Creating a Vision for School Sustainability
Your school’s Vision for sustainability is like a northern star - providing guidance, inspiration, and a clear direction for your entire community. It serves as a unifying force, aligning efforts and ensuring that every action taken contributes to a shared, meaningful purpose: creating a sustainable and climate-resilient future. A clear, well-communicated vision ensures that your school’s sustainability progress won’t be derailed even as students and teachers come and go.
Why a Vision Matters
A sustainability vision is more than a goal—it’s a shared sense of purpose that:
Unifies the school community by aligning sustainability efforts with your school’s values.
Inspires action by focusing on a positive, hopeful future rather than just addressing problems.
Provides direction for initiatives across the school, ensuring everyone is working toward the same objectives.
How You Can Help Create and Communicate a Sustainability Vision
Step 1: Collaborate to Develop the Vision
Form a Coalition: Gather students, teachers, staff, and administrators interested in sustainability.
Speak at assemblies or send out emails inviting participation.
Aim for a diverse group to ensure broad representation of your school community.
Ask Key Questions: Work together to explore these guiding questions:
Who are we as a school community?
What do we do in sustainability, and why does it matter?
What is the positive end-state we envision for our school? A vision statement is ambitious!
Run Collaborative Sessions:
Break into small groups to brainstorm ideas and share perspectives.
Document and synthesize the group’s input into a cohesive draft.
Refine the draft iteratively with feedback until the vision resonates with everyone.
Align with the School’s Core Values: Show how sustainability enhances the existing school mission, ensuring the vision feels integral to your community’s identity.
Step 2: Communicate the Vision
Make It Visible:
Share the vision widely through assemblies, newsletters, posters, and the school website.
Host an official launch event to spotlight the initiative.
Engage the Whole Community:
Invite parents, alumni, and local organizations to support the vision.
Highlight successes regularly to maintain momentum and visibility.
Champion the Vision:
Keep sustainability in conversations by celebrating achievements and ongoing efforts.
Collaborate with school leaders to integrate the vision into strategic plans.
Step 3: Define Target Areas and Action Steps
Identify Focus Areas: Break down the vision into actionable categories, such as academics, operations (e.g., energy, waste, transportation), and community engagement.
Set Goals for Each Area: Develop specific, measurable goals, such as integrating sustainability themes into the curriculum or reducing campus waste by a certain percentage.
Plan Actions: Outline clear, practical steps to achieve each goal. For example, organize a speaker series with sustainability experts.
Read about how Chadwick School in California created their mission statement.
Download a this PDF Doc to guide you through the process.
Example Sustainability Mission/ Vision Statements
"To shape engaged citizens who live with integrity, empathy, and purpose, in part by involving our community in the stewardship of the planet.” - St Patrick's Episcopal Day School, Washington D.C.
'“At Chadwick School, we recognize the fragility of our planet and the impact of human actions on natural ecosystems. We acknowledge our responsibility to build and maintain a culture of environmental sustainability, to lead by example, and to take meaningful actions to create positive change on our campus and in the larger community. Sustainability is woven through our academic curriculum, extracurricular activities, and all campus programs, and we help students to identify real-world problems and enact solutions through hands-on experiences. Ultimately, we habituate our community to sustainable lifestyles and guide our students to become global citizens and inspirational leaders.” - Chadwick School, California
"To actively engage students, staff and the community in developing a sustainable environment which fosters and inspires best practice and emphasises the importance of preparing and empowering individuals to become responsible for contributing to a sustainable future." - Beaumaris Primary School, Victoria, Australia
"The Limestone District School Board is committed to reducing our ecological footprint in a fiscally and socially responsible manner through various initiatives. It is critical that we help students and staff understand how our individual and collective behaviour affects the environment, and how environmentally responsible lifestyles can contribute to healthy, sustainable ecosystems.
Environmental education is a vital tool that helps young people understand the nature and complexity of environmental challenges and builds their capacity to take appropriate action. In our work toward fostering understanding of environmental education and a sustainable school system, we strive to provide leadership to our broader community and to seek leadership within the same." - The Limestone District, California USA
"Creating a better future by educating responsible citizens who will contribute in positive ways to the local and world community. We believe that one of the most critical issues facing our young people is the issue of sustainability. If our environment is to support future generations, then our young people must have the knowledge, skills and ability to find creative solutions to the problems we have created and make choices today that preserve and protect tomorrow's world. We believe that sustainability education must be integral to our curriculum. We also believe that the operations of our schools can, and should, be done with sustainability in mind." - Tahoma School District, Washington USA
Read Portland Public School District's Climate Crisis Response & Sustainable Practices Policy.
