Members of staff from the Estates Department were recently awarded Highly Commended Awards at the AUDE (Association of University Directors of Estates) Awards Gala Dinner at Canterbury Cathedral’s Chapter House.
Sarah Cooke, Head of Customer Services and Engagement, was Highly Commended in the Chair’s Award for Long Term Contribution. Sarah was recognised for continually developing her role and contributing within the Estates Department, the University as a whole, and to the local community. Sarah joined the Estates Department in 1989. She was shortlisted alongside three long-standing University Directors of Estates.
Sarah is the Head of Customer Services and Engagement. She is an excellent example of someone who has continually developed their role and sought to contribute more and more both within the Department, to the University and to the local community. Having joined the Estates Department in 1989 as a Data Operator within the Maintenance section, Sarah spent the early years of her career gaining knowledge and experience in various aspects of the Estates Department’s activities
Most recently, in keeping with the Department’s independent approach to value and goal setting, she has been instrumental in developing the CHOICE value system. As a result of her work with Investors in People, Sarah recognised the significance of implementing a set of core departmental values, as these are the essence of the department’s identity and underpin the behaviour of the team.
Sarah has also been closely involved with development of the Estates Management Development Programme (EMDP) specifically targeted at giving managers the right tools to do the job, and which has now been recognised at institutional level.
Community and social responsibility are two key drivers for the Department’s outreach work and Sarah has driven these with unswerving enthusiasm and dedication since the outset. This includes organising key annual events to engage staff and fundraising for local and national charities. In particular the Estates Charity Christmas raffle, which was an idea Sarah developed in 1999, and brings together Estates staff, local suppliers and businesses in collaboration to raffle off prizes to staff with all proceeds going to charity. The charity is selected from many nominated each year by staff members. The department then adopts this charity for the year; and this idea has led to several thousands of pounds going to worthwhile causes.
Emily Mason, Environmental Sustainability Assistant, received a Highly Commended award in the Emerging Talent Award category, for her project, Futureproof. It uses the UN Sustainable Development Goals as a framework for staff and students from across the University to assess the impact of their activities and create bespoke, targeted action plans to improve. By developing Futureproof, Emily has delivered something with far wider-reaching impacts than we had ever envisaged. This approach represents a significant change for the better as Universities are extremely diverse and are not suited to a one-size-fits-all approach.
Emily joined the Estates Department in January 2017 as Environmental Sustainability Assistant and was originally contracted to work until November 2017. Her remit was to design and roll out a University wide behaviour change project to replace the NUS Green Impact scheme which we had run for a number of years and had grown stale.
Having come from a similar role at the University of Greenwich, Emily was able to hit the ground running and make significant progress within weeks of commencing her role. She gave herself the ambitious target of pushing the University beyond traditional environmental behaviours into considering Sustainability in a more holistic way.
One of Emily’s particular strengths is her ability to deliver engaging, interactive sessions to a wide range of audiences. She has built up a large network of Sustainability Champions from across the University and delivers regular training sessions on a range of environmental and wider sustainability topics. These sessions have received excellent feedback from participants and have contributed to much better understanding of the issues across the University.
Emily has proved herself so valuable to the work of the Estates department that her contract was made permanent in November 2017 and we look forward to having her working here for the long-term.
On Monday 23 April, Peter Czarnomski, Director of Estates formally presented the awards to Sarah and Emily.