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The Social Science Green Impact Team win Gold

Head of Sustainability, Dr Matt Montgomery, hands the award to James Mudd, LPS Head of School Coordinator

At an awards ceremony held on Thursday 21 June in the Bramber House Conference Centre, the Social Science Green Impact Team scooped a gold award for initiatives implemented across the schools of Education and Social Work (ESW), Global Studies, and Law, Politics and Sociology (LPS) towards a greener and more sustainable working environment.

The , run by the National Union of Students (NUS), challenges teams to implement actions to improve sustainability and help the environment. Completed actions gain points towards different awards.

Initiatives implemented by the Team between November 2023 and April 2024 include:

• Organising a series of events and wellbeing activities for Professional Services staff, including litter-picking days, a Boundary Walk, and mindfulness/meditation sessions.
• Supporting a Forest Food Garden planting day at which team members helped plant circa 80 trees, shrubs and herbs.
• Encouraging staff to follow more sustainable practices on campus via informational posters, info on noticeboards and emails.
• Producing and sharing regular newsletters.
• Carrying out energy, lighting, recycling, and heating audits.
• Installing bird feeders and bug hotels to promote biodiversity.
• Promoting sustainable travel, including awareness raising of 'Dr Bike' bicycle maintenance events, providing tools and equipment for bicycle repairs, and promoting various schemes offered by the University to encourage and support sustainable travel.
• Working towards improved economy of water usage and more environmentally friendly storage and disposal of chemicals in laboratories.

Senior Operations Manager and Soc Sci Green Impact team member, Ana Pereira, said:

“Winning the Green Impact Gold Award is a wonderful recognition of our efforts since forming the Social Science Green Impact team in November 2023. However, the true reward lies in our ongoing journey towards creating a greener, more sustainable work environment in the three Social Science Schools. We hope this achievement and the initiatives that come out of the group will inspire our colleagues to embrace green practices in their everyday lives, both at work and outside of work. Moving forward, we are hoping to seek feedback from colleagues on what we should focus on next and work together with the University sustainability team to advance those initiatives.”

The Social Science Green Impact Team is made up of the following members:

ESW
Adam Stewart, Ana Pereira, Vanessa Periam

Global Studies
Katie Meek, Meg Sweeney, Michael Lyons, Phoebe Wadey, Sarah Johnson

LPS
Annie Foyster, Charlotte Shamoon, Ellie Stanbridge, James Mudd, James Ward-Lee, Liz Kaye, Lydia De Montford, Sally Parsons.

Senior Education Manager and Soc Sci Green Impact team member, Liz Kaye, said:

“I jumped at the chance of joining our Social Science Green Impact team.  Being part of this group has encouraged me immensely, both from the support we gave each other and the variety of tasks we completed.  We were spurred on even further when it became clear that we had a chance of achieving a Gold Award.

Working with students and younger colleagues every day, plus being the mother of a teenage daughter, has focussed me on the huge importance of doing whatever we can to reduce the damage we are doing to our planet and combat the effect of climate change, to ensure that young people today have a healthy and sustainable future to look forward to.  At the awards ceremony last week we celebrated the cumulative positive effect of lots of relatively small actions and the power we have to drive change in our places of work and study.  At the ceremony we also heard about the initiatives undertaken by other Sussex teams and we were all inspired to share best practice to do even more in the coming year.  It’s great that the University has made sustainability so central to our current and future mission and vision – and Green Impact will help us to continue to ensure that the small things happen, without which the bigger things are not achievable.  Watch this space …..”

The award will take pride of place in the receptions of all three schools on an alternate per-term basis.