What's the Green Office?
What is a Green Office?
The Green Office is a sustainable development platform run by and for the ULiège community. It informs, connects and supports students in the development of concrete projects.
To each member of the ULiège community who wishes to put his or her talent, creativity and a little/many time at the service of actions and projects to improve the sustainability of our university.
You want to join us, but don't know how to get involved? Find out here: How to get involved with the ULiège Green Office?
The purpose of the Green Office is to massively mobilize students and staff of the university to accelerate the installation of a culture of sustainability on all our campuses. It responds to the urgency of making a strong transition in our activities to face the systemic crisis.
Through the development of this new culture, two major leverage effects are sought:
- each member of the university becomes a citizen of sustainability and
- each current profession at the university and each future profession of our students becomes a professional mission for sustainability.
At its creation in 2020, 5 missions were assigned to the Green Office :
- To inform and raise awareness of the ULiège community on sustainable development and its issues, including theUnited Nations 2030 Global Agenda with its 17 sustainable development goals,
- Promote and disseminate good practices within the university,
- Create a community committed to sustainable development,
- Setting up field projects with experts (teachers and researchers in particular),
- Working with sustainable development networks and other Belgian and European Green Offices.
To fulfill its missions, the ULiège Green Office has set a series of objectives, including
- To create a central place for students who wish to get involved in sustainable development at the university.
- To provide training on sustainable development, theUnited Nations 2030 Global Agenda and its challenges at our university.
- Facilitate the realization of ideas and initiatives to realize sustainable development projects with the collaboration of our experts.
- Strengthen the capacity of students who wish to get involved in sustainable development by giving them the opportunity to learn about project management and to exchange with students from other Green Offices.
- Valuing the work of students by highlighting to the ULiège community their contribution to the evolution of sustainability at their university.
The Green Office's activities are diverse but all have the same objective: to educate and support the ULiège community towards a more sustainable lifestyle.
The Green Office team is composed of motivated students from different faculties. These students are involved in the GO as Greener (volunteers) or as jobists (paid) for some.
They carry out various awareness and action activities on the University's campuses. These activities focus on the following themes:
- Sustainable food with the Court-Circuit team
- Waste reduction with the Zero Waste Team
- Access to water for all with the Water4All team
- Responsible digital with the GSM2Life team
- Alternative mobility with the Active Mobility team
The teams organize events on campus such as: a collection of old mobile phones, batteries, a garage sale, a local breakfast, trainings and workshops. They also create awareness tools (menu - resources) in order to better understand the issues involved in each of these themes and to support community members in their daily actions.
Find the achievements of each team via the links!
You want to join us?
Contact us by email at the following address: greenoffice@uliege.be
The Green Office offers a program of individual challenges to reduce one's impact on the environment and the climate by adopting new, more sustainable habits.
All these actions are available on a collaborative platform to which you have access by connecting via your ULiège email address.
Co-construction is a dynamic that the Green Office likes to develop. It aims at creating new tools, challenges, activities in collaboration with members of the ULiège community (students and staff) but also with organizations outside ULiège.
A few examples
- Realization of awareness projects, campus development and challenges in favor of biodiversity and our well-being with the students of theAnthropocene Biodiversity course(Prof. Sylvie Gobert)
- Creation of a decision tree on eco-responsible fish consumption with Oceanography students
If you have ideas and would like to implement them with the Green Office or if you would like to build a project on sustainability with your students in the framework of a course, contact us!
The commitment program developed at ULiège has received numerous awards and support since its creation in 2020. Following these recognitions, other institutions wanted to replicate this program on their own campus. This is when the replication project was born.
The replication project responds to the needs of the sustainability coordinators (few in number and overloaded) who have difficulties in creating didactic content and organizing activities. In addition, students are looking for support to act in favor of the environment and climate.
The objective is therefore to share all the tools and experiences developed at ULiège with other institutions that wish to do so in order to create a global community of campuses committed to sustainability.
15 partners in the Wallonia-Brussels Federation are already part of the adventure! We organize together twin challenge campaigns: these are activities on the same theme, at the same time, but on different campuses. This allows us to increase the impact of the activities and to create a buzz around these events.
A collaborative digital platform will soon be created to bring together all the partners and their communities around sustainable challenges and activities.
Discover the whole project here
You are a higher education institution and you are interested in this project? Contact us greenoffice@uliege.be !
The Green Office is committed to respecting the diversity of ideas and the path of each individual towards a life that is more respectful of humans and the planet. The team focuses on efficient time management for the realization of concrete projects with immediate visible and substantive positive impacts on the evolution of our campus culture.
The main values shared by the team on a daily basis are:
Caring, Creativity, Respect for the contributions of each person, Collective improvement, Hope, Sharing for the Common Good
The reference framework chosen for sustainable development is the United Nations 2030 Global Agenda with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals. This is a compass for transforming human activities on a global scale with a view to safeguarding the biosphere and Humanity.
The recommendations made in the awareness-raising brochures and the proposals for action (challenges) are based on reports from international scientific platforms such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), as well as on the opinions of experts from the University of Liège.
Coordinator: Cécile Van de Weerdt - greenoffice@uliege.be
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