Highly Commended awards for Estates staff

Emily Mason - Highly Commended in the Emerging Talent Award category

Emily Mason, Environmental Sustainability Assistant, received a Highly Commended award in the Emerging Talent Award category, for her project, Futureproof. It uses the UN Sustainable Development Goals as a framework for staff and students from across the University to assess the impact of their activities and create bespoke, targeted action plans to improve.

By developing Futureproof, Emily has delivered something with far wider-reaching impacts than we had ever envisaged. This approach represents a significant change for the better as Universities are extremely diverse and are not suited to a one-size-fits-all approach.

Emily joined the Estates Department in January 2017 as Environmental Sustainability Assistant and was originally contracted to work until November 2017. Her remit was to design and roll out a University-wide behaviour change project to replace the NUS Green Impact scheme which we had run for a number of years and had grown stale.

Having come from a similar role at the University of Greenwich, Emily was able to hit the ground running and make significant progress within weeks of commencing her role. She gave herself the ambitious target of pushing the University beyond traditional environmental behaviours into considering Sustainability in a more holistic way.

One of Emily's particular strengths is her ability to deliver engaging, interactive sessions to a wide range of audiences. She has built up a large network of Sustainability Champions from across the University and delivers regular training sessions on a range of environmental and wider sustainability topics. These sessions have received excellent feedback from participants and have contributed to much better understanding of the issues across the University.

Emily has proved herself so valuable to the work of the Estates department that her contract was made permanent in November 2017 and we look forward to having her working here for the long-term.