LUBS Sustainability Champions 2024/25

Responsibilities for all Student Sustainability Architect roles include:

• Supporting the delivery of a core sustainability project (see below);
• Working with the LUBS Blueprint Champion or Staff Sustainability Architect / Champion (your supervisor) to set objectives,
  plan and manage the project, and monitor performance against these objectives (e.g., including time, quality, and budgets);
• Where required, promoting LUBS Sustainability activities at key events, e.g., LUBS Open Days, Careers Fairs, LUU events,
  and Welcome to Leeds campaigns;
• Supporting the marketing and communication of the LUBS Blueprint and the University’s Climate Plan by using social media to publicise
  events or contributing to the LUBS Sustainability newsletters;
• Researching, applying, and promoting equality, diversity, and inclusion initiatives and sharing best practices
  within the Sustainability Architect community;
• Supporting student-facing activities and assisting with other sustainability campaigns and projects when necessary;
• Producing an end-of-project summary report to summarise the achievement of key project objectives.

Priority One: Positive Impact Rating (PIR)
The Student Sustainability Champion will engage with the Positive Impact Rating (PIR), a university ranking system that evaluates business schools based on their societal impact and commitment to continuous improvement. The PIR prioritizes purpose-driven education and aligns with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). The ranking a school receives is derived entirely from a 20-question survey completed by students, with the PIR team responsible for survey creation and the LUBS Accreditation Manager overseeing associated fees and administrative tasks.

The Student Sustainability Champion will participate in several key activities, including:

• identifying best practices aligned with the UN SDGs
• disseminating these practices to the student body
• driving student engagement with the survey, and promoting the results of the ranking

Priority Two: Exploration of Additional Ranking Opportunities
The Student Sustainability Architect will investigate further ranking opportunities that are valued by our students and peers.

This involves assessing the potential benefits of pursuing these rankings and determining the efforts required for successful participation.

Are you eager to promote how much the LUBS curriculum embeds sustainability, and want to encourage even greater engagement?

Our teaching already contains many great examples of deep engagement with sustainability topics, but these could have a higher profile and availability to current and future students, alumni, and employers. Having easy access to illustrative case studies of teaching sustainability will help LUBS staff eager to do the same.

A repository of such examples is one key way in which to help embed more sustainability in teaching.

As Student Sustainability Champion on this project, you will: -

• Building on existing known examples, identify suitable case studies for elaboration
• Help design, develop and promote practical, staff-facing examples of teaching sustainability
• Design and promote versions of these case studies, aimed at other audiences, in particular our own students
• Offer advice on effective approaches to embedding sustainability in the LUBS curriculum

This project will build on last year’s project to develop a shared understanding of decolonising the curriculum at LUBS. ‘Decolonisation’ is one of component frameworks of the University Student Education Strategy that falls within equality and climate justice arena within the UN SDGs. LUBS Student Education Strategy has set up a Task Group on ‘Decolonising the LUBS curriculum’ as part of the Curriculum Project. At LUBS, research is needed to define the parameters of and mechanisms for decolonising the curriculum.A Student Sustainability Champion will be involved with the following:

• Decolonising Website - suggest benchmarking with what's out there
• Decolonising Workshop/Seminars - reframe the purpose of the group and identify advocates for staff welcome / induction, or organise another LUBS Seminar
• Complete the analysis of the staff survey and establish phase 2 with students
• Continue to generate conversations around the link between decolonisation and decarbonisation through activities such as podcasts

This project seeks to provide a tool that both encourages and facilitates slow travel for university business among staff. The Business School recently implemented a slow travel policy for staff, introducing penalties for air travel and rewards for rail and slow travelling in general. However, when travelling medium and long distances, most staff are used to travel by air, and changing to rail (or a combination of other modes) can require a fair amount of planning, making it a barrier to its usage.

This project aims to reduce this barrier by creating an online tool that recommend staff with slow travel routes to their destination. The tool could take the form of something similar to google maps, or maybe even simpler, a database of routes to different destinations starting from Leeds, including details and comments (more like a wiki).

The Student Sustainability Champion will be involved in the following activities:

• Conduct a literature review (academic and grey literature) to understand best practices and theory
• Liaise with LUBS Admin, IT, and other relevant groups
• Propose a design for the Slow Travel Planning Tool
• Implement the design of the Slow Travel Planning Tool using a web technology
• Test the design with users

Also, the Student Sustainability Champion should have the following skills:

• Data Analysis: Ability to analyse data to identify most common destinations, frequency of trips, etc.
• Software design: Experience designing web-tools from a user-centric perspective.
• Software Development: Experience in developing web tools. Knowledge of node.js, ASP.net or other web technology for developing front and backend of web services.
• Good interpersonal skills: Testing the tool with potential users will be a critical part of the development cycle.

