SP0261: Student Support for impact200

We are seeking SPF Big Wave funding to provide support to the students and young alumni who have presented the best projects at impact200, the Bicentennial Student Sustainability Challenge, to sustainably transform all McGill campuses, Montreal, Canada, and the world over the next 50 years.

The Bicentennial Office, in partnership with the McGill Sustainability Systems Initiative, the Office of Sustainability, the Dobson Centre for Entrepreneurship and representatives of the Faculty of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, is organizing impact200, the Bicentennial Student Sustainability Challenge. impact200 is a sustainability centred initiative which offers McGill students and alumni who've graduated since 2018 the opportunity to engage in innovative projects pertaining to the sustainability of our campuses, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and the world. Participants are invited to form teams of three to six people and submit ideas or projects based on the UN’s seventeen Sustainable Development Goals.

An online platform is made available to participants in order to facilitate team formation, communication, planning, idea sharing, and collaboration. Teams have until December 1st, 2020, to submit an initial proposal. Following these submissions, thirty teams will be selected as semi-finalists in mid-December 2020. Semi-finalists will have until February 26th, 2021 to submit a more indepth proposal, which will also include a brief video and poster presenting their project. They will be invited to present their project to a jury composed of experts from various fields in early March 2021. In late March 2021, ten teams will be selected. From May to August 2021, the finalists will work on their projects by developing a proof of concept. In early November 2021, teams will make a final presentation of their project. In late November 2021, a gala will crown the winning teams. Following the challenge, finalist teams will be offered the opportunity to strengthen their project through a special training program provided by the Dobson Centre, in order to bring their proof of concept to reality.

Projects will range from creating green spaces on certain McGill rooftops to creating biodegradable gloves for students and technicians working in our labs. The Bicentennial team will act as an institutional liaison between teams and key University stakeholders in order to ensure that teams receive the administrative support they need to further their project and to succeed. impact200 projects are expected to bring education, conversations, and engagement around sustainability to the forefront of McGill's Bicentennial, building in turn towards transformativestudent involvement on campus. Our goal is that many of the impact200 projects go on to become Bright Spots, sustainability-related projects that are scaled up and lead to significant changes on campus and across communities.

In designing impact200, we are seeking to prioritize student equity, accessibility, and interdisciplinarity. Students from the entire McGill student body have the ability to register completely online, and work with students who are from outside of their own faculty. The goal of our Big Wave application is to better financially empower students and young alumni who have presented the top projects, such that students from all backgrounds can participate.

More specifically, we want to use the funding to provide a $ 5,000 stipend to each of the 40 possible finalist team members, and to provide $5,000 to each team to help them develop their proof of concept over the summer of 2021. In the current context of a global pandemic, we realize how difficult it is for students to find good paying jobs. Through the financial support the finalists will receive, we want to ensure that they can devote their full attention to their project during the Summer of 2021.