SSMU Sustainability Assessment
I spent most of the summer following graduation alongside my good friend Derina Man, researching and writing a sustainability assessment for the Student Society of McGill University. It was the culmination to many years working on environmental issues with the SSMU, and there’s much more that can be said about that.
But from a non-activistey perspective, it was also an exciting opportunity to design my first book. Having put so much thought, work and strategy into the research and writing, I knew that this was a document that couldn’t simply sit on the shelf. Public communications is always a consideration in my organising, but with the Sustainability Assessment, the stakes seemed higher.
So to finish off this project, I spent many weeks laying out our work, reformating and recontexutalising content, and sprucing it up with beautiful graphics and photography. The finished report is over 100 pages, so I worked hard to make it enjoyable to read. We didn’t expect anyone to read the whole report (although, some foolish souls have done so). Rather, we broke it into chapters, and I further broke these down into sidebars and action plans, alongside the main content.
In the end, I hope that the SSMU 2008 Sustainability Assessment is a beautiful, readable book. I found inspiration in documents like the Sustainable Concordia 2003 and 2006 sustainability assessments, the International Energy Agency’s Lights Labour Lost, and Our Cultural Sovereignty, the 2003 report of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.
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