This project seeks to establish and measure Key Performance Indicators for sustainability associated to each department in LUBS.

The School and University encourages sustainable practices, such as turning IT equipment off during breaks, commuting using transport modes other than car, and slow travel. However, currently there are no indicators of how each department of our school perform in terms of sustainability.

This project’s aim is to define these KPIs and stablish a way to measure them with enough reliability. For example, measuring energy consumption associated to each department, and carbon emissions from business travel, among others. This project is likely to have a strong technological component, as reading and processing continuously collected data may be needed (e.g. from smart meters or online databases).

The Student Sustainability Champion will be involved in the following activities:

• Conduct a literature review (academic and grey literature) to understand best practices and theory
• Liaise with LUBS Admin, Facilities, and other relevant groups
• Propose measurable KPIs to keep track of the sustainability of each department
• Implement KPI measuring procedures
• Develop a monitoring tool for the KPIs (eg. online dashboard)

Also, the Student Sustainability Champion should have the following skills:

• Data Analysis: Ability to analyse data to propose measurable KPIs and track sustainability metrics. Knowledge of R or Python are desirable.
• Project Management: Skills to implement KPI measuring procedures effectively.
• Software Development: Experience in developing monitoring tools, such as online dashboards. Knowledge of R, Python, ASP.net or other is highly valuable.
• Familiarity with Sustainability Metrics: Understanding of sustainability principles and metrics.
• Proficiency in Relevant Software: Knowledge of software like Excel, Tableau, or other data visualization tools.

This project will provide wide-ranging support to the launch, delivery and evaluation of a LUBS student sustainability team competition, which is run annually in collaboration with an external partner.

The competition themes change each year depending on business priorities of the partner organisation. In previous years the competition has focused on the introduction of e-bike charging stations at Coop stores (2022); the treatment of sustainability performance in franchise operations to provide recommendations for the Coop (2023) - see LUBS and Co-op Student Team Sustainability Challenge 2023  In 2024 Oxfam set business issues focused on diversification of its stock sourcing strategy – see LUBS Sustainability Challenge 2024 - the winners! | LUBS Student Guide

The business competition is again being delivered in partnership with Oxfam GB in 2025.

The Student Sustainability Champion will be involved in the following activities:

• Support the project planning, monitoring and delivery activities
• Engage with external partner and internal stakeholders, to generate participation in the competition
• Collaborate with other sustainability champions to identify effective ways to engage students across LUBS
• Generate student interest and engagement through a variety of promotion activities, including promotion materials as required
• Assist with post-competition project evaluation

This project is designed to build a sense of community for staff and students by collaborating with the To Walk organisation to encourage staff and students to walk and engage with their surroundings.

Walking is not only the most sustainable means of getting from A to B, but it also supports their overall wellbeing by enabling walkers to recall, connect, reflect on, and develop their sense of who they are. Building on the success of the last two projects that captured the walker’s landscapes through photography and sketching, this year’s brief will capture the walker’s landscape through reflections, and textual narratives that support the landscape photography. Reflections may include identification of music and memory triggers, enhancement of wellbeing through performances at an exhibition at the launch.

Collaboration with the School of Performance and Cultural Industries and the National Poetry Centre would ensure the project generate conversations about place, memory and landscape would extend LUBS commitment to community across faculties and disciplines,

The Student Sustainability Champion will work with the project lead to:

• help raise awareness, promote the campaign, and recruit staff and student participants through comms and social media
• provide support for walkers during the training process
• assist with the capture, collation and establish a platform to upload students walking experiences reflections
• establish and support the exhibition on campus
• assist with generating media interest in the project

The public (staff, students, externals) are often unaware of the myriad of activities that the Blueprint champions are engaged in, let alone the goals of the sustainability blueprint team. An enthusiastic and proactive Student Sustainability Champion is sought to assist the development of a coherent and responsive communications approach to disseminate content more effectively to the University communities. The brief will focus on communications and event planning

Communications:

• Create engaging content for social media, newsletters, and the university website
• Collaborate with various departments to promote sustainability projects and events

Event planning:

• Organise and coordinate sustainability-related events, workshops, and campaigns
• Work with student organisations and external partners to ensure successful event execution
• Manage event logistics, including venue booking, materials preparation, and participant coordination