Green Impact Students’ Unions Excellence Award

What is Excellence?

Green Impact Students’ Unions Excellence is a year-long reward project.

It allows students’ unions who have achieved a Green Impact Gold award for two consecutive years to take a year’s break from the workbook. The excellence framework gives students’ unions the opportunity to work with their institutions on a bigger picture sustainability initiative, creating transformational projects, with support and guidance from NUS.

Aims of Excellence:

To continue to motivate our top achieving students’ unions;
To harness the experience, energy and enthusiasm found within Students’ Unions, to create unique and exciting sustainability projects;
To collectively tackle bigger-picture challenges and issues beyond the parameters of students’ unions.
Identifying transformational sustainability projects to inspire action across the Students’ Union movement.

To see a selection of recent entries, watch the video below.

To take part in GISU Excellence in 2014/15 you must fulfil the following criteria:

1) Achieved a Green Impact Gold Standard for two consecutive years or, received Green Impact Excellence in 2012/13 and have been reaccredited with the Gold Standard in 2013/14;

2) A willingness or desire ready to take on the challenge of something larger than the Green Impact workbook;

3) A student officer and/or member of staff who can dedicate a regular portion of their time to the project;

4) Senior management support for their project and/or the Green Impact Excellence theme is cited as one of the operational objectives for 2014/15.

Timeline

14 July 2014: Official launch

5 August 2014: Introduction to Excellence webinar

15 August 2014: Green Impact students’ union signup deadline

3 November 2014: SUs to submit project plan, using NUS template

November 2014: Regional meetings on GISU Excellence coordinated by NUS. Exact date to be defined locally.

20 March 2015: Submit Project Update and Case Study

April and May 2015: GISU Excellence Audits

July 2015: Green Impact awards ceremony for students’ unions

Support

NUS would like to make this process as easy and conducive to success as possible. With this in mind there will be an NUS Project Officer Mentor assigned to you when you opt to do Green Impact Students’ Union Excellence. They will:

Be there to guide you through the process;
Answer any queries you may have;
Read drafts of plans/reports before you submit them;
Help you network with other SUs doing the same theme of Green Impact Excellence.

In addition, you can expect:

One regional meeting. NUS will organise five meetings across the UK to enhance peer to peer learning and create a network of Excellence Students’ Unions;
A 121 with your NUS mentor in autumn and spring, either in person or conference call (depending on locality);
If there are particular organisations you would like to be involved with your projects NUS will strive to set up meetings and provide links where possible.

Rewards

In 2014/15 GISU Excellence each students’ union’s project’s plan, case study and project update will be marked out of total of 100 points to gain the Excellence accreditation and receive an audit from a NUS Project Officer. The audit will be arranged at the students’ union’s convenience however, it must take place in April or May 2015.

Each students’ union that gains the Excellence accreditation will receive an award at Green Impact students’ union awards ceremony in July 2015.

The top 5 scoring Students’ Unions will receive national promotion of their projects by NUS. This will include, but is not exclusive to: