Future17 at ASPIRE

Students from the University of Auckland's inaugural Future17 cohort joined forces with the newly established Sustainability Hub to deliver a sustainability-focused workshop for University staff at the ASPIRE conference 2023.

ASPIRE is the University of Auckland's annual professional staff conference, which provides opportunities for our colleagues to engage in talks and workshops that enable and support professional development and growth, encouraging lifelong learning. 

The students – Bella Belcher, Brooke Kingsbury and Maree Watson – had recently completed their Future17 projects, working virtually with teams of international peers to solve real-world sustainability challenges for a range of global partner organisations, while mentored by academics from participating universities. The ASPIRE workshop reflected the structure of the Future17 programme (albeit on a smaller scale), with the students taking on the role of mentors and guiding teams of staff members through their own mini-projects focused on the local sustainability issue of staff commuting.

An integral part of the Future17 course is an online module on the Design Thinking principles and their application in a sustainability context. The students took their staff teams through the steps of the Design Thinking process, relating them to specific modes of transport – with groups addressing driving, cycling and public transport. The student mentors then supported the staff teams in ideating ways to shift staff commuting patterns towards more sustainable options. 

"Commuting is a complex matter for individuals and our staff as a collective," says Gillian Lewis, Director of the Sustainability Hub. "Our student leaders did a fantastic job of sharing what they had learned about collaboratively approaching tricky sustainability questions. The workshop was an opportunity for staff to not only contribute to solving sustainability issues that directly affect them, but to also engage in lifelong learning."