Green Impact is a multi award-winning sustainability learning and awards program, designed to embed environmentally and socially sustainable practices within organisations.

This can mean anything from communicating recycling systems, to committing to go Carbon Neutral; from supporting team health and wellbeing campaigns, to sustainable HR practices.

Green Impact is all about building a community within your organisation around sustainability and working together to create positive change. It encourages participants to improve their own sustainability literacy, give back to their local community, as well as strategically supporting organisation-wide targets and strategies.

Green Impact was originally created in 2006 by the National Union of Students (NUS) in the United Kingdom.

In 2019, in response to the climate emergency and ecological crisis, student officers and staff at NUS founded Students Organising for Sustainability UK (SOS-UK) to go further and faster with NUS’ transformational sustainability work. SOS-UK engages, supports and empowers students and wider society to learn, act and lead for environmental justice.

In partnership with SOS-UK, ACTS is the delivery partner for Green Impact in the Australasian region.

The ACTS mission is to empower, engage and exemplify organisations driving change and leading the transition towards a sustainable future.

Green Impact is a flexible framework that can be implemented in any type of organisations. Over the last decade the program has been successfully run in businesses and private sector organisations,  universities and colleges, healthcare, local authorities, museums and shops… just to name a few!

It’s excellent for engaging completely different types of staff teams in completely different types of organisations. The model really can be adapted for anywhere.

ACTS is a charity and our pricing model for Green Impact is designed to cover our time and resources, and is not-for-profit.

The annual program fee varies depending on the type and size of your organisation, as well as the scope and nature of the support that will be required.

The annual cost to run Green Impact is typically between $8,000 and $15,000 +GST per year. Your fees include a dedicated Project Officer from ACTS who will be on hand to support you with delivery of your program, which will involve ongoing planned support and reactive email support. As well as overall project management and set-up and hosting of the online toolkit, a range of activities and resources are also included.

Please contact us for a detailed quote.

Like with any good engagement program, you get out of Green Impact what you put into it.

As a minimum, we recommend organisations commit resourcing for 1 or 2 people to implement the program, investing 4–8 hours per week. The input required will vary throughout the year according to the six program milestones.

Our team will work with you to set realistic targets about what you want to achieve over your year of Green Impact, and help you develop a plan to dedicate resources accordingly.

Green Impact is the perfect way to bring together all the pieces of sustainability work you’re already doing, and streamlining their collective impact.

If you’re doing something bigger or more structured, it provides a perfect communication tool for disseminating information and getting action.

This can break staff out of silos, get people talking together, and engage more and more people from the bottom up to really bring the whole organisation on board.

Green Impact is really flexible, allowing you to adapt the program to suit the goals and values of our organisation.

The online toolkit that underpins the program is bespoke to your organisation. Each action in your toolkit can be mapped against your values or strategic priorities to show staff how the actions they achieve through Green Impact fit within the organisation.

Of course!

However, Green Impact provides a structured focus to your sustainability work, as well as connecting you into an international network of organisations using the same mechanism to drive positive change.

Working together and learning from each other, our efforts reinforce each other and push us to develop, evolve and better our performance.

So much. Our toolkits go far beyond the narrow confines of environmental actions and help to broaden conceptions of what sustainability means.

Each organisation’s toolkit is unique, but designed to help your community  drive change in areas from energy efficiency to procurement to economics to health and so much more. The actions of the Green Impact toolkit generate improvements in all aspects of  working life.

Other features of your toolkit can include:

• SDG Mapping. Each action in your toolkit can be mapped against the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. This allows staff to easily see that the actions they take not only benefit their team and their organisation, but also have wider impacts on creating a just and sustainable society.
• Actions for flexible working. With office-based staff working from home or flexibly, we can adapt standard actions to support staff wherever they are working.
• Self reporting tools. To improve our reporting on Green Impact, we can include self reporting functions to allow teams to input accurate information into the toolkit. This can help generate additional metrics for annual reporting, such as carbon reductions and cost savings.

Not really. Most Green Impact programs are implemented over a 12 month cycle, however there are no restrictions around when you can launch your program.

Green Impact is a tested program that covers the whole sustainability agenda.

• Meet your sustainability targets without enforcing, through a completely bespoke toolkit of actions that can be linked to your sustainability strategy or plan.
• Participation from across the whole organisation with tangible actions for different work environments (including offices, labs, grounds, clinicians, and catering).
• Gives champions a tangible role and builds community cohesion and better workplace dynamics by reducing siloed working and improving staff morale and pride.
• Provides measurable outcomes and reduced energy, waste and water.
• All actions are verified through university student auditors undertaking an ACTS auditor course.
• Added capacity to your sustainability work by engaging teams of staff.
• Improved reputation (amongst shareholders, PR, patients, local community).
• Staff and stakeholder learning and development opportunities through webinars and workshops.

Absolutely! Education institutions that take part in Green Impact can engage students in a number of ways. This can be as a direct team member (especially post graduates/PhD students who will often have dedicated space of their own), or in a volunteer support role as either a Project Assistant or a Student Auditor.

Not at all!

Green Impact was initially developed for student unions and universities, however the program evolved early on so that it could be adapted and implemented in any type and size of organisation.

The fantastic thing about Green Impact is that benefits from the skills, knowledge and research coming from the tertiary education sector, while being a program that is open to all.