Student action
Live Smart
Live Smart is our student-led engagement programme that delivers transformative experiences and practical opportunities in sustainability, building skills for positive change. Run in partnership with students, it helps students and staff to live in smarter ways that support wellbeing, save money and build community while protecting the planet.
Two students took paid specialist roles to shape and deliver Live Smart activities in collaboration with other University teams, community partners and students:
| Will Weaving (Geography) Live Smart Co-ordinator |
Nikki Rimell (Geography) Communications Officer |
Events and communications
Bike maintenance sessions
held at Park, FCH, Oxstalls and Pittville
24 blogs featuring 9 students
covered topics from nature to tech impacts
Our new sustainability toolkit
for sports teams and societies was created
New Park campus garden
A new growing space was established on Park Campus to support nature-based wellbeing activities, provide food and increase awareness of biodiversity. Students hosted regular veg growing sessions and special events including Christmas wreath-making, bug hotel building, bulb planting, bird feeder making, garden games and windowsill gardening.
The student team collaborated with 13 special guests to produce 4 episodes of ‘Live Smart Investigates’ – the podcast covered themes on a net zero future, social prescribing, greenwashing and sustainable tech. The Live Smart Co-ordinator also featured on a special sustainability episode of the University’s new ‘Behind the Uni’ podcast series, with a focus on biodiversity action and ways that students can influence change.
Native tree planting
In a self-initiated project, Will Weaving organised a native tree planting event to improve biodiversity on campus. 105 native trees donated by the Woodland Trust were planted across our Oxstalls and Park campuses, assisted by a group of student volunteers and with expert advice and support from Ed Moulding in our Estates team.
Will was the winner of the Student Union ‘Green Gnome’ for sustainability excellence in their annual student awards for the way he involved staff and students in this biodiversity action initiative on campus.
Student feedback
Student interest and perception of action from the University is gauged via the skills survey run by Students Organising for Sustainability UK. Responses to 3 headline questions for UoG are below, with the national comparison (last year’s data is in brackets).
University of Gloucestershire results
National results across UK universities
Responses
2021-2022
192 (471)
8,500 (8,000)
“universities should actively promote sustainability”
88% (91%)
88% (91%)
“sustainability should be integrated into all courses”
80% (85%)
79% (84%)
“my university takes action to limit negative impacts”
79% (78%)
71% (74%)
Reporting on the UN Global Goals
This report meets our annual reporting commitments on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as an institutional signatory to the tertiary sector SDG Accord.
Throughout this annual report, we record how the actions and results shown in this report contribute to the delivery of the UN SDGs. The actions on this page contribute to the specific goals marked below. For more information click here.
