We are now accepting applications for the 2022-23 Adams Sustainability Student, Faculty and Staff Grants, valued at $5000 each! Click the links below for further information on each. Application deadline is November 30, 2022.
Adams Sustainability Student Grants
Adams Sustainability Faculty Grants
Adams Sustainability Staff Grants
Adams Sustainability Student Grants
As part of the Adams Sustainability Celebration, three grants of $5,000 each are available to interested students. Current undergraduate or graduate students from any faculty or discipline across U of T can apply for this grant. The applicant should have a keen interest in sustainability and a concrete plan to advance sustainability on campus. Submission plans may include engaging other students, faculty, staff and/or alumni. A team of students may also apply as a group. Click here to view the 2022 Call for Applications.
2021-22 Adams Sustainability Student Grant Winners
U of T Sustainability Film Festival
Nivaal Rehman and Maryam Rehman
The U of T Sustainability Film Festival aims to use the power of storytelling to raise awareness about sustainability on campus, and encourage students and faculty members to get involved and take action for the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The grant funding will help them achieve this mission by hosting a student short film competition, four virtual film events and a week-long film festival.
The Free Store at UTSC
Sarah Gigi and Yaoyan Huang
Regenesis UTSC has secured space at a UTSC residence building for a Free Store, where items such as clothing, accessories, household goods and books are collected from donations and offered for free to students, faculty and the UTSC community. The Free Store helps promote education and awareness on anti-consumption and production and waste diversion. Funding from the Adams Sustainability Grant will assist in the hiring of a work-study position and a store coordinator who will collect donations from UTSC lost and found and residences, helping low-income students obtain items they need for free. More info available at https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/sustainability/freestore
Tree Discovery Walk, UTSC Parks Canada
Devlin Grewal and Ayuni Ratnayake
Working in collaboration with the UTSC Department of Biological Sciences, the grant funding will assist in the design and implementation of an interactive tree walk through the UTSC Valley Trail, which will highlight tree species of ecological, cultural, and research significance via QR-codes and durable vinyl labels. The Tree Walk will facilitate curiosity and knowledge seeking through self-directed learning while nurturing physical and mental wellbeing.
2020-21 Adams Sustainability Student Grant Winners
SDG Student Hub at U of T
Sustainable Development Goals or SDG student hub has the mission of raising awareness and implementing solutions around the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Their work is guided by three pillars: education, community, and solutions.
The SDG student hub at U of T will be using their grant funding to spread out educational events throughout the year that expose hub members to specific SDGs, as well as NGOs and companies working to implement them. They will be holding a case competition in March that works with a local NGO, after which they intend to implement the winning solution to a community problem that drives impact and change in the community.
They are further developing a career development program that connects students to professionals through talks and networking events. Finally, their work also includes developing the first student journal at U of T that is focused solely on sustainability.
Learn more at: https://www.facebook.com/sdgstudenthub.uoft/
UTMSU Equity Team
UTMSU Equity Team seeks to address food insecurity on campus. They will be using their grant funding to develop a seed library at the UTM campus which offers community members access to free indoor-friendly seed gardening materials, rentable equipment, and educational workshops to challenge the social stigma of food insecurity and foster motivation in our community to help support food insecure Canadians.
Kat Dervenis
Kat Dervenis is a first year MBA student in Human Geography at the University of Toronto St. George whose research interests relate to environmental justice, social movements, and food sovereignty. She has a variety of experience working in the food justice world and supports grassroots community organizing around this issue.
Kat will be using her grant funding to support urban agriculture at U of T. She proposes that container gardening can be done in students’ homes, supporting accessibility, local food production, and even mental health and wellbeing, especially in the context of Covid-19. She will be piloting an at-home container garden kit for students in need and those who have faced food insecurity. This kit will include soil seeds, an instruction document, and ways to reach out to students using list serves. Towards the end of the summer, once students have made progress on growing produce at home, they will have the opportunity to report on their food production experience, allowing for peer learning and ways to optimize the process in the future.
Adams Sustainability Faculty Grants
As part of the Adams Sustainability Celebration, three grants of $5,000 each were made available to U of T faculty members and instructors to add sustainability to their courses or curriculum. The objective was to design, develop, or enhance curriculum options for U of T students to learn more about sustainability topics and challenges. Any faculty member or instructor committed to integrating sustainability principles and content into their coursework were welcome to apply. Priority was given to instructors of community- engaged learning courses and campus as a living lab courses. Click here to view the 2022 Call for Applications.
2021-22 Adams Sustainability Faculty Grant Winners
Prof. Tingting Zhu, Developing Sustainability Modules for GIS Capstone Project
Tingting Zhu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, Geomatics and Environment at UTM. She received funding for her proposal to hire two Research Assistants to develop sustainability modules for a GIS Capstone Project course, which has a community-engaged learning component in partnership with the City of Mississauga. Capable of integrating multidisciplinary data and analyzing spatial interactions, GIS allows administrators to make informed decisions, contributing to global collaboration based on holistic sustainable design.
Prof. Marianne Touchie, Enhancing Campus as a Living Lab in Undergraduate Courses
Marianne Touchie is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil & Mineral Engineering, and Director of the Building Energy and Indoor Environment Lab. She will be using the grant funding to support mini-labs in campus buildings for Building Science and HVAC Fundamentals courses, which have an enrollment of about 200 students a year.
Dr. Hilary Inwood, Re-imagining Sustainability Pedagogy
Hilary Inwood (MA, M.Ed, PhD) teaches in the Master of Teaching program in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at OISE. She leads the OISE Sustainability & Climate Action Network, and its Environmental & Sustainability Education (ESE) Initiative, as well as its Arts Education courses. Hilary will use this grant funding to support changes to CTL 1122, an OISE course focused on sustainability education called Exploring the Praxis of Environmental & Sustainability Education. These changes will use the city as classroom to develop transformative sustainability pedagogies that offer students learning that is relational, community-engaged and action-oriented.
2020-21 Adams Sustainability Faculty Grant Winners
Dr. Hans Ibelings
John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design
Dr. Hans Ibelings is a professor at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. He will be using his funding from the Adams Sustainability Faculty Grant for research assistance to revisit conventional highlights of modern architecture post-1945. He intends to examine these topics through the lens of sustainability and climate change in the hope that it will lead to a new understanding of how global warming is deeply connected to all building activities.
Dr. Michael Liut
Department of Mathematical and Computational Sciences at the University of Toronto Mississauga
Dr. Michael Liut is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematical and Computational Sciences at the University of Toronto Mississauga. He intends to use his funding to promote sustainable thinking amongst computer science students. He will be adding sustainability concepts over several components of his database course, which aims to impact all three campuses at U of T. He will be introducing the first edition of any type of sustainability concept to the computer science curriculum, and hopes that it will be the first of many to transform more in-depth thinking about sustainability in the field.
Dr. Fiona Miller
Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health
Dr. Fiona Miller is a Professor of Health Policy and Chair of Health Management Strategies at the Institute of Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation. Alongside two PhD students in the department, Victoria Haldane and Anna Cooper Reed, Dr. Miller has worked to create a course on sustainable health care.
Now, with the Adams Sustainability Faculty Grant, Dr. Miller and her colleagues hope to engage with other programs within their faculty to pilot some of their learning. They hope to further co-develop materials and find opportunities to embed sustainable health systems and sustainable healthcare imperatives into curricula throughout their faculty to take the conversation forward.