The launch of our Host Partnerships 2019-20

After 5 years of increasing levels of partnership engagement with the Responsible Futures programme, we are taking an exciting next step in our learning through the introduction of host partnerships.

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Responsible Futures supports institutions and students' unions working together in partnership to embed sustainability throughout all parts of the student learning experience (formal, informal and subliminal curriculum). Our programme has been designed as a set of 45 criteria which guide the actions of participating institutions, while providing a means to track and assess progress. Audit scores are based on how well institutions meet these criteria, and are kept confidential to ensure no 'ranking' or 'league table', but rather the encouragement of progress.

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Now that the programme has been successfully running for the past 5 years, we want to highlight key learnings through the introduction of Host Partnerships. These are accredited institutions who want to share their leadership and good practice, as well as their challenges and failures, in order to collaboratively support other ongoing and future partnerships.

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We are excited to be working this academic year with our first Host Partnerships who applied and were successfully awarded the status. The 2019/20 Host Partnership institutions are: Anglia Ruskin University and Students' Union, Keele University and Students' Union, and UWE Bristol and the SU at UWE.

Anglia Ruskin University and SU Partnership aim to share their learnings from the progress they've made over the past 5 years since sustainability was made a core part of their academic regulations. The regulation ensures that every course is addressing goal 4.7 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals on Education for Sustainable Development. Alongside this, they plan to host an event that will showcase some of the work they have been doing to support communities to take action on sustainability challenges at a city-wide level.

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UWE Bristol and the SU at UWE are focused on creating workshops facilitating different approaches to student engagement in HE, exploring the barriers to student participation in sustainability and social responsibility initiatives, and they aim to present this research at the next EAUC Conference. They also aim to undertake a review of the first five years of the Responsible Futures programme, in order to understand its impact on FHEIs and students' unions, in order to inform the next five years!

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Keele University and SU aim to share their strong approach to ESD, distributed leadership throughout all parts of University and Students' Union's operations, key in their governance structures and support for cultural change. They also will share their experiences of integrating major campus-wide sustainable infrastructure projects into research, education and external engagement, alongside workshops themed around 'failure', sharing stories on projects which have not gone to plan and how we can all learn from our own mistakes.

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We are excited to work alongside these three partnerships to support the continued growth of Responsible Futures in 2019-20 and beyond. To learn more about Responsible Futures please visit: https://sustainability.unioncloud.org/responsible-futures and to sign-up for the programme please visit: https://sustainability.unioncloud.org/our-work/take-part