Council of Sustainability

The Council of Sustainability (CoS) is a student-led organisation that works to promote sustainability at Kristin. We started the year with a weekend of team-building and planning, which also included a beach clean-up at Sulphur Bay. We hope this year will be our best one yet, so we have set many goals.

Our most important goal for this year is to achieve Enviroschools' Green Gold status. In 2019, Kristin achieved a Silver status and this year we’re going for the Gold! On 6 July, the CoS and various other supporting students will undergo a reflection to decide whether Kristin supports and promotes the five pillars of Enviroschools to a high degree.

These pillars are: sustainable communities, learning for sustainability, empowered students, Māori perspectives, and respect for diversity. The full-day reflection event will include our Principals, members of the Board, Auckland Council, Upper Harbour Local Board members and many more interested parties.

Some major actions we have taken since our 2019 reflection are: implementing the student-led proposal of five new compost bins for everyone to use, the calculation of Kristin’s carbon footprint, the initiation of the Bicultural group and the development of the Interschool Sustainability Series (an online community forum for secondary school students around Auckland to share their school’s sustainability progress, created by Year 13 student Azaria Eddy).

Through our Enviroschool planning days, we have created advertising initiatives, communicated with the Junior School, organised the reflection itinerary and more. The CoS and the Reflection Team look forward to the possibility of achieving this awesome status for the school.

Other goals we are working on include being more inclusive of our younger students. Kristin is a school of many ages and we have now appointed new Junior School members to represent and share their views. The tuckshop and café at Kristin are areas where many students don’t consider the impacts for sustainability. Research is in progress on alternative packaging, waste issues and how well our suppliers meet our goals to be more sustainable.

One of our aims from last year, yet to be achieved, was to provide a platform for all of the sustainable groups of Kristin to provide insight on. Well, that’s underway too! And we are now working very hard to include Māori aspects into school life, with the introduction of a new Bicultural team.

If you are interested in learning more about what the Council of Sustainability is doing, you can access our website through the Kristin Portal. On our website, you will see weekly updates on our progress and other interesting bits of information such as Kristin’s Carbon Footprint Report, where you can see what we spend energy on in specific categories.

Through all of these goals, the CoS hopes to make Kristin even more sustainable in 2022 and we look forward to being a Green Gold Enviroschool in the near future!

Top left: Lucy Bolger, our Council of Sustainability Chair getting student voice at the Senior School Market. Bottom left: Our Enviroschool reflection team, brainstorming ideas for our Green Gold reflection day. Right: Council of Sustainability members at our "camp" event, a beach clean up at Sulphur Bay in Auckland.