Dear friends and supporters,

Here is a quick reminder of our next open meeting tomorrow, and a news flash about new resources available on our website and YouTube channel.

We hope it sounds interesting and motivates you to get involved in any way.

Details for upcoming open meeting tomorrow
Date: 25 May, Thursday
Time: 5-6.30pm
Place: Pool Seminar Room F20, Hicks Building.

Open meeting agenda - May 2017:

• Welcome and introduce any newcomers
• Share and discuss any local and international environmental news with a clear focus on the positives
• Please bring any upcoming events that you want to share with the network
• Our project coordinators will then update us on ongoing projects in a brief 2min fashion
  • ‘Changing systems’ weekend workshop update (more below)
  • ‘Sustainability Forum’ update
  • Student society update
  • Film projects updates
  • Network coordination
  • New project ideas (bring yours!)
• Break down into working groups to move things forward
• Summary of working groups
• Next action summary

We hope many of you can make it albeit the fabulous weather… we will be moving to the pub (Uni Arms) afterwards!! ;)

Three new CNU resources available online

• Our ‘Changing Systems: Not just lightbulbs’ weekend workshop took place on 13/14 May and was a blast.
  • Have a look at our ‘first impressions’ event blog with loads of pictures available here.

• The recording of our event lecture ‘The brutal logic of climate change’ by Dr Aaron Thierry is finally available on our YouTube channel. It is already racking up hundreds of views! Thanks to our CNU student society president Yahya for filming, editing and uploading the full lecture.
  • Watch it on our CNU YouTube channel here.
• Our website has a new updated project category with a little selection of our previous projects.  It hopefully gives a brief flavour of what we have done and triggers more people to get involved.
  • Available in the left panel 'CNU Projects'.

We hope to see you tomorrow and please make use and share our resources.

Your lovely CNU coordinators

P.S: Here is a 'people picture' from our 'Changing Systems' weekend workshop. :)

Dear friends and supporters,

Last weekend (13-14 May 2017) we got one step closer to our vision of a carbon neutral university.

You ask how?

We organised a workshop we called ‘Changing Systems: Not just Lightbulbs’
and invited sustainability professionals and visionaries from universities to learn together how to make changes – System Changes.
 
What can be effective in building pathways to zero carbon in a university or college?  How can we engage people, sustain the momentum, produce results?  We focussed our conversations onto “What Works”, and we will produce a guide covering what emerged.  Our expert speakers provided stories of what, in their experience, really does work.

Who came together and how did the magic happen?

We invited people who have already set off on zero carbon journeys and asked them to tell us their stories of change.
 
And they came.

Our main speakers

Great stories from course participants and great atmosphere over the weekend

Besides our four main speakers, we had an excellent team of workshop participants from all over the country - SOAS University of London, the University of Warwick, Sheffield Hallam University and even international attendees from as far as Australia.  Several of them gave short TED-style talks on their own projects and experiences, bringing an additional depth of experience to the table.

The whole concept of the workshop was based on group work to identify what actually works – enabled through experienced facilitation by professional facilitator and CNU member Nick Nuttgens.

As a network, we aimed to increase human interaction and enable sustainable collaborations for the future.  Participants came together for an evening meal provided by the Real Junk Food Project team.  RJF catered for us over the whole weekend, keeping our food footprint low and our bellies happy.  A bit of warmth and many smiles are just as important as facts and we had a good mix of both…

What to expect next…

After a lively weekend we have loads of new ideas, motivation, and notes from our sessions, which we are going to pull together over the coming weeks.

We will make all resources available in the near future and we have also set ourselves a goal - to create a guide to ‘What Works’ that can help universities and other similar organisations in building zero carbon pathways.

Our aims:

• Short interview videos with our main speakers online;
• Full length lectures and summary blog posts online;
• The initial draft guide to ‘What Works’ will be opened up for review by participants. The goal is to publish by the end of June.

This whole event, and what we are now building from it, is the work of volunteers.  (No-one has been paid a penny, apart from expenses.)  We are enjoying ourselves as a team!  Please get in touch if you want to help make it happen.

Thank you.

Your CNU event coordinators
Adam Howard, Stephen Folkes, Dan Olner, Aaron Thierry