Community and voluntary impact

We want to be more than a university. We want to be part of a thriving sustainable city and community within the Living Coast UNESCO Biosphere. To do this, we want to have maximum community impact in all that we do.

We already support and encourage our students to volunteer through our Spirit of Sussex Award Scheme. From August 2021 we will increasingly identify and promote new opportunities for students to volunteer in the community on projects that support the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

We will also better record and showcase the vast amount of community outreach work that our academic staff undertake, such as the provision of talks, workshops, mentoring and support services and advice.

We will report on these achievements in our annual sustainability report that we will publish every autumn (with the first report published in November 2020). In order to do this effectively, we will ask all academic staff to report on how they have contributed to each of the 17 UN SDGs on an annual basis.

Despite many of our staff and students being extremely active in the community we, as an employer, have not previously provided all our staff with a consistent volunteering allowance. We want to change this and allow all of our staff to be given time out from their day jobs to support good causes in the community.

That is why we are piloting the introduction of a new staff volunteering allowance of at least two days per year (pro rata) for all employees on a contract of 12 months or more from August 2021. The volunteering scheme will be directly aligned with the UN SDGs and the University Sustainability Strategy and will enable us to further maximise our contribution to the community. We will review the success of the scheme in August 2023 with a view to introducing a five-day fixed volunteering entitlement by August 2024.

We will also continue to support local voluntary, community and social enterprises (VCSEs) and causes. For example, we have chosen Surfers Against Sewage to be our charity of the year for 2021 on account of their excellent work protecting our beaches and oceans.

In addition to these commitments, we will continue to be active partners in various community partnerships and forums. For example, our Vice-Chancellor sits on the Greater Brighton Economic Board. This means that as an active member of the Board we have signed up to all 10 of their environmental pledges for tackling climate change.

Finally, we know that our staff and students do not stop being sustainability leaders and champions when they leave the campus. That is why we are committed to identifying a package of opportunities for staff to make their homes more sustainable, such as energy- and water-saving advice and signposting to low-cost energy- efficiency improvements.