Hi delicious friends! I want to briefly share here about one of the interesting things that happened during the Sustainability and Impact Club’s first session (January-February 2020).

We knew that during session 2 all students would choose a big challenge and work on it to solve an important problem, bring more light and knowledge on it, create a methodology or new contents to raise more awareness around our topics in the University community, and in Tampere hopefully :)

So during session 1, we choose smaller challenges in order to prepare ourselves and to get a little training for what was coming. Because yes, when you work in the sustainability and impact field, you need a few extra-skills, and you need to be trained if you want to take the long run.

One of the most important skill is to protect your creativity from tons of doubts generated by the fact that most of the sustainable topics are still fully to be analysed. We are all constantly learning and adapting in this field!

Take recycling for example. There are dozen of different toxic components in so many stuff we "recycle"... it’s a very complex problem... we know a bit about it, we have some processes, some proven, some experimental, but we (users and consumers) are most of the time very ignorant. So when we start to question with the desire to contribute, make a change, have an impact, we can quickly feel very overwhelmed by the amount of research, new paradigms to understand, details that are changing everything and complex analysis tools. Well, well, the fact is that our sustainable future is in progress... we are living an historical moment and it generates lots of doubts!

Another important skill among a few others is to take care of your motivation to do good. Even in Finland, that’s not the trend. Based on hard capitalism rules, we tend here like everywhere to live for ourselves with a very high level of comfort and we feel that it’s okay without really questioning where all the stuff we buy coming from. Well, covid-19 is shacking that for sure but hey, it shouldn’t wash away a feeling of emergency to mitigate global warming with a real collective effort. So, if you’re motivated by that, take care of your motivation! And stay creative.

So here is the first batch of challenges with links to the student’s articles. I was planning to release them one by one on Sustainable Tampere to share with the great motivation and creativity of these students but I had to review many things due to covid-19, including my communication goals.

That being said, I’ll soon share about their great challenges so stay tuned, and enjoy!

Coffee Awakening, by Tri Phung.

Eco Smile (with a virtual exhibition), by Tina Jokitalo.

Fourteen days to make my life greener, by Candy Hio Liam.

How can we survive the Apocalypse by telling stories? and Three amazing tips that will help you write stories about climate change, by Raysa França.

Is your country green enough?, by Maria Vaslova.

Living with a meat lover, by Meredith Chuzel-Marmot.

Making Lapinkaari students residency more sustainable, by Juliette Caillé.

Mapping Tampere’s treasures and Unlocking Tampere’s treasures, by Victor Théoret.

Money goes green, by Niilo Montonen.

What’s behind sustainable labels?, by Tatjana Blum.