OsloMet and Act Sustainable at Chalmers University of Technology and University of Gothenburg establish collaboration thanks to SDSN Northern Europe

After having connected via SDSN Northern Europe, OsloMet and Act Sustainable have decided to collaborate and run their sustainability weeks at the same time. The 16-20 November will offer a wide range of sustainability topics at all three universities.

SDSN Northern Europe aims to increase collaboration amongst members. One example of a current collaboration is between Act Sustainable, the sustainability week at the University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology (Chalmers), and the Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet). Both organising teams will share experiences and two of the events from Act Sustainable will be streamed live to participants at OsloMet. This is the story of how the collaboration started. One particular virus played a vital part.

For the third year in a row, the University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology join forces and arrange a full sustainability week for their researchers, teachers, staff and students. Due to the Corona pandemic, Act Sustainable is run digitally for the first time. This is of course a challenge but also offers completely new possibilities. Project manager Karin Bylund from the Gothenburg Centre for Sustainable Development is very positive about the conversion from a physical to a digital event.

– We can increase our capacity and have more people attending – something I am really happy about. This is the first time we go online like this so it will be something completely new for me to do as well, says Karin.

OsloMet is organising its first sustainability week this year and Elin Wyller is coordinating the event. She saw a tip about Act Sustainable that Karin posted at the SDSN Northern Europe communication platform Mobilize and got an idea. OsloMet was just in the starting blocks of its planning. Maybe it would be possible to collaborate? She contacted Karin who immediately seized on the idea.

“We always want to collaborate with relevant partners.

– We always want to collaborate with relevant partners. We all strive for the same thing, so we naturally benefit from more people joining our mission. It is also inspiring for us to connect with similar initiatives and to see how they structure their work and what topics they address, says Karin.

One problem was that OsloMet had planned to run their sustainability week a bit earlier than the dates for Act Sustainable. Elin Wyller talked to the working committee for the OsloMet sustainability week and they proposed moving it to the same period as Act Sustainable. This would make it possible to collaborate.

“We changed our planning to be able to align the two events.

– Karin joined one of our meetings and we soon decided to go ahead and collaborate. We changed our planning to be able to align the two events, says Elin.

But what advantages did OsloMet see that made them choose to run their sustainability week at the same time as Act Sustainable?

– We saw three main advantages. The first is that OsloMet could benefit from the Act Sustainable team’s experiences from making three previous events, both practically and in terms of content. Secondly, we could broaden our program and thirdly, if sustainability is communicated from OsloMet, the University of Gothenburg and Chalmers at the same time, it becomes top of the agenda.

Two of the events from Act Sustainable will be streamed live to participants at Oslo Met. These are ‘Citizen Science and Biodiversity’ on Tuesday, November 17th, and Keynote lecture by Emma Frans on Thursday, November 19th.

– Our main target group for this first sustainability week is students, although researchers and employees are of course welcome to attend, says Elin. We hope to create even more awareness and commitment among our students. The theme for this first sustainability week comes from the students themselves. Together we want to inspire our students with more knowledge about sustainability by extracting diverse topics from this somewhat vague concept. We want to make sustainability more understandable by linking the themes this year to the students’ everyday lives: food, clothing, construction, energy, climate and environment. At the same time, we want to link students more closely to existing research work at OsloMet. We will, for example, present three ongoing research projects at our university where the researchers want to involve students.

 

FACTS

Oslo Metropolitan University is a member of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) Northern Europe, which is hosted by Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg. OsloMet is organising its first sustainability week this year.

Act Sustainable is the sustainability week of both Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg. It is organised by the Gothenburg Centre for Sustainable Development. This year’s version is the third year in a row with a full week program. However, the history goes back 15 years when the first sustainability day was organized at the University of Gothenburg. Act Sustainable target students as well as researchers and teachers, and other staff members and offers this year a research conference as part of the program.

Read more about Act Sustainable here.

Read more about the OsloMet sustainability week here [In Norwegian].