Go Green Roadshow Blog
For the next three weeks Go Green Intern Richard has a mission: To travel the country and help as many groups with their Go Green campaign as the rail network will allow.
Sunday 2 November
London has twelve P&P groups, most of whom are running Go Green so giving a Go Green workshop at the Regional Training Day was a fantastic way to hit many birds with one stone.
Some groups like Westminster were completely new to the campaign and hadn’t actually met their VC yet, so appreciated hearing about how other groups started off their campaign.
Royal Holloway on the other hand have smashed the campaign and gotten the university to appoint an environmental manager, who turned out to be Andy Hix, a former People & Planet stalwart. In addition to transforming the university Andy has been producing an epic trilogy of recycling films, the latest and greatest of which is “Gangster Recycling”.
At Royal Holloway they also created a video petition to show to their VC in which students got to vent about why the uni wasn’t green enough. This was an inspired piece of campaigning as it showed that it wasn’t a just couple of ethical do gooders behind the campaign, it was most of the student body. Genius!
After the Go Green workshop and a mega picnic everyone regrouped to discuss what London People & Planet groups could collaborate on over the next year.
The ideas for Go Green Week 2009 were far too numerous to list here, but a few of the more exciting ones were a mass lobby of MPs and some kind of ultimate bicycle day party. This could include bicycle repair workshops, auctioning bikes seized by police, bike safety lessons from the council, bicycle-powered smoothie makers and dusting the day off with a big party powered by, you guessed it, nuclear power. No, I meant to say bicycle power.
Go Green Week is 9-13 February 2009 but with ambitious ideas like this it’s good to get planning as early as possible in advance. If you have had any great ideas or have a question then email James in the P&P office.
Post training we headed to Indian Veg, the world’s greatest restaurant, for an all you can eat vegetarian curry for £3.95!
The evening ended with a democratic poll on the back of a napkin which determined we had to head towards the pub. God bless democracy.
Friday 31 October
On Friday was an early morning visit to Reading University. They have been blitzing Ditch Dirty Development and Redress Fashion at the start of this year but are turning their sights to Go Green as their university has a long way to go. They dropped 20 places since last Green League and have just got a very low 2:2. Boo!
Their environmental policy existed but covered hardly any of the areas it should have so that was going to be a real target for the campaign.
Reading Uni has a staff environmental committee but they have been twiddling their thumbs so P&P president Emily was planning to meet them to make an undeniably strong case for a good environmental policy. We discussed the economic, ecological and PR reasons for Going Green, many of which can be found in the Going Green Report so hopefully the committee will now realise the error of their ways.
Then next on the campaigning list is trying to get a Students’ Union Motion supporting Go Green through their students union. This can get you extra clout when lobbying your VC, but also can get you funding for going to Shared Planet, and union resources for advertising. If your group hasn’t done it already, then do it now!
Wednesday 22 October
Aberdeen wave their hands uncontrollably
On Wednesday I took a train to Aberdeen University to meet the beautifully named Shared Planet society. I ran through a facilitation workshop which went down a storm and finished up by discussing Go Green. Aberdeen has an environmental manager but strangely enough hasn’t done any environmental audits so it was hard to work out how it could be setting ambitious environmental targets.
At the moment Shared Planet society concentrates most of its efforts on a communal organic cafe they hold every Wednesday. It seemed really popular but it would be even more exciting if the people who came to the cafe could have their energy channelled into a campaign that would lead to some big changes in the university. They seemed excited by the idea of a Green League Award Ceremony but then again who isn’t? After the meeting we went back to my host Robin’s flat, where a bring-your-own-dish organic feast was prepared. It was hospitality at its finest!
Tuesday 21 October
Abertay People & Planet getting active
Day two of the Roadshow started by visiting Abertay University to give the grandly named Presidential Team an introduction to the Go Green campaign. The University didn’t give enough information to get on the 2008 Green League, so actually getting the University on the League seemed like a big priority. There was a long way to go and I was only meeting with the committee so planning for the year was a bit premature but Richard Hawting, Campaign Advocate for Go Green dropped by and was able to shared some of his experience at Dundee University.
Mr Hawting scribes ideas for the Go Green campaign.
Richard Hawting and his Dundee crew have been running the Go Green campaign for three years now and their efforts have been rewarded with some real progress. With the release of the 2007 Green League the campaign got a massive boost and the University realised they were losing money and reputation and forked over the money to employ a full time environmental manager.
That evening I went to the Dundee People & Planet meeting and the Environmental Manager came along and was very very keen to tell everyone all the great stuff the University was doing. From LPG vehicles, to waste audits to renewable energy some really big changes were happening on campus.
The Go Green demands had effectively been met so we brainstormed ideas for where to go next. The university has invited the Carbon Trust in to reduce Carbon emissions by 10% over 5 years and while this target isn’t piddling the University could be much more ambitious. If a university demonstrated that cuts of 50%, 80% or 100% are possible it would be a fantastic example for the whole of the public sector. Over the next year the Future of the Go Green campaign is going decided by students, so it was interesting to hear how students thought the campaign could be taken to the next level.
Coming from a university like Edinburgh College of Art to Dundee showed a seismic shift in what universities could do. All of the things that Dundee was doing were things the students could have run a separate campaign to achieve, but having pushed the University on the Go Green demands Richard Hawting and his gang have changed the university so that from now on it will continually improve.
Monday 20th October
After a beautiful train journey from London to Edinburgh my first stop on the Roadshow was to give the Edinburgh College of Art a Go Green workshop with Regional Rep Ben Miller. The group were completely new so I introduced them to the Go Green demands, why they are crucial in transforming a university and some success stories from other unis.
Then we got onto discussing what the Edinburgh College of Art was currently doing for the environment and it was quickly revealed that the university was in the dark ages. They hadn’t had any environmental audit and there were no staff employed to reduce the uni’s environmental impact. They did have an environmental policy but it had been on a shelf collecting dust since 1982! Back in 1982, some scientists were worried about Global Cooling so the policy may possibly have aimed to increase carbon emissions.
Zombies against climate change © Mark Marek
There was so much to change that the group enthusiastically dove headlong into planning a campaign launch. They hadn’t met with the Vice Chancellor yet so sending him a list of demands and arranging a meeting was essential. As well as this they planned a spectacular launch to get the student masses on board. Someone came up with the inspired idea of combining it with a big Halloween party by making it an “Environmental Nightmares” themed evening. So next Friday zombies killed from climate change and people mutated from nuclear waste will join various other enviro-monsters in the Student’s Association Bar to launch the Go Green campaign. Genius!
Esme brandishing a timeline for the Redress Fashion campaign.
After this workshop I was off to Edinburgh University for a workshop on campaign planning. Edinburgh have scored a respectable 2:1 in the 2008 Green League and have held a Stop Climate Chaos debate and a brilliant Green League Award Ceremony a few weeks ago, so they decided to plan for their Redress Fashion campaign. The People & Planet group has been facing some opposition from a small but vocal group of right wing students who accuse People & Planet of being a small but vocal group of “plucky hippies” so they worked on a plan to get a motion to their Student Association to ban Topshop advertising on campus to show that most of the student body were behind them.
See this ridiculous Edinburgh student newspaper article for a hilarious take on People & Planet.