MRU’s Sustainability Forum a wide lens at society’s biggest challenges
On Oct. 8, MRU’s Sustainability Forum will bring together a range of voices and ideas including Calgary’s mayor, companies such as WestJet and IKEA, and Mount Royal researchers, students, management and employees.
This event is designed to serve as a platform for knowledge dissemination, discussion and student engagement about sustainability and how researchers, practitioners and students are working to solve the most relevant issues of the 21st century.
The forum will feature speakers including Mayor Jyoti Gondak, known for her dedication to sustainable urban development and community engagement and experience from her career in urban sociology, numerous perspectives from the MRU community including dean of business and communications studies Kelly Williams-Whitt, PhD and Colette Winters, associate vice-president of Facilities Management, as well as speakers from government, MRU’s institutes and Indigenous voices. It will also feature panel discussions, guided tours of the MRU greenhouse,a presentation on the benefits of access to greenspaces and a movie night.
“Sustainability is a crucial component of today’s business environment and business education,” Williams-Whitt says. “The forum is an opportunity to learn from experts at MRU and from others in the community who are researching, managing and working on this important topic.”
Organizer Mauricio Latapí, PhD, an assistant professor in general management at MRU who studies sustainability in transportation, says the all-day forum is an excellent opportunity to make connections between sustainability research at MRU, what the University itself is doing through Facilities Management, for example, and what the broader community and industry is innovating on this front.
Another interesting addition this year is a session on “eco-grief” by Janet Arnold, access advisor with Access and Inclusion Services, which will address the hopelessness and helplessness felt when addressing climate change. Journalism students taking a course on podcasting will record and report on the forum, which wraps up with a movie night (The Grizzlies), part of a Sustainability Cinema Series in collaboration with MRU, Bow Valley College, SAIT, Ambrose University and the University of Calgary.
“If a student has a break between classes, we want that student to experience different perspectives on sustainability at different times. So, sustainability in sports, sustainability in medicine, sustainability in psychology, in business. We want students to be able to see different topics. We want them to see that their professors and other areas at MRU are doing really cool stuff. Areas at MRU are doing amazing things but they are a bit siloed, so we want to bring them together to talk about what we are doing and where we are going,” Latapí says.
“The other side is seeing what business practitioners and the community is doing. So, we have the mayor speak on her perspective. We’re having WestJet to ask them, ‘What are your sustainability plans?’ It’s a balance between academics, staff and management at MRU, students, as well as industry, business and community.”
In conjunction with the annual Sustainability Forum, from Oct. 7 to 11 faculty members from across MRU who are interested in seeing new ways to teach sustainability in action are invited to attend a sampling of classes that are exploring different teaching styles, methodologies, and student engagement strategies focused on sustainability in action. The 2024 Sustainability Forum Open Classroom Week will give instructors who are interested in integrating sustainable development goals into their teaching practice the opportunity to observe what others are doing in their classrooms and to engage in conversations about teaching sustainability with their colleagues. Sign up here or contact AnneMarie Dorland at adorland@mtroyal.ca.