Our University reached another milestone in achieving its strategic goal of becoming a responsible and sustainable university when it created and implemented its Sustainability Strategy in the spring of 2017. Today, the implementation of our Sustainability Strategy is managed by the Sustainability Council, and its day-to-day operation is supported by the Sustainability Network, which is made up of members of the internal community. In the 3 years since its inception, we have achieved results in many areas, while at the same time, reviewing our activities over and over again, setting new goals, or simply fine-tuning existing ones.
Looking to the future, it can be said that the Responsible and Sustainable University has achieved such a level of legitimacy within the BUEB as a fundamental goal in the last three years, that it is absolutely necessary to maintain and pursue it as a priority objective. Our aim is to become the leading sustainable institution in the region, as well as in the education and research of sustainability.
Background
As the largest business university in Hungary, educating about 18,000 students, we have a huge responsibility with respect to what knowledge and attitudes we equip future generations to head into the labour market. As a university of applied sciences, and focusing on our core business- education, we believe we can make the biggest impact here, so we are committed to contributing to a more sustainable future through guidance and by example. We know that change does not happen overnight, but we are committed to setting an example for other institutions in the region, working closely with stakeholders and sharing our knowledge to this end.
Creating a Strategy
Responsible thinking is one of the traditional values of BUEB, and in order to consciously and systematically incorporate it into our operations, the management of the Institution initiated the preparation of the Sustainability Strategy in January of 2017, and for the implementation, a Working Group was established. With the support of the Institutional and Faculty leaders, the Working Group was formed with lecturers, employees and students from the internal community of the University. During the preparation of the strategy, foreign best practices were examined first, then the University's sustainability activities and the most important projects related to the topic were analysed by organisational unit and relevant topic. The most important finding was that while we could already be proud of many valuable initiatives, there is a lack of an institutional level strategy and co-ordination that would ensure that our goals remain focused in one direction, that we increase our positive impact, and that our results are visible. This has led us to create a document with broad involvement, including students, that will help us focus and pinpoint exactly what is fundamentally important to us.
About the Sustainability Strategy
The Sustainability Strategy is in fact, a guideline for how we want to support our increasingly sustainable and cohesive community. As a responsible institution of higher education, we consciously assess, manage and communicate our own socio-economic-environmental impacts, and incorporate the experiences into our operational, research and educational strategies. The strategy also contributes to the commitment of the members of the institution, as it is clear from this document that we can achieve our key goals mainly through individual and small group contributions based on volunteerism. The Sustainability Strategy offers an opportunity for each member of the BUEB community to take into account their own role in the process of linking the well-being of both the narrower organisational and wider societal-global community.