Key outputs to date include:

• Delivery of first Warwick Sustainability Challenge (in partnership with Coventry City Council), June 2022.
• Delivery of sustainability workshop at EUTOPIA Conference 2022, July 2022.
• Delivery of second Warwick Sustainability Challenge on Waste (in partnership with Estates)
• Delivery of workshop at the Behaviour Change for Health and Sustainability 8^th CBC International Conference, November 2022.
• Dissemination blog article for Cultivate “Education for Sustainable Development in Practice”, November 2022.
• Delivery of presentation on the WSUsC at Coventry UK City of Culture, February 2023 (Connecting Place, Culture, Research and Impact – Stories from Coventry, Roundtable event).
• Delivery of a workshop for ESI Student Innovation Programme (Stockholm School of Economics Riga), March 2023.
• Publication of “Using design thinking to create sustainable communities” in IJMAR, October 2023. Reference: Barile, L., & Kelestyn, B. (2023). Using design thinking to create sustainable communities. International Journal of Management and Applied Research, 10(2), 216-230.
• Delivery of third Warwick Sustainability Challenge on Food and Drink (in partnership with Student Opportunity and Food and Beverage at the University of Warwick).
• Collection of additional data from the WSUsC on Food and Drink.
• Dissemination of the Challenge at the “IJMAR Special Edition Event” (February 2024) and “Steam Challenge, low carbon schools Solihull” event (March 2024).
• The Challenge has also been shared by Advance HE in their latest Guides to ESD in practice, with an article on “Co-creating sustainable solutions with external partners: the Warwick Sustainability Challenge (WSUsC)”, available at https://advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/guides-esd-practice [last accessed 12 August 2024].
• Adoption of the methodology beyond Warwick University, in particular the WSUsC has been replicated in two UK and one school in Argentina and in a university in Latvia.
• Publication of the WSUsC as part of ESD guides for Advance HE (February 2024), and a blog article in COBS.
• Publication of a book chapter in “Co-creating Sustainable Communities: The Circular Role of Higher Education”, in L., Lotti and Barile, L. (ed.), Springer Nature Group.
• Delivery of fourth Warwick Sustainability Challenge on the topic of food and drink (in partnership with Warwick Food and Drink).
• Delivery of fifth Warwick Sustainability Challenge on the topic of cycling (in partnership with Coventry City Council).
• Planning of the next iterations of the Challenge to be delivered in future.
• Finalising survey questions for data collection in future.

The challenge was very well received both by the University and local community in Coventry. Considering the 70+ participants to the Challenge, we collected some data to evaluate the impact of the Challenge and, among those who took part in the final survey, more than 70% stated that the Challenge had a positive impact on increasing their knowledge on sustainability skills. Details on the survey’s results can be found in the IJMAR paper.

Institutionally, the Challenge increased awareness around education for sustainable development (ESD) contributing to the establishment of a Sustainability Hub hosted within the School of Cross-Faculty Studies. Furthermore, the interdisciplinary and student-centred nature of the challenge offered opportunities to reflect on how to engage students and staff more meaningfully from academic and non-academic departments willing to contribute to critical sustainability debates. This gave life to the new ESD Network aimed at engaging the broader Warwick community encompassing more people across the University, and led to the WSUsC becoming a key example in the Sustainability theme of the 2023 Institutional Teaching and Learning Review (ITLR), endorsed by senior management. The Challenge inspired further student-centred projects at Warwick, and led to the creation of the “Designing Together” WIHEA project, which has received a Warwick Awards for Teaching Excellence in the category of Team Award.

More broadly, the Challenge:

• Helped strengthening the relationship between Coventry City Council (CCC) and academics at Warwick leading to creation of a green legacy - i.e., a group of researchers from different departments working with the CCC on sustainability related projects.
• Created opportunities to work in collaboration with schools (e.g., Warwick School) and engage with young pupils on an important topic such as sustainability.
• Increased the national reputation of Warwick University on how the institution contributes to responses to climate change.

The WSUsC impacted several groups and individuals’ capacity to engage the public.

• Student and staff facilitators were trained in design thinking and facilitation, learning skills that contributed to their employability and own engagement initiatives.
• Staff participants had an opportunity to extend their networks and expand CPD, in one case directly contributing to a promotion.
• Student Opportunity were trained in the methodology in September 2023 to build institutional capacity for delivering the WSUsC regularly.
• The Challenge has been disseminated at various events and national and international conferences, and replicated with students at a university in Latvia.

We are currently working with Student Opportunity to replicate the Challenge with incoming students at Warwick and engage them with sustainability skills. We hope to continue to work with Coventry City Council and the University of Warwick to replicate the Challenge in future and better understand the impact on the local community.