Green Impact Students’ Unions (GISU) is our flagship sustainability support package and awards programme for the student movement. It’s designed to help unions run effective projects and campaigns, using our power as the student movement to create lasting change.
Although it’s called ‘Green Impact’ it’s not just about planting trees or getting your recycling in order. Many Green Impact students’ unions use the framework to build impactful projects and campaigns around climate justice and equality, curriculum reform, health and wellbeing and much more. Joining GISU means joining our network. We provide opportunities to partner with other unions, hold networking events and share good practice through resources and case studies. Our vision is that students graduate from further and higher education equipped to deal with the global challenges we face, and we believe students’ unions play a key role in helping students gain the skills, knowledge and experience needed to make this happen. We created the Green Impact toolkit as a framework for union staff, officers and students to collaboratively address key issues to lead on embedding sustainability and social justice across campus, the curriculum, and wider society.
Green Impact Students’ Unions (GISU) works on an annual cycle. Launching each autumn, unions try to implement change throughout the academic year, submitting work in late spring, receiving an audit in early summer, then awards are announced in July.
Each participating union will be given access to the online toolkit which houses all the actions we’d like SUs to work on through for the year.
Over the months you will be making progress on campus and within your students’ union, setting up, embedding and delivering campaigns and initiatives. There are a number of ways you can receive support over this period:
