Sustainability Staff and Student Engagement

Our Environmental Sustainability Staff & Student Engagement Strategy sets the College’s approach to increasing engagement with and awareness of environmental sustainability in the RCA community. It seeks to bring together existing activities into one holistic strategy covering internal communications, community engagement and partnerships, academic engagement and staff development.

This Strategy was first approved by the Environmental Sustainability Committee in May 2024 and is reviewed every 12 months. The Environmental Sustainability Manager and the Senior Communications Manager are responsible for the Strategy. Read the highlights of the Strategy below.

The Royal College of Art uses a range of different metrics to measure progress in relation to staff and student engagement. These metrics vary between activities, and include: attendees to events, survey response, newsletter open rates and intranet clicks.

SustainLab is a society of the Royal College of Art Students’ Union. It is a collaborative and cross-disciplinary platform for all RCA students to engage with, in exploring what sustainability is and how it can be embedded as part of their creative practice. It is a forum for ideas to be investigated, challenged, and shared with the intention of facilitating experimentation and knowledge-building with our creative practices.

SustainLab organises talks, open-crits, workshops and conversations for students to develop their knowledge of sustainability and how to incorporate it into their creative processes. Some of these events are also open to the public.

It was founded in September 2017 by RCA students, with the intention of supporting and inspiring the work of fellow students who have an interest in sustainability.

SustainLab hosts regular exhibitions, showcasing the work of its members. The 2024 exhibition, 'Co-creating With Nature', explores environmentally conscious works of artists and designers who commit to sustainability through thinking about alternative systems and processes in their practice. In 2025, 'Ancestral Utopias' explored themes of ecological slow violence, ancestral knowledge, generational thinking, and long-term strategies for addressing the climate crisis.

The 2026 SustainLab exhibition Following Fallowing explores the relationship between rest, creativity, and sustainability across diverse media. Rather than framing rest as withdrawal or inactivity, the exhibition positions it as a fundamental condition for making, a generative interval through which ideas mature, systems recalibrate, and practices renew themselves. In doing so, it asks: What might creative resilience look like if we valued cycles of pause as much as cycles of production?

The Green Futures Group is an informal cross-union collective established in 2022 by RCA academic staff to gather information and swap ideas on environmental sustainability throughout the RCA community. In the face of the climate crisis, it has become imperative to make profound changes to how we conduct our working practices. The group welcomes input from everyone: students, academic staff, union representatives, facilities and administration staff, estates and campus operations managers, external contractors, technicians, members of the RCA Executive Board, and local organisations.

The group meets several times a term and constantly collects and passes on information, identifies problems, canvasses for solutions, and connects people working towards the same goal across the RCA community.

Green Futures Group members are also part of the RCA’s Environmental Sustainability Advisory Group, working with the operations and communications teams on a coherent strategy that is inclusive and positively productive within the community.

The Green Futures Group is currently conducting the scoping survey, How Green is the Curriculum?, to discover and record how every programme across the college incorporates environmental sustainability and the climate emergency in their teaching, studio practice support and community infrastructures.

There is also a rolling programme of Green Futures events and projects that promote awareness and good practice among students and staff: a termly repair café run by student and staff volunteers; regular clothes swaps facilitated with the Students’ Union; and an annual Ecollegey! Festival, introducing new students to the theories and praxis necessary for an equitable transition to a decarbonised and sustainable society.

The College provides funding for staff and student engagement activities. The Sustainability Seed Fund launched in 2026 as a small grants funding scheme for RCA staff and students to support sustainability projects on campus. Funding of up to £250 is available for projects tackling on-campus issues like reuse, energy, carbon emissions, waste or biodiversity.

Our students and staff are passionate about sustainability and have many ideas to improve sustainability at the College. The Sustainability Seed Fund aims to help students and staff to take action to turn their ideas into reality.

Projects funded in 2026 include workshops to develop an RCA Herbarium and the purchase of a plastic shredder.

The details of how to apply to the 26/27 Sustainability Seed Fund will be published in the College newsletters.

An annual communications plan accompanies the engagement strategy, which is a live working document overseen by a communications working group that meets monthly. Highlights of activities which took place during 2025/26 are:

• Ecollegey! Festival
• SustainLab Exhibition
• Sustainability Staff Lunch & Learn
• Repair Cafe
• Clothes Swaps
• Anxiety to Agency workshop for students
• Local Biodiversity Tour
• CLIMAVORE Days in the College canteen
• Dr Bike pop-up workshop
• Cycle training