The 2019/20 Green Impact toolkit is now live! As last year was the first time that all teams have completed projects a few tweaks have been made based on feedback from the teams and to iron out some wrinkles.
A brand new addition to this year’s Green Impact programme is Big Green Events. These will be university-wide, centrally organised and could be anything from litter picks to talks on how to live a more sustainable life. Everyone is welcome to attend these and encouraged to bring along anyone else who is interested. Teams will receive 3 points for each event that is attended by at least 1 team member and an extra 2 points if they bring someone along who is not currently involved with Green Impact. These scores will be added to your overall Projects score to determine your final award level. The programme of events will be continually developing so if you have any suggestions please send them to greenimpact@sheffield.ac.uk. If there isn’t time to include them this year then we will bear them in mind for next year.
Project Planning
To make sure that teams aren’t trying to rush to complete projects there is also an absolute deadline of 20th December to submit project plans. There is also a maximum of 4 projects per team so you can invest your time and make sure they are impactful and well evaluated, as well as not putting too much strain on yourselves. Teams should complete one project on an environmental theme to make sure that environmental issues are being tackled as well as social ones. Projects also need to contribute to one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. They cover a really broad range of issues and it should be really interesting to see where your efforts fit into the global picture. The plan template has also been adjusted to make it easier to decide how you are going to monitor the impact of your project. There are a selection of past case studies that you can use for guidance and inspiration when planning your own project. We have also included historical criteria from the old toolkit on the resource page if you want to use some of these as a basis for a project.
Project Scoring
Last year we had an amazing number of teams getting really high scores and so to differentiate between these a bit we have altered the points required to get gold and silver. The thresholds will now be all the essential actions plus 40 points for Bronze, 80 points for Silver and 120 points for Gold. These points can come from both the projects and attending the Big Green Events. The project scoring has also been adjusted slightly with the ‘replicability’ criteria removed and the points available for ‘legacy’ increased.
All the updated documents can be found on the project resources page. To make it more manageable for the auditors all evidence should be included within the case study not as separate files.
If you have any questions about the changes or anything else Green Impact related please contact greenimpact@sheffield.ac.uk.
Key Dates
Project Plan Deadline: 20th December 2019
Toolkit Submission Deadline: 6th March 2020
Audits: 1st April 2020