Story

4 years of the Climate Advocates programme at UAL

Written byCommunications
Published date 17 August 2026

**Earth Week 2025: Gaia Bomb workshop | Photograph: Tika Sufyan**

Since 2022, the Climate Advocates Programme has evolved into one of UAL’s flagship ‘Students as Partners’ initiatives. Working closely with a wide range of job families across UAL, Climate Advocates (CA) are paid student-partners led by Climate Advocate Leads in each College. As current students, or recent graduates, they promote environmental awareness and sustainability in teaching and operations and meet regularly to share good practice within the community.

Their primary role is to support the work of embedding Climate, Social and Racial Justice (CSRJ) into the curriculum, bringing the tools, expertise and knowledge from their various creative discipline. This collaborative approach provides students with the opportunity to have a real impact in the pedagogical development of UAL.

We spoke with Climate Advocates Samantha Jarman (CCW), Mia Liyange (LCC) and Monika Gravagno (CSM) to hear about how the programme is taking shape.

Can you outline your role within the Climate Advocates Programme?

Mia: I bring expertise from my work with course teams as a Senior Educational Developer at LCC, and it dovetails quite nicely with working with students as a climate advocate coordinator. I’m responsible for designing the job ad, recruiting them and supporting them as a mentor figure throughout the year. I introduce them to various people and projects that can help them on the journey which supports them to make interventions to embed climate justice at LCC.

Samantha: I have been involved in the CCW Climate Advocate programme since 2022 when it was first developed. We typically have between 7 and 9 Climate and Repair Advocates each year, with a spread of discipline expertise and year groups. We run weekly meetings which support their training in ecological, carbon and material literacy which helps them to develop and deliver their programme. We support the re-approval and the course validation process; offering feedback on course modifications and material to ensure the CSRJ principles are embedded.

Monika: I coordinate and lead the group of CA at CSM and we work to embed CSRJ in the curriculum. This takes the shape of running—and sometimes continuing—annual projects in collaboration with the academic team, technical team, or Estates. The CA are often consulted for the educational strategy, or for the PG certification.

How do you approach the Climate Advocates Programme at your College? What are you testing, challenging and learning through it?

Mia: I approach it as an opportunity for students to receive payment and remuneration for work that they would probably have been doing already – student advocacy on climate justice is a huge part of why initiatives exist at UAL. A lot of staff advocates are quite indebted to students for making the issue impossible to ignore. It's about empowering students and alumni to take on that role and explore what leadership and what advocacy means to them. A lot of Climate Advocates are interested in how working on climate justice can bring students together and create empowerment and hope and optimism and community. What I have been learning this year is how to achieve those aims in a large, fast-moving educational environment.

Samantha: We build our timetable around the Wimbledon Sustainability Symposium in November and Earth Week in April. The Carbon Literacy training and all the CSRJ training sits around that. They develop workshops that can be facilitated within courses and generate a theory of change to consider how they can measure the impact of their projects. It's phenomenal what they achieve in 4 hours a week. They learn how to collaborate really well with each other, plan, ideate, organise, deliver, and evaluate the projects that they've been running, which is why I see it as it's like a placement. At CCW, the CA introduce themselves at the Student Experience Forum and celebrate and showcase the work at the Students as Partners Festival at the end of the year. There is lots of collaboration and crossover across the advocacy programmes at CCW. These include the Changemakers, Repair Advocates, Climate Advocates and Community Advocates.

Monika: The Climate Advocates projects don’t sit in isolation each year. A lot of effort goes into making sure that they establish and document networks, or that they continue and steward projects. It is never about one person doing a project. It's built in a way that when this cohort of Climate Advocates leaves, someone else can take a project and continue it, respond to it, reduce it in scale or zoom into an aspect of it. So there is also a sense of legacy, responsibility and authorship that is shared as well, which I think is important.

Tell us about a specific project that you have worked on with the Climate Advocates in the last year?

Mia: One of our climate advocates now runs a composting business. It is an example of the true partnership modelling of this programme where a Climate Advocate like Yoshimi, who was a student and is now alumni, can found a business while collaborating with staff members who are working in the same area, and be paid to do some of that work at UAL.

Samantha: Let's Talk About It is a conversation workshop created by the CCW Climate Advocates to help conversations about identity, culture, lived experience, and for those conversations to feel easier and more natural. We did workshops with Citizens UK when we were developing it last year. Using simple prompt cards, the session encourages gentle and honest conversation in a relaxed setting. The toolkit uses reflective and playful question cards, partner rotation, and short time rounds to make meaningful dialogue feel safe and accessible.

Monika: For the last couple of years we have established a circular network for recycling calico and mixed fibres in the fashion programme. We work very closely with Estates, the technical textile workshops, the fashion tutors, and an external partner who sorts and shreds the fibres to be rewoven. In parallel, we work with the students to understand the value of materials and how to treat or design with the materials so they are recyclable and how to classify and process them so they can be. For example, not using lots of mixed materials, ensuring materials can be taken apart, removing pins, separating areas with glue. So far, it is the legacy of three years of climate advocates.

How do you think this initiative has climate impact at your College?

