And the Winners are….

So it is that time of the year again. The weather is starting to get a little more tolerable, there are green shoots on some of the bushes and trees, and the GOOD IDEAS contest winners have been announced. “What’s the Good Ideas contest?” you are asking yourself. No don’t strain your mind, I will tell you instead.

The Good Ideas contest is a competition for students on campus to suggest good ideas that the University should adopt. It began in 2008 with 10 prizes of $1,000 for the best ideas, as judged by a panel of campus community members. This year it is grown to 20 top prizes of $1,000.

The contest was mildly ridiculed by some students because of the contest’s ironic tagline “Only one good idea per student”, implying that students were only capable of having one good idea at a time (we certainly wouldn’t want their brains to over heat).

But controversy aside (and I use the word controversy very loosely), I heart this competition. It essentially provides me with an unlimited source of great ideas to make the campus more sustainable. I had hoped that the contest would be changed into a green ideas contest but I think that I’ll survive. Especially since a good number of the ideas are already green.

This year’s winners are no exception, so let’s take a look at the one’s that have caught my interest in particular.
· Make downloadable agendas available
· Création d'un vestiaire (a drop-off place for old objects that could be used by other students)
· Creation of bike lanes
· Improving nutrition: Opening a grocery store on campus and a buffet section in the cafeteria
· Regular "town-hall" style meetings
· Classified used-book website
· Plant trees on the roofs
· La création d'un centre d'éducation financière
· Campus computer repairs
· Clinique de santé mentale

Admittedly there are other ideas that could also be considered as sustainable in the list of winners. And I can’t imagine how many of the submissions were related to sustainability. Basically 50%-75% of the winners were sustainable ones so…. here’s to a brave green world. And now comes the hard part, making all these ideas a reality.

For a complete list of the winners, click here.