I am an Education for Sustainable Development Officer in the NTU Green Academy Team and I love my job! On a day to day basis you might find me either working with course teams to help them integrate sustainability within their teaching, developing some new teaching material, supporting the running of the Sustainability in Practice Certificate (an online module available to all students and staff at NTU) or co-ordinating any number of additional exiting sustainability related projects or events at the university.

Last year I was lucky enough to work on a project in collaboration with the Volunteering Team, the Environment Team and the TILT Education for Sustainable Futures group to create a series of Community and Estate case studies. In doing so we captured some information about many of the unique and innovative sustainability related projects happening at NTU and transformed these into teaching material.

This blog site is now intending to take this concept a step further. NTU is full to the brim with passionate, sustainability minded people. It feels like every other day I find out about another new or existing ‘Future Thinking’ project or initiative that is helping to create a more sustainable world. This can be anything from a piece of research, an event that’s happening or even a partnership with a local charity or small businesses.

With NTU’s recent commitment to embedding the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into the curriculum it seemed like the perfect opportunity to share and celebrate all of the ways in which staff and students alike are working towards each of these goals to create change in  the 5 critical areas of People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace and Partnership.

This blog aims to showcase and share knowledge about the many achievements of both staff and students across the schools and departments at NTU and also to encourage and inspire more people to be actively working towards a more sustainable future and also the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

When it comes to sustainability, every little really does help and no project is too big or too small to deserve recognition. Sustainability is something that is championed across so many levels at NTU , both strategic and operational, by both students and staff, both locally and globally. The aim of this blog site is to pull (or sew) together these pockets of good practice. We hope you enjoy both reading and writing the blog posts!

– This blog post was written by Jessica Willats, who is an Education for Sustainable Development Officer in the NTU Green Academy.

Want to write a blog post that’s featured on this site? Email us your ideas today at GreenAcademy@ntu.ac.uk!