Eighth Annual Sustainability Awards recognize campus leaders

Two new award categories, dozens of nominees and a record crowd of about 180 people were on hand at the eighth annual Sustainability Awards to celebrate everything from providing clean drinking water to a village in Nepal to reducing construction waste on campus.

The annual awards recognize and celebrate the outstanding contributions and cooperative efforts of students, faculty and staff in advancing our institutional commitment to excellence and leadership in sustainability.

Nominees are evaluated on a wide range of criteria including commitment, peer engagement, impact, complexity, innovation and collaboration. How projects are building student core-competencies for leadership in sustainability through experiential learning and how research or research initiatives are engaging local and/or global communities to find innovative solutions to grand challenges are also evaluated. 

"This is a wonderful event," said President Elizabeth Cannon at the awards lunch. "I always leave these awards so inspired by the campus community's energy, creativity and passion for sustainability."

"This past year held many achievements in sustainability," said Cannon, before announcing the award winners in six categories. The university launched its Institutional Sustainability Strategy, received Fair Trade Campus designation – the first given to a post-secondary institution in Alberta – and the Sustainability Resource Centre has hosted over 80 events, along with many other academic and operational new and ongoing initiatives.

New categories recognize experiential learning on campus and in the community

This year's awards introduced two new categories: Campus as a Learning Laboratory and Community as a Learning Partner to reflect the Institutional Sustainability Strategy and its emphasis on helping students develop leadership skills for sustainability through project-based learning by working on challenges both on campus and in the community. By blending classroom theory with problem-based experiential learning opportunities, students are equipped to handle real world problems and can leverage research expertise to assist communities locally and globally.

This year's award recipients are:

Sustainability in the Built Environment Course Project – Campus as Learning Laboratory Award
Led by Caroline Hachem-Vermette in the Faculty of Environmental Design, this course project engaged architecture and design students in the process of assessing the sustainability of our campus buildings.

Small Scale Hydro for Rural Health in Nepal – Community as a Learning Partner Award
Using a Grand Challenges Canada grant, Schulich researchers Ed Nowicki and David Wood, helped developed a hydroelectric system for providing clean drinking water to a village in Nepal. Extending their knowledge to build capacity, Nowicki and Wood are using experiences gained in Nepal to deliver coursework that develops critical thinking by encouraging students to approach sustainability in a systems context.

Campus Community Kitchen Coordinators – Student Leadership Award
Students Marissa Bennet, Vivian Duong, Julia Weaver and Megan Williams are bringing students and staff together to learn about healthy eating, sustainable food practices and food security through free events that build cooking skills using healthy, local ingredients, and simple and inexpensive recipes.

Community Garden Club – Student Club Leadership Award
The Community Garden Club models and promotes sustainable agricultural practices. From encouraging the campus community to use locally grown food without the need for pesticides and herbicides, to enabling others to grow their own food.

Joule Bergerson, Schulich School of Engineering – Teaching Leadership Award
The Teaching Leadership Award went to Joule Bergerson, assistant professor in the Schulich School of Engineering, who teaches a Life Cycle Assessment course where students dig deeper into the impacts that a process, technology, or industry has on the environment, as well as on society and the economy.

Construction Waste Diversion Program – Staff Leadership Award
Led by the Project Management Office in Facilities Development, the program takes an integrated approach to managing the 3,000 tonnes of construction waste produced on average each year. Through recycling and reuse the program and has diverted over 80 per cent of construction waste from landfill.

For more information about the sustainability awards, visit ucalgary.ca/sustainability/awards.