Envisioning Concordia's sustainable future

Our collective sustainable future is everyone’s business.

That’s why close to 100 people from across Concordia’s community — members of faculty, administration, staff and students, along with partners from external organizations — recently took part in a unique visioning process.

Held May 24 and 25 on the Loyola Campus, the goal of the gathering was to create a comprehensive inventory of sustainability initiatives and efforts happening across the university.

The two-day event is the first step in developing the soon-to-be-defined Sustainable Communities Partnership (SCP).

The SCP stems from an objective in the university’s Strategic Framework: Reaching Up, Reaching Out which emphasizes increasing Concordia’s community engagement and social responsibility over the next three years.

Sustainable Concordia’s annual waste audit is one of the many social responsibility initiatives at the university. The most recent audit found that Concordia sent 718 tonnes of waste to the landfill in 2008-09. | Photo by Concordia University

“In regards to sustainability, there are so many things happening through so many layers at this university,” says Marc Nisbet, SCP Coordinator. “We needed to take stock of everything that’s already going on.”

The goal of the visioning process was to connect people and encourage dialogue.says Linton Garner, Community Relations Coordinator for the Office of the Vice-President, Institutional Relations and Secretary-General.

“This wasn’t the beginning of the sustainability conversation; it was about taking the current conversation to a more productive place,” says Garner.

Sustainable Communities Partnership organizers hired graphic recorder Sara Heppner-Waldston to attend the two-day visioning process and create an illustrative record of the discussions. Heppner-Waldston’s images will be incorporated into the final report and the SCP’s future website. | Image courtesy of Sara Heppner-Waldston

For those with various responsibilities, a two-day commitment such as this might seem demanding. But for most participants, it was time well spent.  

“Some people who planned on leaving after first day decided to stay because the conversation was too important and the progress was so good,” says Garner. He identified the address from guest speaker Sue Levesque from York University’s Community Engagement Centre, among the gathering’s highlights.

As well, participants from the Department of Applied Human Sciences have decided to host a follow up conversation to see how they fit in with the SCP as it moves forward.

A group of staff members involved in separate offices across the university even created a mailing list to keep each other up to date with their own progress.

The recommendations that surfaced over the two-day meeting will be distilled into a report, which will be delivered to visioning process participants by mid-July.

The next consultation, expected this fall, will be opened up to the wider Concordia community and the community at large.

“This process created a space to have a critical look at what we are doing and why we’re doing it. What we heard is that people want to do more,” says Nisbet.

Hear more from some of the participants at the two-day gathering at Loyola, the first step toward Concordia's Sustainable Communities Partnership: