WHAT IS GREEN CANTEEN?

Over the last year the Green Canteen team has been working on reducing the amount of meat served in Denmark’s university canteens, hopefully making them completely vegetarian by 2028. We’re currently working on both the UCPH canteens as well as the canteens at DTU. The Danish climate council has officially stated that reducing meat in public canteens is one of the best ways to create lasting change in the general population’s eating habits, thereby having the potential to reduce the Danish population’s CO2 emissions substantially.

The reason we believe that university canteens are especially important is that they can influence an incredibly diverse and large group of people right before they go out to have an array of different jobs and positions of power in society.

Why should you join?

By joining this project, you will become a part of a small but very dedicated group of climate activists, who all have different skill sets and educational backgrounds. Additionally, everyone involved has reported feeling more optimistic about the climate crisis after joining the group, as it is work that until now has produced tangible and positive results, showcasing that change in large institutions is possible.

Finally, the work is professionally rewarding, as it hones skills such as networking, collaboration, communication and strategizing making it a great addition to your CV.

What can you do?

There are a lot of different types of work within the project, but the Green Canteen team mainly need help with the ones listed below. You can expect to have an influence equal to the amount of work and engagement you put in, so depending on what area you’d prefer to work with you can become a key part of our strategizing or simply help us out with practical but very valuable work.

Below are the three workgroups:

1. Institutional work

This group works with contacting stakeholders and decision makers at Copenhagen University, to push for the canteens to reduce the amount of meat served and carbon emissions. The work in this group is:

• Gathering, organizing and communicating data about the social an environmental effect of canteens reducing meat
• Booking and having meetings with university faculty, leadership and organizations outside of UCPH
• Researching funding, grants and additional strategies when it comes to reducing meat in public canteens.Nature of the work: 2-4 hours/weekWe’ll meet around once a week either in person or over zoom, the dates of these meetings are decided depending on everyone’s schedule. The tasks will be distributed among the group, Anna and Jakob. In the weekly meetings we’ll assess our progress, come with input to each other’s work and plan for the next week. This work has a high amount of independence, flexibility and responsibility. You can expect to gain skills within fundraising, networking and a broader understanding of political processes.

  The amount of time you put into this work is up to you but will likely be around 2-4 hours. Our main request is that you participate actively in meetings, respect our guidelines for external and internal communication and that you are able and willing to take on tasks between meetings.

2. SoMe and graphical design:

This group works with creating social media posts, designing posters and designing a website for the group. We already had a professional graphic designer to design our logo and colors, and the work will therefor mostly be about utilizing those designs in our external communication. You therefore don’t need to be creatively gifted to contribute! If you do want to work more creatively, we would appreciate more input and ideas to our graphic identity. The tasks include:

• Finding/creating images and text for posters
• Creating texts and design ideas for our website
• Creating SoMe posts for our Instagram

Nature of the work: 2-4 hours/week

Depending on how many join this group, you’ll either work independently or with a small team (or independently in a small team). You’ll join the weekly meetings with the rest of the group where we’ll discuss what we need and how it should play into our strategy.

3. Outreach

This group works with reaching out to and engaging students. The goal of the group is to collect signatures, inform students about the campaign and the benefits of reducing meat in canteens. The work in this group is:

• Going around campus and collecting signatures while handing out cakes/snacks
• Hanging up posters and informational materials on the UCPH campuses
• Helping at setting up and manning stands at UCPH events such as KU festival, UnionDay etc.Nature of the work: 4-8 hours/month

  This work is mainly physical and social, meaning that we’ll meet 1-2 times every month and collect signatures and hang up posters or participate in bigger events. You can sign up to join any time, or only once or twice in the semester. We’ll walk around in small groups of 4-5 and hang up posters/collect signatures and there is therefore a large social aspect to the work.

You will be added to a discord server, where we’ll list the dates, and where you can sign up. You can expect to meet other like-minded students and utilize your communication and people skills. Our only expectation is that you follow our code of conduct when talking to other students about sensitive subjects such as the environment and meat consumption.

Our only request is that you’re open to constructive feedback and respect our code of conduct for external communication.

Want to join this driven volunteer team? Get in touch with Actory at info@actory.dk