Cathy Walker is an inspirational sustainability leader for staff, students and the broader community. In all of her projects, Cathy goes beyond usual boundaries, to ensure she is empowering, championing and supporting inclusive sustainability. One part of Cathy’s role is to host regular lunches for students, Cathy not only sources local, healthy and seasonal food for events, but she also supports the local Neighbourhood House by hiring them for catering. Cathy enables a significant reduction in waste to landfill by providing reusable crockery for students and staff at events, as well as for day to day use on campus that people can borrow and bring back. Cathy not only practices sustainability, she communicates the decisions she is making with students and staff to include them in the sustainability journey. Communicating how she practices sustainability allows her to share her skills and knowledge, and to empower and enable students and staff to be part of this change.

Cathy prioritises the welfare of students and is quick to celebrate and promote their work in creating behaviour change campaigns on campus. Cathy is a founding member of the Cradle Coast Campus Environmental Sustainability working group a formal working group of the University’s Sustainability Committee.

Cathy goes above and beyond as the only staff member in her Green Impact team. For the past two years, Cathy’s team has won our overall Green Impact award and achieved Gold both years. Many people have been influenced by the team’s work and have started engaging with sustainability because they can see the work Cathy and her student colleague Davina practice, leadership in action at their campus.

Participating in Green Impact, Cathy found helped build links throughout the wider Northwest Coast community as well as strengthening partnerships within the UTAS community.