As I arrived to my first ever university lecture hall in the fall of 2007, I can’t say I was particularly concerned about my undergraduate experience. After working fulltime for a year to save up for tuition, I had spent the majority of my summer travelling across the Canada and down the pacific coast. My habit of conversing with students as fellow travellers landed me at a meeting of the Sustainable McGill Project (SMP). As I would learn, this group had worked with various professors and administrators to assess McGill’s sustainability performance using the widely acclaimed Campus Sustainability Assessment Framework tool. After completing the assessment, the students began to disseminate their research, ideas and recommendations throughout the University. Over time, it became increasingly apparent that without an internal mechanism to implement their recommendations, progress was going to be limited.

With some of the involved students graduating, institutional memory became a growing concern. The mandate of the group evolved as they hosted a series of community consultations, ultimately leading to a proposal for a “Sustainability Centre” at McGill. After organizing a faculty forum to communicate our vision in the spring of 2008, three coordinators of the group, including myself, were invited by the administration to sit on a steering committee over the summer to assist in the creation of the McGill Office of Sustainability. Our vision was to make the university culture, curriculum and operations more sustainable through cyclic assessment, short and long-term goal setting, and community engagement. Our role was integral for student support, as collaboration between students and administrators was rare at the time. This office now employs 3 full time staff, as well as 10 student internships which I help establish and coordinate, providing real world experience for these students.

Around the same time, I also helped coordinate the first ever Rethink Your Curriculum Challenge. Spearheaded by my friend and fellow SMP activist David Gray-Donald, the challenge asks students from all 55 departments to assess the knowledge they have been given in respect to sustainability in their field, the opportunities they have been given to apply that knowledge, and their ideas for what could and should be done to improve their education. In addition to small awards, the authors of the best two papers from each department were given a synthesis of the feedback from the other submissions, and encouraged work with professors to implement their ideas.

In 2009, I cofounded the McGill Food Systems Project (MFSP), a collaborative initiative between students, professors, and McGill Food and Dining Services. Fellow activist Dana Lahey and I built and led this multi-stakeholder group of senior administration, staff, faculty, and students to integrate sustainability into the university’s food procurement. Before the MFSP existed, no one knew where our campus’s food was coming from, let alone whether or not it was grown sustainably. Using student research, community engagement, and stakeholder collaboration, the MFSP works to maximize the environmental, social, and economic sustainability of our food system. As cofounders, we identified strategic levers to shift McGill’s institutional relationship with its food system toward sustainability, and led the community to act on those levers by: Co-designing and securing a fulltime sustainability purchasing position in McGill Food Services; Co-Creating and co-supervising 25 student research opportunities that inform McGill’s food procurement policy—e.g., sustainable seafood, produce and poultry standards; Connecting award-winning certifier Local Food Plus with McGill administration and key stakeholders in the provincial government, insuring their expansion into Quebec; Successfully designing and negotiating sustainability commitments within RFPs and contracts, directly influencing the operations of McGill’s corporate food service providers, including mandatory minimum local purchasing requirement (25-75% of total purchases, by season); Securing $26,000 in provincial grants to support applied student research in sustainable food systems.

Through an upper level independent study course, I authored a proposal in 2010 to renovate an existing building to LEED standards, and established an annual interdisciplinary field study semester focused on applied sustainability to be hosted in the building. While the retrofit process was not approved, the field study semester was given a significant seed funding to begin this year. A new faculty lecturer and six student interns were recently hired to lead the development of the field study curriculum.

However, my most notable achievement was the research, design, negotiation, democratic endorsement, and implementation of a $2.5 million fund for community-based sustainability projects at McGill. Historically, funding was the main barrier to many sustainability initiatives and after a conversation with the associate Vice Principle University Services in the spring of 2009, I spent the summer researching different funding models for sustainability initiatives at other universities, and interviewed the activists who designed them. Some universities had a fund dedicated solely to energy savings which consequently excluded much of the grassroots involvement of their communities. Others had smaller student-only levies, but faced difficulty maintaining institutional memory between generations of students. After much consultation, I coauthored a proposal for an unprecedented fund that would match contributions between students and the administration, and would be accessible to the entire community for projects which build a culture of sustainability on campus. I negotiated with and successfully lobbied the senior administration to establish, fund and staff the Sustainability Projects Fund, and commit to match the monies raised through student referendum. Unlike far-off granting agencies, our fund is designed to facilitate the effective and coherent planning, financing and implementation of projects to promote sustainable practices in our community. The intent is to fully fund or to provide seed capital for dynamic, innovative and interdisciplinary sustainability projects, thereby allowing such projects to be implemented more quickly and effectively than might otherwise have been possible.

Available to students, professors, staff, campus and community groups, the long term aspiration is for the SPF is to foster broad based involvement. The monies are delegated through a committee with equal representation from students and the administration. By sharing the responsibility of consensus-based decision making among all actors, the fund serves a model for communities and governments alike. Both the structure and process we designed for the fund were well researched and very intentional, but also unprecedented. As a result, envisioning, negotiating and actualizing this project over the past 18 months has been very challenging. With no precedent to draw from, the administration was hesitant about sharing this much responsibility with students, not to mention their anxiousness concerning the $25 million deficit that loomed over the university at the time. I turned down numerous suggestions to drop the matching component and allow students to raise and oversee an independent fund. On the other hand, many student leaders were initially concerned about the supposed apathy of the student body towards a fee, while others questioned the motives and trustworthiness of the administration. Believing that real change was possible, we also turned down the proposal to significantly decrease the student contributions to the fund.

Without sacrificing the authenticity of the original vision for a true partnership for sustainability, we were able to cater to interests of all of those involved. The biggest challenge was the incredibly short campaigning restriction of six days to inform and win over 20,000+ students, with only $200 budget and no electronic list serves allowed. Dedicating 60+ hours a week on top a full-time course load, I relied heavily on my ability to inspire all of the student associations through presentations at their councils, engage activists and volunteers to help the campaign with the promise of the funds potential, as well as organize social networking campaigns to encourage all students to take ownership of their ability to participate. I designed and led campaigns that built and empowered a 200+ volunteer team, with the student referendum garnering ~80% approval and the second highest voter turnout in our history. In the first 12 months alone we received 100 applications requesting $2.3 million, indicating a real depth of community support for this fund.

To date, the SPF has already financed 45 projects, allocating nearly $1.1 million back to the community. A few notable projects include a volunteer based, education-focused urban gardening project, which produces over 2000 pounds of produce each season for a bike-powered meals-on-wheels program for marginalized members of the local community; an industrial composter, which produces up to 200 tons of pre-consumer waste into a valuable resource each year; a student-run bike collective; a campus survey to assess the transportation habits of our community, to identify motivations and barriers to sustainable alternatives, and to inform policy decisions; real-time, building-specific energy dashboards and a website to engage occupants to reduce consumption and measure progress. As I graduate, I take comfort in knowing that many of these projects were designed to remain largely self-sustaining and relatively resilient in the face of organizational or social pressures, as no organization, community or social movement can be sustained if its continued success depends on the efforts of a few.