Sustainability Research Pod

Speakers: – Mary O’Connell, Head of Parks & Community, Bankside Open Spaces Trust

– Molly Gadenz, Green Hub Coordinator, Bankside Open Spaces Trust

– Laura MacMahon, Community Learning Officer, Royal Parks

– Iain Boutlon, Chair of Trustees, LEEF (London Environmental Educators Forum)

Gardening is not only good for the environment but evidence shows it can make a massive difference to your stress levels and improve well-being. In fact, doctors are even starting to prescribe gardening for mental health!

Biographies: Bankside Open Spaces Trust (BOST)is an environmental and volunteering charity withover 20 years of protecting, preserving and enhancing parks, gardens and other amenities in London’s SE1 and surrounding areas. The charity aims to improve people’s health and wellbeing by making where they live and work greener and more beautiful. Collaborating closely with local residents and businesses to champion green spaces. The award-winning open spaces each are unique, with their own atmosphere, identity and senseof place.

Mary O’Connell, Head of Parks and Community at BOST, is a trained Horticulturist with extensive experience in open space management. Mary will discuss the importance of open spaces for health and well-being and give advice on how you can get involved in gardening or green up your local area.

Molly Gadenz coordinates the Green Hub Programme at BOST, with wide-ranging skills in community engagement and supporting residents in setting up community gardens. The Green Hub programme supports residents, forming a network of gardeners, providing them with resources, connecting them with each other and teaching new skills, so that they can engage in gardening and growing activities in their local green spaces. Molly will give tips on how to engage your local community in a project and how to get your community gardening project off the ground. Visit: www.bost.org.uk

The Royal Parks is a charity managing London’s eight historic Royal Parks across 5,000 acres with 77 million visits every year. Laura McMahon is the Community Learning Officer for The Royal Parks and coordinates a long-running programme of activities designed to enable visitors to see the parks in new ways. This includes walking tours and workshops open to all; and in-depth work with London’s underserved community groups who face challenges in accessing the parks. Laura is trained in Social and Therapeutic Horticulture and Organic Horticulture and has almost a decade of experience setting up community gardens and teaching people how to grow their own food.

Laura will present the community programme she delivers in the central Royal Parks and highlight specific projects she delivers that engage local underserved communities with nature to improve their wellbeing.Visit: www.royalparks.org.uk

We’ll also be joined by Iain Boulton, Chair of Trustees for LEEF. Iain is a long-term LEEF member, and parks office for Lambeth council, and will provide a contrasting view of green space from a public and local authority perspective. Iain is also known as the Bat Man as he often runs highly engaging bat walks in various green spaces in London. Visit: www.leef.org.uk

Session lead: Jaya Gajpara, Course Director, Education for Sustainability, LSBU.

“The word learning undoubtedly denotes change of some kind.” (Bateson, 1972, Steps to an Ecology of Mind.) What personal learning experience would change your consumer behaviour and improve your well-being? Join this wide-ranging discussion to explore the impact of education for sustainability in relation to consumption and well-being.

Speakers: – Jaya Gajpara, Course Director for Education for Sustainability, LSBU

– Rolf Jucker, author of blog ‘Sustainability Writings’ and the book ‘Can We Cope with the Complexity of Reality?

– Paul Maiteny, Ecologist & Psychotherapist plus Lecturer in Education for Sustainability, LSBU

Session lead: Dr Glen Strachan, Education for Sustainability Programme, School of Law & Social Sciences, LSBU

School: Law and Social Sciences.

This session will focus on how embedding sustainability across LSBU has the potential to bring about wellbeing for the communities on and around campus. The session will include Research, Enterprise & Innovation (REI) at LSBU together with some REI student ambassadors in order to highlight the importance of equipping LSBU students with sustainability competencies that would increase their employability and wellbeing.

Session Lead: Alex Misfud, Responsible Futures Project Manager, LSBU.

Richard Duke, Director of Strategy and Planning, LSBU, and Duncan Ross, Chief Data Officer, Times Higher Education Supplement.

The session will focus on what the UN Sustainable Development Goals are, and how the LSBU Group has integrated them in its 2025 Group Strategy

Biographies: Richard is an experienced HE leader, holding strategy, planning and finance roles in UK and Australian Universities for over 10 years. As Director of Strategy & Planning at LSBU, he has led on strategy development, the use of insight to inform decision making and performance measurement.

Duncan Ross has been a data miner since themid-1990s. As director of data and analytics at THE,he oversees a team that generates university rankings and related data products. Prior to this, he led Teradata’s data science team in Europe and Asia, where he was responsible for developing analytical solutions across a number of industries, including warranty and root-cause analysis in manufacturing and social network analysis in telecommunications.Visit: www.timeshighereducation.com.

