“Dear future projects: Always have a contingency plan. Life works in unexpected ways. Never rush, go slow, but plan your route and work hard to get where you want to go.”
Fall 2019 - Winter 2020 In Review
In the 2020-2021 Academic Year, we funded 28 projects a total of $126,375
This year we introduced a new pool of funding with the Sustainability Living Labs Partnership with the university however, projects were still requesting more funding from the SAF than is available.
This metric shows how much from the total allocated funding, $126,374, was given to each sustainability theme recognized by the SAF. It should be noted that Education & Research projects often fill in sustainability gaps in Concordia student's curriculum.
- Energy, Resources & Technology
- Health & Wellness
- Community
- Waste
- Education & Research
- Food Systems
- Social Justice
This year we saw a particularly large uptick in students taking on projects of social sustainability, we believe this is a reflection of the momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement. This year the SAF funded and received the greatest amount of race and ethnicity-based project applications.
This metric is typical and consistent in terms of total funding allocated per faculty. It suggests that students in that Engineering and Business students are either less likely to take on projects of sustainability or that they are unaware of the SAF to fund their sustainability projects.
- Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science
- Faculty of Fine Arts
- John Molson School of Business
- Faculty of Arts and Science
This metric shows how many projects we have allocated funding to and how many projects we have denied funding for in each year. This year the amount of applicants we recieved was lower than normal. We have concluded that this is likely due to the pandemic and not being able to not have gatherings. Some projects were able to function online, others may have not pursued their ideas because of the challenges the Covid 19 pandemic presented.
Dear Future Projects...
“This project was organized and held entirely online, which was a first time for us. Even if our screens were holding us apart from each other physically, we still found pros to organizing a successful online event and found alternative ways to get people to interact with our exhibition outside of the realm of the university by reaching out to various local businesses that helped us promote our event. An advice for future projects that might have to organize online events is find out of the box alternatives to make your event as immersive as you can. “
“We would recommend looking into the changing policies for online promotion on social media platforms. Recently, Facebook has black-listed many topics related to politically contentious issues. Unfortunately, this resulted in our application for facebook promotions being denied twice due to its connections with recent social movements on racial injustice.”
” One lesson we learned related to the project management of our exhibition was to eliminate as many uncertainties as possible, as early as possible – especially when you have limited time and funding. During the summer of 2020, our team was conceptualizing our exhibition as a hybrid in-person and virtual event. Given the worsening situation with COVID, by August our team decided that we would shift entirely virtually since health restrictions were constantly changing. By deciding to go virtual early, the team was able to refocus our limited time and resources on what we knew we could make happen regardless of restrictions, rather than struggling to make the project fit to the changing scenario. Looking back, if we were committed to doing things in person, we would have wasted a lot of time planning and re-planning, and in the end, we might not have had an exhibition at all. “
“Schedule time to breath in your timeline, congratulate team members on the little and big tasks completed, keep track of feedback as it will fuel you through the lows and highs, and when your project is aligned with your passion, fear and indecision seem a lot less important!
“Through the FASA x SAF Anti-Oppression Coordinator Pilot Project, we have learned that it is possible to accomplish a lot in a short amount of time, and that by working collectively it is possible to make real changes in our organization. At this point, we have hired two short-term Anti-Oppression coordinators, who are working hard to make this project a recurring position at FASA. Now that the coordinators are hired, there are four main focuses of the project: (1) putting on 2 speaker events by BIPOC artists at the end of May for fine arts students to attend, (2) writing a proposal to the FASA Board of Directors for a permanent Anti-Oppression coordinator, who would be hired and trained at the end of the current pilot project, (3) the creation of a watchdog organization called the Anti-oppression and Intersectionality in Fine Arts (AIFA) that would be composed of a 5 person committee and would exist under the FASA umbrella, and (4) the creation of a FASA BIPOC bursary program to award bursaries to applicants who fill out a detailed questionnaire that will help us better understand the needs of the BIPOC student community. “
“In doing solidarity actions, it is very important to get consent and direction from leaders of the movement you are engaging in. From the beginning of this project we reached out to Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform and Consulted with Francine Tremblay, both have a history of involvement in the movement to decriminalize sex work. Consultation is an integral part of solidarity action. We had media interest in the campaign but, in the end no article was published. In the future I would recommend preparing an Op-ed and sending it to local and student newspapers.”
“ The biggest challenge I faced during this project was staying organized and effectively working with other artists. With a film that has a medium sized budget, keeping track of grants and department progress while simultaneously directing actors was a bit of a challenge but I also learned more about myself and how I like to work. Working with so many different artists can be difficult but I tried to keep my vision at the forefront so it was not drowned out by different opinions. My biggest advice would be to stay true to yourself and your artistic process but also be open to working with those who are in and outside of your field! “