students and staff, like many local authorities are now doing
- Fit solar panels on student homes, so students get free energy, learn about renewables, and the feed in tariffs go to the union for your own Students’ Green Fund (see above)
- Pilot Student Switch Off in state or private schools (see our NUS HEA survey for lack of awareness of sustainability initiatives from students in private schools) or prisons, or help scale up and roll out Green Impact off-campus into community organisations, using trained students to deliver the projects through the formal or in formal curriculum (see Go Green, below)
- Establish a campus-scale food growing initiative, engaging students, administrators and academics to create the most productive food growing campus ever, getting rid of all that mown grass (see University of Lausanne for inspiration), making use of window farms, reconnecting students with the food they eat in the wake of the Horsemeat scandal. How about an ethical burger van community interest company with meat from animals reared by students, developing a microbrewery like at UBC Students’ Union, or bringing back communal bread ovens with the Real Bread Campaign?
- Develop effective local or regional environmental campaigns on issues such as living wages (UK and international through the supply chain), unconventional fossil fuels, conflict minerals, ethical finance, etc. Partner with international campaigns to bring them to the UK, such as Conflict Free Campus, 350.org or www.endecocide.eu
- Develop ethical finance models, such as credit unions like Walsave, for students and staff
- Pilot UK sustainability programmes, projects and approaches (e.g. Green Impact, Student Switch Off, the Blackout) at your institution’s overseas campuses, using international students and academics as vectors, and local students’ unions as delivery partners. Represent the UK at international student sustainability conferences
- Bring new approaches from overseas to the UK, testing them and then preparing them for wider roll-out through the students’ union movement. For inspiration see here or here
- Run a UK-wide, or international, student conference on student leadership for sustainability. For inspiration, and to avoid duplication, see WSES
- Work with certification schemes such as Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance, Organic, etc. develop mass-student awareness of them (see our Fairtrade research) and demand for them, with engagement competitions to win student visits to Fairtrade farms, etc. Also develop opportunities for students to support the development of the models through the formal curriculum
Medium to small (suitable for patchwork bids)
- Establish a high-level forum to engage students, such as the University of Manchester Student Sustainability Forum
- Researching student and staff attitudes behaviours and habits on sustainability, informing local projects and actions, and providing local evidence on student demand to inform the direction of the students’ union and institution
- Create a shared sustainably engagement role across students’ unions and institutions as a joint application, either city-wide or regionally
- For slow to respond institutions, create sustainability engagement role and deliver our off-the-shelf engagement projects, Green Impact Universities and Colleges and Student Switch Off and Student Eats
- Replicate the Go Green project at Anglia Ruskin Business School, where students take Green Impact out into the community as part of their studies
- Engaging art or photography students by developing your own amazing engagement project like Hard Rain or www.picturesofsuccess.org
- Engaging design students to create new cradle to cradle products from waste materials, such as clothing from waste plastic, or closed-loop compostable cotton work wear clothing
- Replicating the sustainability cognate academics project at Plymouth by Paul Murray as a way of greening the curriculum
- Employ paid students as sustainability advocates in faculties, helping engage staff in sustainability through peer to peer networks, and support course reps to raise issues relating to sustainability in the curriculum
- Set up a bike recycling and rental scheme, like iCYCLE MANCHESTER
- Establish a project that supports international development, such as the Newcastle University READ Project
- Establish a project that supports native biodiversity on campus, like those done through Green Impact Students’ Union Excellence, getting celebrities to talk to students
- Community food growing, such as the garden share scheme at Bath, where students grow food in the gardens of older people who can’t manage their gardens (a bit like Landshare), or mass community bee keeping and honey community interest initiatives, such as Pollinate Edinburgh
- Developing a skill share scheme, such Greeniversity, to help find and share key skills on and off campus, and/or develop time banking as a way encouraging student participation in greening initiatives
- Green festivals and fun mass-engagement sustainability events
- Support students to create a series of engaging short films that encourage pro-environmental actions, such as the recycling videos from University of Manchester or the cool film by Winchester Students’ Union
- Engaging student societies and clubs in sustainability, such as Keele’s Sustainability Stripes initiative