5 Lessons I Learned from Starting a Sustainability Program

In addition to my teaching responsibilities at Effat University, I was given the opportunity to develop and lead a sustainability program for the school - and I will be sharing my experiences (both good and bad) here. Feel free to follow along as I update everyone on the program and please, please, please feel free to provide any comments, suggestions, criticisms, etc.

This first post looks back on my first year as a full-time teacher and part-time sustainability coordinator, the trials and tribulations, and the lessons I learned.

When I was first given the go-ahead to tackle this role, I was lost to say the least. I had ideas on where and how to begin, but had trouble moving forward with them. I have a pretty solid environmental science background and I understand sustainability principles pretty darn well. But looking back - I'll be doing that a lot this post - that simply wasn't enough. In fact, it really only helped a little bit. I quickly realized I had a lot of learning to do.

I also had a lot of questions, with the most obvious being: How does one go about improving the social, economic, and environmental performance of a university? And less obvious questions like: Should we report? What should be included in the report? What aspects of sustainability should we focus on? Has the university attempted anything like this before? Who should be involved? How will it be managed? How do I institutionalize it?

While attempting to find answers to these and many other questions, I got many things wrong. But I did get one thing right: I knew that without leadership support and commitment to the cause, the chance of the sustainability effort being a success and leading to positive change was zero.

So I contacted our President and set up a meeting. I went into the meeting with an explanation of what sustainability is, how it would benefit us, and the issues I wanted to tackle, but that was not nearly enough. That first meeting was also our last one for the year.

It has been a slow-go, with more downs than ups. The downs included waning leadership support, low participation from the community, and an environmental performance assessment that flopped - all of which were my fault. I can only attribute so much of that failure to the fact that I spent most of my time teaching. Rather, it had more to do with the steep learning curve I went through and not having a clear path forward.

The good news now is that I'm turning a corner and beginning to understand exactly what steps I need to take. As I go through this period of enlightenment, I thought I would share with you 5 lessons I learned from this past year as a part-time sustainability coordinator:

1) We were already "doing" sustainability. The university naturally wants to reduce costs, improve processes, and conserve scarce or expensive resources. How do you do that? By becoming more efficient with the resource inputs (energy, water, food, operational materials, etc.). For example, 90% of our gray water from campus buildings is used for irrigation. There were also plenty of people already interested and/or committed to these types of initiatives.

2) A formal report isn't necessary - at least not right away. A GRI-compliant report is great for understanding your impacts, communicating those impacts to stakeholders, and recognition and promotion of your efforts, but it isn't mandatory. If you really want to report, keep it simple at first and don't be afraid to report on the not-so-good stuff as well. Perhaps start by posting your commitment to sustainability and a few key pieces of data on your organization's website.

3) Communicate better with leadership. Tell them exactly what a sustainability program would entail, how it would benefit the organization and the bottom line, and have an overarching strategy before trying to sell it to them (more specific strategies can come later). Continue to keep leadership in the loop with what is happening with the program. I'm using monthly progress reports.

4) Do an assessment. Establish a benchmark. Once you know where you stand, then you can decide where you want to go and how to get there. Depending on the resources available, the assessment can be simple or more complicated. I suggest focusing on the sustainability aspects deemed most material and that will also have the most impact, like energy, water, and waste/recycling.

5) You can't do it by yourself. A huge part of leading sustainability efforts is educating the community, raising awareness, and building and managing relationships with stakeholders. Just like any other accomplishment in life, you can't do it by yourself. Embed it in the culture.

Peter Graf, Chief Sustainability Officer at SAP, learned some similar lessons.

I hope this helps!