Montreal’s Dawson College can now boast of being an internationally recognized institution when it comes to leadership in sustainability.
The college was given a gold-level accreditation by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education and scored the highest number of points for any diploma-granting college in the world at the gold level.
“We’re the first CEGEP in Quebec and the sixth college in Canada to be granted the gold recognition,” said Dawson College director general Richard Filion.
The move towards becoming more sustainable started in 2006.
“One of our teachers came in and told me about the fact that we should start looking at the sustainability in our own curriculum and so we started a first project that we called an action conservation,” Filion said.
He explained how the school committed itself to transforming education.
“It became quite obvious that the environmental crisis, the climatic crisis that we are in needs a bold educational undertaking in order to sensitize our young generation about the issues and rise up to the challenges that it creates.”
In 2017, the college opened an office of sustainable development and in 2018 pledged to become carbon neutral forever.
“We’re undertaking all kinds of activities to to offset our carbon footprint. And I think it’s a great feat,” Filion said.
In a news release, Chris Adam, Dawson’s sustainability coordinator, explained how sustainability is also about happiness.
“We are continuing to develop real-world projects that explicitly focus on building positive relationships with each other, other institutions and our natural environment. Hope abounds at Dawson and we are watching our community flourish,” he said.
Examples of sustainability projects at the college include the creation of rooftop gardens, planting trees on campus, as well as student-led initiatives to compost waste and recycle light fixtures.
Filion said promoting sustainability on campus has been a group effort.
“I would say it’s an institutional undertaking,” he said. “Student services are part of it. Academia is part of it. Human resources is part of it. Every sector of the college has been called on duty in order to integrate in our behaviors, in our activities, as much as possible, environmental awareness.”
Filion said the next step is to achieve platinum status — something only 10 institutions in the world have accomplished so far.
More importantly though, Filion said he hopes Dawson’s example will inspire other Quebec schools.
“We only hope that it will create a momentum, that other institution will follow our example,” he said. “We’re opening the way and we hope that others will follow.”