20 years not out - reflections on building sustainability in the students' union movement

By Jamie Agombar, Executive Director, SOS-UK?

Twenty years ago, on 11 November 2003, I started at NUS UK as their fresh-faced Ethical Supply Chain Coordinator. So last Friday, 11 November 2023, marked my 20th year of continual service for NUS / Students Organising for Sustainability (SOS-UK) . Two decades later I am undoubtedly less fresh-faced, but I still love my job and am still massively motivated by it, because of the amazing people I work with, and the stunning impact we make together when supporting students to lead on sustainability.

I’d always wanted to be a warden of a nature reserve, but whist studying Ecology at UEA, Professor Tim O’Riordan made me realise that preserving a isolated patches of nature was ultimately unsustainable, he encouraged us all to think bigger, to engage politicians, businesses and the public. So I went to Lancaster University and studied an MRes in Environmental Science, where I also became the non-sabbatical Ethical and Environment Officer, which really helped me get the NUS job.

When I started at NUS my role was mostly constructively engaging with the suppliers to NUS’ purchasing consortium. We really led the way on supply chain ethics, a decade before ESG was properly a thing. We pushed Coca-Cola to own the labour relations issues in their bottlers, and helped get GSK over the line when they finally relinquished the patents to their antiretroviral HIV drugs.

In those days my work was steered by the NUS Ethical and Environmental Committee, comprising student officers and students’ union staff, including Matt Hyde OBE when he was at Goldsmiths SU. Matt really helped us turn a corner, away from our campaigning work being led by negative boycott campaigns to something much more proactive. Building on the ideas and enthusiasm of Anna D'Arcy MSc MIEMA CEnv , together we set up Green Impact, which provided a framework for students’ unions to reduce their own negative environmental impacts, then celebrated their achievements. Colin Baines provided our first external funding, in the form of sponsorship from The Co-op, and just like the NUS sustainability team grew from just me to me and Catherine Dishington

Then Neil Jennings came in with Student Switch Off, we worked with People & Planet to make divestment the norm, Simon Kemp funded our Students Skills survey that led to Responsible Futures, we worked with Martin Wiles to scale Green Impact up into universities, the Lottery funded us to develop our food and farming work, and Steve Egan found us a cool five million for our Students Green Fund from HEFCE.

From 2008 we had a dedicated research function - led by Lizzie Bone , and now Rachel Drayson . Using the NUS Card database, we could capture valuable insights into what students wanted. This helped us make our case to HEFCE for the ï¿¡5m, and landed well at a time when policy makers were being criticised for increasing tuition fees but not giving students what they wanted in return. Our Student Skills Survey is now 14 years old, with c120k respondents to date, providing a fascinating longitudinal evidence base of the increasing concern of students for the environment and increasing demand for them to learn green skills. Our research remans widely cited and has given power to the arm of academics and students working on curriculum reform across the sector here and overseas.

By 2018 we were the biggest department in NUS and in 2019, with the support and guidance of Peter Robertson and Aidan Grills MBA FRSA FCMI CMgr , we spun my department into a brand new charity, SOS-UK, so we could go further and faster with our transformational sustainability work, on the back of the youth for climate strikes. But also so we could go upstream into pre-16 education, beyond the boundaries of NUS. SOS-UK is still proudly a part of the NUS family, alongside Endsleigh and OneVoice, and long may that continue.

Since 2019 we have grown SOS-UK from 16 staff to now 38 core staff, plus 20 student staff. Working with amazing students like Joe Brindle and Scarlett Westbrook , we developed our Teach the Future campaign, which helped get the Department for Education to set up its new Climate Change and Sustainability Unit. When Covid hit we supported awesome students like Shreya K.C. and Kelo Uchendu to run the Mock COP in place of the postponed COP26, which led to the first ever Education Ministers Summit at COP26, and now climate education is a big thing for the UN. Our Climate Education Bill is likely to be passed if Labour win the next election, which will lead to sustainability being liberated from its subject silos and woven through all subjects. Meanwhile we are supporting incredible students like Jodie Bailey-Ho and Phoebe L. Hanson to deliver Teach the Teacher, retrofitting climate education into the education system, ensuring young people get the integrated, solutions-centred climate education they deserve.

Over the last 20 years I’ve learned so much from the phenomenal young people we have worked with, they have shaped my thinking on so many things. In particular, Zamzam Ibrahim , one of the founding trustees at SOS-UK, helped me realise that we can’t have climate justice without racial justice. Together we developed Race for Nature, placing 130 young people into 33 nature organisations, and now The RACE Report, a transparency campaign that will be catalytic for the sector. At SOS-UK we are working hard to make the sustainability sector more inclusive, so all the young people we engage and support will feel they are truly welcome and can thrive in our movement.

Alongside our work in the UK, we somehow found time to create our international secretariat. In 2019, working with Danske Studerendes F?llesr?d / National Union of Students in Danmark and Union of Students in Ireland, Toke Dahler , Charlotte Bonner and myself set up Students Organizing for Sustainability International , to get student-led organisations across the world collaborating on sustainability campaigns. We now have 32 members, host the amazing Green Office movement, and are led by the amazing Peter Kwasi Kodjie , the Secretary General of the All-Africa Students Union (AASU) .

Nostalgically looking back, our work had such a massive impact on the lives of so many students, and together we have achieved so much. Looking forward, our systems change work is beginning to bite, and we are scaling up beautifully, but in many ways it feels like we are only just getting started, there is so much more to do…

I’m personally so grateful to everyone who has been alongside me for these last 20 years, for your support and encouragement, your ideas and your energy, your kindness and your friendship. Thank you all so much! I’ve met so many amazing people and made so many friends, and I look forward to working with you all over the years to come. Most importantly, I want to say thank you to my wonderful wife Sam Agombar , and our kids Lily and Robin, who have unwaveringly supported me to do my job for two decades.