This week, the Green Impact blog interviews Simon Geller, lead for the CiCs team! This post is by Lee Morris, Lucia Bizos and Veronica Love, three students volunteering for Green Impact. If you or your team would like to contribute to the blog, email greenimpact@sheffield.ac.uk.
Simon Geller from the CiCs team is our interviewee for this week and he brings many interesting thoughts to the table. The CiCs team is a ten man team across a variety of buildings, known amongst the Green Impact teams for being exceptionally hard working as well as enthusiastic about what they do which shows through their four consecutive gold awards.
Firstly, Simon was asked how he built up his team and how he managed to create such a good chemistry between them. He had done reasonably well on his own and wanted to expand the project which took him quite some time. His team’s chemistry is attributed to their determination to do well and work hard whilst making sure they have plenty of fun and enjoy their work.
The team’s most important actions have been those with a university wide impact. An example of such an action is the cics teams work on university printers for both academic staff and students. An action this big consumes a lot of time and work the printing services are impressive and serve everyone’s purposes. Simon said it was mostly a matter of finding a way to do more with less so that the carbon footprint was slowly but surely being lowered. Whilst the big actions are important university wide, it is the smaller actions, however, which keep up the team morale. One example is the composting which gained a lot of attention and enthusiasm as the team could see what it was they were achieving.
The most difficult change to implement was not, however, one of the big actions, whilst they were tough to do it was actually getting people to feel a desire to contribute, from recycling properly to turning off lights when a person leaves a room, it is important to win the hearts and minds of the people before enforcing massive changes on their lifestyles.
The CiCs team! From left to right: Gary Bollington, Simon Geller, Julie Bradley, Janine Barraclough, Andy Horne, Alison Lougheed, Jenny Allsop, Paul Thacker.
Particular interest from the team came in the form of a vegetable patch. Not only were they producing their own vegetables, at the annual BBQ they could serve up their own produce, always a bonus!
Simon advises any new team or any team that is struggling to just start small. It is the little actions which help to make a big difference and soon everyone will be winning gold! The CiCs team’s new exciting project this year is tracking travel requests to make sure that the most efficient mode of transport is being taken!
Thank you for reading,
Lee Morris, Lucia Bizos and Veronica Love.