The session will cover the latest research by the speaker and her colleagues on exploring a framework for Extinction Governance. This framework seeks to integrate species extinction prevention and biodiversity protection into the heart of governance and accountability. The discussion will also cover engagement by institutional investors on extinction prevention and biodiversity protection.

Biography: Jill is an academic currently holding a Chair in Financial Management at Sheffield University Management School and a Visiting Professorship at Wits University in South Africa. Her research covers corporate governance, extinction accounting, extinction governance and responsible investment. Jill is also an author and illustrates her books too!

How has the fashion world changed in 2020 and what are the next steps for the each one of us to take? Join us in conversation with some of the leading fashion sustainability experts. We will be diving deep into a number of subjects & understanding how brands can authentically sustain an authentic commitment to sustainability.

Speakers: – Aja Barber– Paola Masperi, Mayamiko– Amanda Johnston, The Sustainable Angle

Biographies: Aja Barber is a writer, personal stylist and style consultant living in South East London. Her work focuses on sustainability, ethics, intersectional feminism, racism and all the ways systems of power effectour buying habits. She can be found over at her Instagram @ajabarber, microblogging daily.Visit: www.patreon.com/AjaBarber

Paola Masperi. Founder of award winning fashion brand Mayamiko. Mayamiko is a responsible womenswear and lifestyle brand, created by women who are at the heart of social enterprise, with ethics and sustainability at its core. Visit: www.mayamiko.com

Amanda Johnston is curator and consultant atThe Sustainable Angle, having curated the sustainable textiles collection and Future Fabrics Expo since its inception. She has a background in design consultancy and education, and has co-authored two books:Fabric For Fashion, and Fabric.Visit: thesustainableangle.org

For Fashion The Swatch Book (both published 2010; 2nd edition 2014). Amanda teaches at the London College of Fashion, and regularly runs sustainable materials workshops, delivering presentations and seminars internationally, both at industry events and in educational forums. Amanda has a degree in Fashion Design from Kingston University.

Session lead: Ronke Fashola, Course Director, Fashion Promotion and Marketing, and Fashion Buying and Merchandising, LSBU.

School: Arts and Creative Industries.

Initial findings from a UK wide study (specifically a content analysis) of module descriptors from all universities in the UK with business and management undergrad programs, identifying how/if sustainability is embedded to descriptors.

Session leads: Grace O’Rourke, Lecturer in Marketing, LSBU and Barbara Czarnecka, Senior Lecturer in Marketing, LSBU.

School: Business.

As a sector known for its constantly changing trends, high turnover of goods and large impact on the environment, it’s clear that retail needsa drastic reboot. In response, StudioXAG have launched an initiative designed to realign their operations and begin to rethink the traditional retail display model.

Biography: StudioXAG are an London andAmsterdam based creative agency which specialisein show-stopping, temporary retail installations for brands including adidas, Christian Louboutin andLiberty. Join Gemma as she introduces a numberof creative approaches that the studio are usingto make incremental, but impactful changes tohow they work and the projects they deliver.Visit: https://studioxag.com. 

Socrates said a life unexamined is not worth living. I say an action unexamined is not worth taking. I aim to persuade people to a radical rethink of small, everyday actions that unwittingly cause harm to the planet - possibly themselves too. I hope to make them aware of habits and practices they cling to, and encourage them to understand they can change their ways with little inconvenience. I want to alert people to the role that marketing and advertising has in ‘helping’ us make those choices, and to examine the reality behind the hokum dreamt up in advertising agencies.

Biography: Dillie Keane is a performer and songwriter best known as one third of the satirical trio, Fascinating Aïda. Of late, she has taken to blogging about ecological issues having been a doom-mongering greenie for many decades. Her ecoblog, shityoudontneed.blog, aims to persuade people to change their planet-damaging habits in an entertaining way. Dillie has been awarded two doctorates for her contribution to the gaiety of nations. Well, the citations didn’t exactly say that, but she can’t think why else she might have got them.Visit: shityoudontneed.blog.

This session will examine our hands-on Bamboo Tensegrity Pavilion experience that we’ve carried out in partnership with Dr Andry Widyowijatnoko and colleagues from Institute Technology of Bandung in Indonesia as part of the Royal Academy of Engineering funded project.

Students from architecture, engineering and construction courses at LSBU joined forces to give a helping hand to build this pavilion in three days. This session will also discuss the opportunity and challenges in using bamboo within UK’s climate.

Session lead: Jennifer Hardi, Course Director, BSc Architectural Engineering and BSc Architectural Technology, School of Built Environment & Architecture, LSBU.