Responsible Futures Criteria:
The Responsible Futures toolkit involves criteria split into 8 different sections. These sections vary in focus but essentially collate to provide a whole institution with a review of our commitment to sustainability. In partnership with the DSU the DMU sustainability Team work incredibly hard at gathering as much evidence to satisfy tis criteria to regain our responsible futures accreditation. Read on to find out more details about each of the criteria as well as information about the evidence we submitted for it.
Baselines and Benchmarks
This includes the university committing to basic tasks focused at ensuring we are in fact reviewing our sustainable commitments throughout the university. It is centered around the idea of setting minimum standards and goals that continuously increase as we reach them. The evidence submitted for this cycle ranged from DMU’s participation in the annual NUS survey to publishing findings and actions on staff and student feedback.
Partnership and Planning
These are about implementing the necessary spaces and opportunities across the institution for co-creation and collaboration along with creating plans on how these will be best maintained and replicated. The evidence we submitted for this criterion was meeting notes of the DMU X DSU working group for responsible futures, the policy for the newly created Sustainability Committee and proof of stakeholder engagement.
Leadership and strategy
For this we are required to evidence high level engagement from all levels across the university as well as being able to identify key leaders/ leader roles in different parts of DMU and DSU. Further to this the criteria requires confirmation of accompanying sustainability strategies being in place across the campus. For this we presented sustainability strategies from both DMU and DSU as well as job descriptions of staff roles embedding sustainability.
Policy and Commitment
This section is about the policies and maintenance of them to ensure that we have efficient and effective policies in place across the institution and that we are consistently, improving, updating and maintaining them. In terms of evidence for this we produced policies from across the different areas in the institution.
Interventions
This section analyses our efforts towards creating spaces and opportunities for staff and students to engage in activities and discussions to do with sustainable development, increase their knowledge on it and co-create innovative solutions the institution-wide and societal issues. The evidence we submitted for this section included details of the range of recent events the university has had on across the four faculties and directorates as well as the feedback opportunities and resources/ funding we have for staff and students.
Impacts and Outcomes
This is all about how we measure the short- and long-term impacts that we have on staff and students both while they are at the university and after they leave. It also looks at the positive outcomes our work has created across the institution and how we will create replicas or legacies for successful methods. The evidence we submitted for this was the surveys, focus groups and feedback opportunities we held across the campus to monitor our impacts.
Outreach
This section looks at the impact we have outside our university. It involves things such as local university partnerships, community projects, further university partnerships and global projects. The evidence we submitted for this included a range of opportunities hosted at DMU through DMU Global, DMU Local, the Sustainability Team, the DSU, DMU Dubai/ Kazakhstan and more having impacts on the local, national and international community.
Self-defined
The final of the 8 criteria is called the self-defined criteria. This is focused on creativity, flexibility and uniqueness. It allows us to choose three things that we do towards sustainable development across the institution which are exclusive to us and not being done anywhere else. The three things we focused on this year were DMU being multi-year running Global SDG Hub for the United Nations SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions), our Sustainability Scholarships Scheme offered to international students and finally, our School of Fashion and Textiles whole school curriculum change.