For a few years now, the only visible activity from the E&E Campaign has been its annual conference, so Dave and I were determined to make it a good one, with activity that continues well after the event. Key to that was some good solid debate, working with our partner organisations, and building networks. Personally, I think we succeeded on all fronts.

The venue was Harborne Hall in Birmingham, which is a lovely old house in some really nice grounds. Recommended, for sure! We had speakers and workshops from Friends Of The Earth, People & Planet and NUS Services Ltd.’s E&E Committee, focusing especially on the Sound Impact Awards.

As with all NUS Conferences, this was a democratic event, and so delegates from thirteen different CMs elected six students and officers to the E&E Campaign Committee – well done to Aaron, Charlotte, Hannah, Selina, Tim and Toby! Their details will all be going up in the Society & Citizenship Zone of the website soon.

E&E Conference, for the first time ever, passed six policy motions to provide a programme of work to the new Committee, on the following subjects:

• Goldsmith’s College’s “Lug-a-Mug” Campaign
• Fair Trade and the World Trade Organisation
• Opposing Nuclear Power
• Socially Responsible Investment
• People & Planet’s Go Green Campaign
• The Companies Reform Bill

All of the policy passed should be available on this website soon!

In line with our stated objective of ensuring that National Conference 2007 features at least one motion in the Society & Citizenship Zone dedicated to E&E issues, ideally with a number of amendment to it, we also used traditional NUS methods (i.e. post-it notes and flipchart paper) to discuss possible policy areas. The two most popular were food and energy, and so the Committee will be putting together formal model motions based on those discussions, and possibly some others, which we will publicise as soon as possible.

In the wake of Conference, we’ve also set up a JISCmail email list for people to talk to other E&E activists and officers in the student movement. If you’d like to join, you can either contact Dave or me directly, or send an email to listserv@jiscmail.ac.uk with nothing in the subject line and “SUBSCRIBE NUSENVIRONMENTANDETHICS yourname@yoursu.org” in the message body. It’s a simple and easy-to-use mailing list, much like RAWS or the Presidents’ list. I’d encourage you all to join up and get involved, whether you’re an E&E officer or just an interested party, as we’re keen to get as many people involved as possible.

Just a quick word on the Sound Impact Awards before I sign off. To set the scene, I’ll quote the NUSSL Newswire that went out about it:

A message from NUS Services and the NUS

The Sound Impact Awards is a highly exciting new environmental initiative that we have launched today.

The scheme seeks to encourage, reward and celebrate environmental best-practice in Students' Unions through an independent benchmarking process similar to Best Bar None.

The launch of an environmental accreditation scheme for Students' Unions is long overdue. Although the movement has a proud history of campaigning for social and environmental justice and corporate responsibility, many Unions have failed to get a grip on internal environmental best environmental practice, such as recycling and energy efficiency.

We are hopeful that the Sound Impact Awards will help change this, acting as both the catalyst and mechanism for greening participating Unions.

We encourage you to sign up today and make a difference.

Rather than a finger-wagging guilt exercise, the Awards instead make changing your Union’s culture fun and competitive. As an added bonus, NUS will be taking part in the Awards on the same terms as SUs, so you’ve got the chance to show us how much better you can do this stuff than we can.

And then, of course, once we know who the top ten best SUs in the country are for E&E best practice, we can all steal their ideas in an effort to get even better awards in the future *grin* Seriously, I encourage every Students’ Union and Area Organisation in NUS to sign up to the Sound Impact Awards. It’s a great way to make our ideals into reality, and there’ll be a glitzy dinner and award ceremony at the end.

E&E Conference this year was a real breath of fresh air. I met lots of really cool people (who you can see in the photos that will also be up on the website soon, courtesy of Claire Haslam from UcCA), got to witness some solid debates on E&E policy, and left feeling like the Campaign had some direction at last.

I’ll keep you updated on what comes out of the Committee and other activists. As I say, at the very least you’ll be seeing increased partnership between NUS’ E&E Committee, our NUSSL equivalents, and external organisations, as well as model motions for Conference, and a variety of outcomes from NUS, based on policy that got passed. I don’t mind going on record and saying that I’m optimistic about the year ahead!

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