Sustainability Staff and Student Engagement

Our Environmental Sustainability Staff & Student Engagement Strategy sets the College’s approach to increasing engagement with and awareness of environmental sustainability in the RCA community. It seeks to bring together existing activities into one holistic strategy covering internal communications, community engagement and partnerships, academic engagement and staff development.

This Strategy was first approved by the Environmental Sustainability Committee in May 2024 and is reviewed every 12 months. The Environmental Sustainability Manager and the Senior Communications Manager are responsible for the Strategy. Read the highlights of the Strategy below.

The Royal College of Art uses a range of different metrics to measure progress in relation to staff and student engagement. These metrics vary between activities, and include: attendees to events, survey response, newsletter open rates and intranet clicks.

SustainLab is a society of the Royal College of Art Students’ Union. It is a collaborative and cross-disciplinary platform for all RCA students to engage with, in exploring what sustainability is and how it can be embedded as part of their creative practice. It is a forum for ideas to be investigated, challenged, and shared with the intention of facilitating experimentation and knowledge-building with our creative practices.

SustainLab organises talks, open-crits, workshops and conversations for students to develop their knowledge of sustainability and how to incorporate it into their creative processes. Some of these events are also open to the public.

It was founded in September 2017 by RCA students, with the intention of supporting and inspiring the work of fellow students who have an interest in sustainability.

SustainLab hosts regular exhibitions, showcasing the work of its members. The 2024 exhibition, 'Co-creating With Nature', explores environmentally conscious works of artists and designers who commit to sustainability through thinking about alternative systems and processes in their practice. In 2025, 'Ancestral Utopias' explored themes of ecological slow violence, ancestral knowledge, generational thinking, and long-term strategies for addressing the climate crisis.

The Green Futures Group is an informal cross-union collective, established in 2022 by RCA academic staff to gather information and swap ideas on environmental sustainability throughout the RCA community. In the face of the climate crisis, it has become imperative to make profound changes to how we conduct our working practices, and so the group welcomes input from everyone: students, academic staff, union representatives, facilities and administration staff, estates and campus operations managers, external contractors, technicians, members of the RCA Senior Management Team, and local organisations.

The group meets several times a term and is constantly collecting and passing on information, identifying problems, canvassing for solutions and connecting people working towards the same goal across the RCA community. Green Futures Group members are also part of the RCA’s Environmental Sustainability Advisory Group and members of the Environmental Sustainability Committee, working with the operations and communications teams on a coherent strategy that is inclusive and positively productive within the community.

There is also a rolling programme of Green Futures events and projects which promote awareness and good practice among students and staff, including technical and academic staff forums, a termly repair café run by student and staff volunteers and an annual Ecollegey! Festival, with workshops and stalls focussed on practical skills that support an equitable transition to a decarbonised and sustainable society.

The College provides funding for staff and student engagement activity. Students are invited to contact Environmental Sustainability Manager Megan Jones for information regarding funding for student-led projects.

Recent projects include a project to develop an app to reduce waste and encourage greener working practices among students, and developing a small dye garden.

An annual communications plan accompanies the engagement strategy, which is a live working document overseen by a communications working group that meets monthly. Highlights of activities which took place during 2024/25 are:

• Ecollegey! Festival
• Symposium on Sustainability
• SustainLab Exhibition
• Sustainability Staff Lunch & Learn sessions
• Repair Cafe
• Clothes Swaps
• Sustainability Lunch & Learn sessions for staff
• Anxiety to Agency workshop for students
• Local Biodiversity Tour
• CLIMAVORE x Jameel at the RCA Lunch
• Dr Bike pop-up workshop
• Cycle training