It’s decided; this year’s Student Leadership Award goes to an outstanding student project in the Netherlands.

oikos & ISCN 

The Student Leadership Award is carried out thanks to the collaboration between oikos and the International Sustainable Campus Network ISCN. It rewards the best student-initiated practices in the realm of sustainability and has entered its third year of existence in its collaborative form, building on the prior success of the oikos Student Entrepreneurship Award. 

 

This year’s champion project 

This year's award goes to the Maastricht University Green Office, as the jury found that it 'promotes sustainability as a topic of active concern among students, staff and faculty, and advances a self-perpetuating process of organizational transition towards a greener campus’. The project began at the behest of a few resolute students in September 2010. Today the Green Office, with its interdisciplinary and intra-preneurial outlook, has achieved commendable milestones. The list of successful projects that students have already successfully implemented through the Green Office consists of: the first sustainability baseline analysis of Maastricht University, the new sustainability policy 2012-2014, business cases for a more energy efficient computer infrastructure and light system, as well as several conferences and networking events.

 

Now, it’s scaling up  

Having established an NGO ‘Green Office Europe’, the team plans to promote and create more student-driven Green Offices at European Universities. “The Green Office is a unique and very powerful project, in the sense that it provides practical sustainability education for the students engaged in the office, and creates a positive impact on the university sustainability efforts. Through Green Office Europe we want to bring this lighthouse project to more universities”, explain the four founders of Green Office Europe Arian Meyer, Ulrich Scharf, Valentin Tappeser and Felix Spira.

 

oikos contributes! 

The Green Office team has been already officially rewarded at the ISCN conference in Eugene, at the Unviersity of Ontario. Besides the international recognition, oikos will actively support further development of the Student Leadership Award winners during oikos Winter School – the coaching week for project developers and beginning social entrepreneurs, which takes place in November, in the Ruhr Area in Germany.

United front of students' sustainability activism 

We are delighted to see an emerging international student network growing stronger in its endeavor to promote sustainability on campuses worldwide and look forward to develop the synergies between oikos, The Green Office and the oikos Maastricht Chapter to bring about change in higher education institutions.

 

Pranav Gajjar, pranav.gajjar@dont-want-spam.oikos-international.org
oikos International Executive Board Member,
oikos coordinator of Student Leadership Award 2012,

Dawid Wroblewski, dawid.wroblewski@dont-want-spam.oikos-international.org
oikos International President