Green Impact Blog! – Be Seen Wearing Green at CCCU

It has been over a year since I first arrived at Canterbury Christ Church University (CCCU) to work as their Green Impact Assistant. In fact, it is fast approaching two years since the newly set-up sustainability development team welcomed me to join the efforts promoting all that is pro-environmental across the University.

Now my job has developed and I work as the Sustainability Projects Officer, a role which involves a vast number of sustainability-related projects. Anyone who knows ‘sustainability’ knows that this is a far-reaching concept!

On top of Green Impact, I take part in organising conferences (such as the forthcoming UN Earth Day event, hosted at the University); linking up with local pro-environmental groups; attending BioBlitz’s; participating in Fairtrade cake making (and then eating); I do my share of bicycle-generation for electricity; I co-plan the internal auditing of our EMS and make sure all is in order for our ISO14001 commitments, especially on the legal side of things; I talk to students, and to staff about the ways we can be a truly sustainable university; my colleagues and I regularly arrange and promote sustainability events (such as film-club screenings, allotment sessions and working groups); and of course we provide support to anyone at the University who is working within this  very broad area.

All-in-all, there is a whole lot going on and it is a great pleasure to be part of it. Working as the Sustainability Projects Officer at CCCU is fantastic – a dream job. However, there is sometimes so much going on that we don’t have the time to see things happen: the lunchtime SWISH event whooshes by or perhaps the activity, such as switching over to LED lightbulbs or putting solar panels on a roof, just isn’t all that visible (our roofs are flat, and so long as the light shines a light is a light, right?).

What I thought was that it would be great to have one day when everyone involved in a sustainability project could show their dedication to building the culture of sustainability across the University by being seen wearing green. Last year, 2012, we put the call out, “BE SEEN WEARING GREEN!” we hollered loud and far. The Student Union’s Vice President (Welfare & Education) joined the Director of Sustainability Development and myself and we did a silly dance with balloons in our then empty planters.

This year the planters are full of plants, grown by staff and students from Green Impact teams who adopted them. So we went walkabout across the campus to find staff and students who were clad in green attire… (see photos)

For the past two years we have made the BE SEEN WEARING GREEN sustainability awareness-raising campaign take place on the People & Planet day of action. Hopefully this campaign will take place again next year, and perhaps we will try a Guinness World Record Book attempt for the most people to BE SEEN WEARING GREEN!

- Lucy Brown is Sustainability Projects Officer at Canterbury Christ Church University, former Green Impact Assistant and still assisting in the impacting of green