Sustainability Community Lab (SCL)

The Sustainability Community Lab is a funded programme and welcomes SME local nottingham businesses to join and has been created by Nottingham Trent University.

This is focussed on supporting businesses like yourselves in becoming more sustainable and how to future proof your buisness with such changes.  You tend to find that the larger businesses already have somebody to take the lead on sustainability, however, smaller businesses sometimes lack in the knowledge, time, money and resources to start to put plans in place to future proof their business.

It is increasingly important for all businesses to be more sustainable for many reasons and I have named just a few here for you:

• Improve talent attraction and maintain current employees
• Greater employer satisfaction
• Reduce costs
• Increase profits
• Reduce waste
• Support with CN28 Nottingham
• Retain current clients and gain more in the future
• Competitive advantage
• Preparedness of sustainability reporting for SMEs in the future (2028)
• Improve relationships with suppliers
• Doing our bit to help with climate change both socially and environmentally

We have already supported over 55 local businesses complete the programme and have found it invaluable as it helps them to carry out an audit of their business and work out a sustainability business proposal.  This will pull out anything from short term easy wins to the more challenging changes that will both make a positive impact on your business.

One cohort remaining which commences on Wednesday 26th April and runs for 6 weeks.  The course is intended for early careers within your team and are all online apart form the last session where they will pull together a personalised and relevant sustainability business proposal for your business.  The three different areas of the programme are highlighted below which include a guest speaker who will share their journey to Carbon Neutral along with engaging activities and workshops where they ‘go down the rabbit hole’ and explore what can be done in your business:

• Wednesday 26th April - Online - Holistic & Intersectional Sustaiability
• Wednesday 3rd May - Online - Holistic & Intersectional Sustaiability
• Wednesday 10th May - Online - Guest Speaker - Adam Pickering from LeftLion
• Wednesday 17th May - Online - Sustainability in Business
• Wednesday 24th May - Online - Susdtainability in Business
• Wednesday 31st May - Onsite at NTU -  presentation