In April of this year, the Council of Sustainability (CoS) conducted a survey encompassing Middle School, Senior School students and Staff Members. Our aim was to gain a better understanding of the Kristin community's perspectives around sustainability at Kristin.
But to survey sustainability at Kristin we must first have an understanding of sustainability itself. Sustainability according to the University of Alberta means, “meeting our own needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Within this, we discuss the economy, people, and the environment. However, within this survey, we did look primarily at social and environmental sustainability, as these are the two main areas that CoS looks to improve.
Overall the survey had 104 participants all from different areas in the school, highlighting the unity and investment our school’s community has around sustainability at Kristin. The first two questions were directly related to the participants' experience of sustainability at Kristin. The first asked for a general rating of how sustainable Kristin was, and the second was how much knowledge they thought they had on sustainable activities within Kristin. The general rating was pretty high with an average rating of 3.48 (out of 5), and although the rating for knowledge on sustainability in Kristin is lower it is still decent at 3.15. Even so, one of the main takeaways from this survey is that awareness of sustainable activities is lower than it should be.
As a member of the CoS, I am privy to the wide range of activities and opportunities that have been achieved and are actively being done in line with social and environmental sustainability. But from reading and analysing this survey, I feel that many students and staff are unaware of the extent of things done small and big. Some aspects of the 5 pillars of enviroschools are definitely lacking in comparison to others but are still being actively worked on by students and staff alike. Also, many of the improvements suggested by the participants are already being carried out. One key action CoS is taking away from this is that the access to information on this topic needs to be improved. We hope to achieve this through our website and better networking by all those who are working to make Kristin a more sustainable place.
The second aspect of this survey was looking at perspective on how close we are to Enviroschool Green Gold (to learn more about Enviroschools please click here). At the beginning of 2022 Kristin hopes to take yet another step in our Enviroschool journey by achieving the GreenGold award, and to better see our strengths and areas for improvement, CoS decided a survey would be the best way of going about this. To survey this we asked participants to rate extracts from the GreenGold paragraph depending on the extent to which it reflects Kristin. Each of the five statements was then followed by two questions, one asking for the reasoning behind the rating and the second asking for any improvements they would like to see happen.
Kristin "is involved with our community, honouring the diversity of people within it." This statement was ranked highest overall by the participants at 3.89 (out of 5), which is 1.05 more than the lowest-ranked statement: At Kristin "Maori Perspectives are enriching our journey." This was beneficial to be able to identify which areas from the perspective of the general Kristin community needs the most and least improvement moving forward. And although there is some disparity between them they are both over 50% which show that overall Kristin is doing well across the board. Another takeaway from this survey is that waste reduction was the most common improvement suggested across the board
This survey was insightful, and although some of the areas of improvement and strengths identified by the participants reflected the ones CoS have, many new areas have been identified as well. From this, CoS hopes to make its existing projects more in line with the needs that this survey has identified, and also look at new initiatives that we hope will help limit the disparity between statements. We hope the outcome of this survey allows us to move closer to Green Gold and a more sustainable future.
An Infographic of the key findings is attached below, and the executive summary can be provided to members of the Kristin community by request for educational and planning purposes.
By Azaria Eddy
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