Solihull College and University Centre: Sustainability Stakeholder Engagement Workshops

Lead Organisation

Sustainability West Midlands

Project Delivery team: Beck Collins (Project Manager) and Morgan Roberts (Project Support)

Customer

Solihull College and University Centre.

Overview

During this project SWM worked with the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) at Solihull College and University Centre, to help them understand how both as a team and as individual leaders, they could achieve the College’s ambition of becoming a sustainable college. The aim was to move concern for sustainability out of a single job role, and begin to embed it into all decision-making.

This was done over two engagement workshops, followed up with an Enhanced Sustainability Delivery Plan, which provided recommendations. The first workshop explored what the College currently does which is sustainable, what holds leaders back from going further in sustainability, and how these barriers can be overcome. The second workshop drew out four key challenge areas identified during the first workshop; governance, the curriculum, finance and procurement and business growth, and sought to identify the specific actions they could take in each of those areas in the coming months, the next year and beyond, to embed sustainability.

Recommendations

Working with the SLT in this way, SWM agreed on a number of recommendations to support this embedding of sustainability in all decision-making at the College. These were:

• Train all staff in sustainability / carbon literacy,
• Embed sustainability into SLT management and governance practices,
• Embed sustainability in the curriculum in a systematic way,
• Embed sustainability into estates and procurement,
• Explore a variety of ways to move forward individual sustainability projects which have no defined ownership,
• Improve communications about the College’s sustainability ambitions and progress (internally and externally),
• Engage with students and include them in the journey.