Mia: They are a very visible part of the College who are oriented towards this work. I think the name brand recognition is a huge thing. Whenever people talk about sustainability, they're like, “What about the climate advocates?”. It's a very valuable perspective and having people whose role it is to focus on that is helpful. There aren't many other issues at UAL that have been given such a specific platform where students are empowered to feedback at this level.

Samantha: The Climate Advocates understanding of the CRSJ’s has really supported how they encourage students to be aware through the workshops they run within courses and during events like Earth Week. Whether that workshop is about food literacy, environmentally responsible tech or carbon data. The one on food literacy taught students and staff how to decipher food labels, know all the various names for sugars and emulsifiers and understand how food sustainability links to landscape health. The programme is very visible, and this is increased by students hosting and organising workshops. Particularly with the monthly repair cafe, it's a way to demonstrate that everyone can make a difference by small actions.

Monika: It is about treating climate justice not as a silo but making sure that we are aware of the interconnection it has with social and racial justice. Positive climate intervention is not just about huge, massive impact on a scale that goes beyond the UAL, but it's about little actions that educate our students and allow them to participate actively. For example, we are doing a project in the roof garden about permaculture and making the space legible for students to be there, to study there, to not just have a lunch break, but to utilise it as a resource for learning outdoors. The idea of the climate advocate is to make sure that we have this agency and advocacy, although we are a small group.

What makes climate-engaged learning work for students/staff?

Mia: Students and staff are animated by the real world. Making that learning work is to convince them it is a real thing. Projects which are tied to live examples of this work across the university ensure the work is done collaboratively and has more impact than if the project is hypothetical. We need to teach an approach to collectivity to engage with these topics, connecting and articulating how Climate, Social, and Racial justice is felt in different global contexts. That's the connection and empowerment piece. We need moral courage and education in order for people to feel empowered to bring the real world into their classrooms. I think one of the things that makes CRSJ learning work is a sense of ownership for students, and with that comes empowerment and support to discuss these knotty issues. I would argue that those are principles of inclusive pedagogy regardless and creating cohesive community spaces to discuss these issues does the world of good.

Samantha: A combination of autonomy and trust. Giving them autonomy to run their own projects, but also the space and the training to develop their professional skills. They're at various stages when they become part of the programme. So, longstanding CAs of two years support the students coming in. Students take it in turns to lead or shadow, step forward or step back. So, they come in as individuals and before you know it, they're working in an amoebic way. It's interesting.

Monika: Scale is super important. Often at the beginning of the programme, the Climate Advocates try to answer these very big questions about the climate crisis. We can hit a wall of feeling very sad and discouraged and not understanding how we're going to engage. But when we try to scale it down, make it approachable, feasible, they find some agency.

How has the programme evolved since your involvement and have there been crucial or surprising collaborations?

Mia: A librarian at LCC offered us a space in the library to showcase Climate Advocate projects. He then dressed that space with books from the library that are relevant to the project. We've had a lot of engagement with it and people borrowing books from the display. It's also great for the current climate advocates because they can understand a bit about past CA projects.

Monika: The big change has been the shift from 8 climate advocates working closely with each Programme Director when we launched the Climate Advocates. This led to some unbalanced outcomes across the programmes and now there are 2 climate advocates for each school and we work with any job family at CSM: cleaners, workshop technicians, tutors, the estate. It is a more dynamic way of building collaborative relationships from this process.

What has been the most surprising aspect of this work?

Mia: I've been surprised by just how much impact can be created by something as simple as this programme existing. I think people care and I think they want space to be acknowledged and supported to imagine things. That as a bedrock is, again, a principle of inclusive pedagogy anyway. What the Climate Advocates, as a programme represents is naming something, creating specialism, creating time, creating funding, creating compensation, all of those things. I believe so strongly that creating space for these things makes an impact.

Samantha: One of my surprises this year was what can come out of the relationship between the talking and the doing. Eliminating the fear of talking about difficult subjects through zine making or through the tears in our fabric project where they're mending and talking and thinking about non-violent communication and we'd like to do more work on that.

Monika: A lot of joy comes from working with the Climate Advocates. My role is very staff facing, and I don’t see students that much outside of this. So the work re-centres the purpose of my role as Education Developer.

Hear from some of our Climate Advocates

As a Climate Advocate, I bring a small island perspective from the Caribbean into a London institution. In the Bahamas, climate change has always felt immediate, so being able to speak about environmental justice from that frontline position feels deeply meaningful. It has sharpened my sense of responsibility as a documentary filmmaker. This work has pushed me to be more intentional about the stories I tell.

— Lauren Richie, Climate Advocate (LCC)

Monika, my Climate Advocate Lead, really empowered me to find my voice in this space and gave me the confidence and platform to put my regenerative design research into practice. I’ve also been inspired by the grassroots care and commitment of technicians and students, who actively reflect their values through their everyday choices. Overall, it’s given me a glimpse into the kind of work I hope to pursue in the future.

— Hannah Ogahara, Climate Advocate (CSM)

I’m proud of co-curating the Earth Week workshop programme and helping create a space where people could engage with climate ideas through creativity.

— Natalia Ryzhova, Climate Advocate (Camberwell)