A message from your Sustainability Officer

Hi Everyone!

Last week I held the first Sustainability Student Group Meeting as part of my Sustainability Part-Time Officer role at the GSA. Thank you to those that joined!

Currently I’m working on a sustainability policy for both the GSA and the University. The GSA policy will contain objectives and targets so that the GSA will be run in a more sustainable way. Initially this will involve collecting baseline information to establish how targets can be formed and align more specific objectives alongside this. You can expect to see points related to energy and water use and waste metrics. This will be taken to the Board of Trustees at the GSA for approval. As for the University policy, this will include points that we expect to see from the University which will be lobbied to establish change. This will be taken to Council to be voted upon before sending it to the University. I’m hoping to have this completed by May or June in order to take it to Council before the end of the spring term.

In the meeting last week, we discussed points that could be included in the policies. We discussed points such as cycle lanes, electric charging points, sustainability within teaching, and support for societies and groups with sustainability links.

There were a lot of actions to come out of the meeting and so I’ve been contacting people and groups across the university to hear about their views and gain more information about details for the policies.

If you have any ideas about what should be in either of the policies, you can either contact me directly (see below) or attend the next meeting which is on Thursday 29th April at 12pm-1pm. You can sign-up here: https://forms.gle/dCE3NswsLPh5NcbZ7 

More information about the meeting can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/events/269943704621958 

If you’d like any more information or to talk to me about anything sustainability related, you can get in contact with me in the following ways:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/yorksustainabilityofficer 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/YorkGSA_Officer

Email: sustainabilityofficer@yorkgsa.org