When I first decided to develop the ‘15 Ways in 15 Weeks’ initiative, I knew I wanted to get the students leading with faculty mentoring
(including IMBAs and PhDs). Two of our sustainability-related centres are excellent examples of the blending of East and West. The Centre for Responsible and Sustainable Business Education collaborates with multiple Chinese and Western stakeholders while the W.E. leader Mindfulness Centre combines Eastern traditional culture with Western modern medicine. Congratulations on winning an AMBA & BGA Excellence Award for CSR and Sustainability. Can you share some insight into your winning initiative ’15 Ways in 15 Weeks’ (FWFW)? We were absolutely thrilled with this international recognition of FWFW. As you know, we adapted an Open Educational Resource (OER), the ‘Anatomy of Action’ project, which had been developed in 2019 by the UN’s Environment Programme and the UnSchool of Disruptive Design. For other educators looking to provide quality experiential educational programmes for their students, I highly recommend this time- and energy- saving strategy of customising Creative Commons-licensed materials. With a group of only three students working on the initiative at the beginning of the semester, it was very useful to have the structure and supporting research already available for us. That let us focus on adapting it to meet our organisation’s needs, as well as the actual execution. The IBSS Sustainability Committee and the Sustainable Future Talents
his organisational skills and vision as he and other student leaders succeeded in hosting the Hult Prize competition at our university. For the FWFW initiative, I contacted him and asked if he would meet me to discuss it. He brought several others to that meeting, and the rest is history. It was probably about a month into the initiative when they announced to me that they had agreed on a name for the group – Sustainable Future Talents – and that they were actively recruiting new members. We ended the 15 weeks with 27 student members and a new leader, LI Yanfei. In December 2021, we welcomed our second cohort of Sustainable Future Talents recruits. They have had to rethink their initial plans for this semester. As you probably know, many cities in China, including Suzhou, are currently experiencing a surge in Covid-19 cases. Due to this, our university has been online only so far this semester. At present, we are looking at providing online carbon literacy training across the university during Earth Week. Many of us attended this online training provided by Professor Petra Molthan- Hill of Nottingham Trent University through the PRME organisation in November, and received our Carbon Literacy certification from the Carbon Literacy Project in Manchester. We have plans to translate the training materials into Chinese so that the Sustainable Future Talents can begin to provide this training to Chinese Business Schools
really came together as a cohesive team through this experience. I certainly learned many lessons from it that I will carry forward into my practice. Even though I consider myself to be very good at listening to my students, and meeting them where they are in their educational journey, I still grew in these skills as I worked with the different Sustainable Future Talent teams to plan the activities each week. As a marketing practitioner who has organised numerous events and activities over the years, I had ideas for how we could plan, promote and execute the initiative. I was proud of our Sustainable Future Talents members for being confident enough to advocate for their ideas, and to correct me when I was wrong. They learned from me how to manage the project while I learned from them more about our target audience’s needs and preferences. The initiative resulted in the creation of the Sustainable Future Talents student association. Could you explain what this is, and what your hopes are for it in terms of next steps? When I first decided to develop the FWFW initiative, I knew I wanted to get the students leading with faculty mentoring. A few months earlier, a determined young man, TANG Yi, had marched into my office to ask for support and funding of a local XJTLU Hult Prize competition. I had never met this young man, but over the course of a month, I became very impressed with
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Ambition | BE IN BRILLIANT COMPANY
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