INTERVIEW
Lobby for a
SUSTAINABLE UNIVERSITY Your topic is sustainability. What is the connection with The Lighthouse? Yes, I think The Lighthouse and the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) team are very much aligned. Because we are both involved in the core values of The Hague University of Applied Sciences, which are global citizenship, internationalization and network university. And we both have a very broad perspective on what the sustainability is. For example, I really liked that students were motivated to go and vote. I appreciated that, because it is also part of the sustainable society. In addition, you can encourage politicians to do something with sustainability.
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The main part of my job is lobbying. I have coffee with people to talk about sustainability and why it is important to the university. But also you have to try and convince them that sustainability doesn’t always cost a lot of money. It has to be a mind-set to make decisions on more than just economic reasoning. And that is something we still have to integrate here at THUAS. We are still not there; a lot of work has to be done because the university doesn’t really have sustainability in its policies yet. De Haagse Hogeschool heeft sinds kort een nieuwe visie: ‘Let’s Change for a better future’. Recently we have a new vision here at the University: ‘Let’s change for a better future’ so I feel there
We help lecturers to integrate sustainability into their curricula.
So I think we are very much aligned but we do different things. We are more internal consultants I would say, we help teachers implement sustainability in their curricular, but also facility managers to implement a more sustainable vision in their departments. The Lighthouse is more about general awareness around certain topics.
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is a momentum now to really integrate the mind-set that people already have into real policies and consequently into the practices in the next couple of years. And at the end of the year we are opening a Let's Change Hub here at The Hague University of Applied Sciences. We want to create a place where people can come
Lonneke Roza Member CSR team
together and work on sustainability issues, even with external parties. If you want to change something here, you have to be involved in the change. There are quite a few events coming up. What would be an effective way to attract more attention? II feel The Lighthouse and CSR team should organise things that make a connection with the teachers, for example the National Sustainability Day, which we organise annually. For that special day, we work together with some lecturers who have included sustainability in their curriculum. And other lecturers will encourage their students to take a look. We work together with around 4-5 teachers from Climate & Management and International Communication Management and 200 first-year students. All these students contribute in some way to another to this event and to create awareness of the importance of sustainability in our university. It is amazing that you are bringing innovation to our university and creating a commitment in people. Everyone can be that person, I am a CSR manager here, but you can do it in any profession, like Annelies for example, programme manager of The Lighthouse. But also as a student, lecturer or a staff member. Annelies and I are people who are not easily put into a box. We
