The Green Impact Students’ Union (GISU) toolkit went live last month but it is not too late to sign up and take part in the programme.
GISU is a framework for union staff, officers and students to collaboratively address key issues to lead on embedding sustainability and social justice across campus, the curriculum, and wider society. This supports SUs to build impactful projects and campaigns around climate justice and equality, curriculum reform, health and wellbeing and much more.
Our online GISU toolkit breaks down sustainability into areas of influence with direct and manageable actions, providing guidance and additional resources for actions. Unions can use it to plan their projects and campaigns, record their progress and upload evidence – developing awareness of their own potential to drive further change.
Students' Unions tell us that they take part for a range of reasons; from helping to communicate to students what they are doing on sustainability, to helping embed sustainability into strategic plans, to helping realise what can be done to improve sustainability in their SU.
Our range of support available for GISU participants includes:
· Online resource bank - including guidance documents, templates, case studies, webinars recordings and tools to monitor and evaluate your sustainability work.
· Webinars - We deliver webinars to welcome & introduce you to the programme, to help keep you on track and we coordinate webinars on a range of themes to facilitate idea sharing and inspire action. This autumn we will be hosting a webinar showcasing sustainable food projects.
· Peer to Peer – We have a great network of sustainability contacts, help partner SUs and support or facilitate online forum calls. There are various online platforms to join in discussions, share ideas or ask questions.
· Phone calls, mid-way – Early in 2022 will offer calls for all participating SUs to check-in with your progress, offer supportand to gather your feedback.
· Email – we run a monthly SOS-UK newsletter, housing updates for SUs, as well as other sustainability articles, sign up for our newsletter here. We will send specific updates on GISU to all SU contacts listed in the sign-up form.
· Ad hoc support – if you have queries at any point throughout the year or would like to suggest an idea for a future webinar, case study or news piece, please get in touch by emailing us. We often share examples of best practice with SUs when they get in contact with questions.
· Training and networking – if you’d like more tailored on-site or remote training, you can request to purchase this when signing up for GISU or get in contact with us. We will host a joint skills and networking day on 2nd December 2021 for our GISU contacts at an additional cost.
· Learning and development opportunities – SUs participating in GISU will receive a 10% reduction in price to SOS-UK’s Learning Academy offerings.
Dates for your diary:
• Intro to GISU welcome webinar: 14th October2021, 11am
• Annual sustainability survey: 25th October –14th November 2021
• Sustainable food webinar: TBC
• Student Sustainability Summit: 21st-22nd November 2021
• GISU contacts virtual skills & networking day: 2nd December 2021, 10am-4pm
• GISU midway ‘check-in’ calls: w/c 7th February 2022
• National SDG teach in: 21st – 27th February 2022
• Progress and action planning webinar: 2nd March 2022, 11am
• Submission deadline: Tuesday 3rd May 2022, 5pm
• Audits: June 2022
• Awards confirmed: July 2022
“GISU is an enabler for success which is in our strategy developed from student feedback.” – Lead SU contact, 2020
If you have any other queries or would like to talk to anyone from the team for more information, do not hesitate to get incontact via gisu@sos-uk.org. You can also view SOS-UK’s full offering for SU’s here.