Hello, this is Peter Levesque. Welcome to episode fifteen of the Knowledge Exchange Podcast. This podcast series is a product supported by the Canadian Council on Learning – Canada's leading organization committed to improving learning across Canada and in all walks of life. I want to thank the great staff at CCL for their efforts with this project to advance our understanding of effective knowledge exchange to improve the learning of Canadians. You can download this episode, as well as one of the five future episodes in the series from my website at www.knowledgemobilization.net, from iTunes directly, just search for KM podcast. Alternatively go to knowledgeexchange.podomatic.com Dr. Beth Savan is a world renowned leader in the practice of environmental sustainability. While the topic of the environment is much discussed by many, if not most, Canadians, Beth has spent the last 25 years actually doing something about these issues. The examples she gives of projects from the University of Toronto, are now having wider effects on other institutions, and more importantly on the generation of students currently going through a transformative period in their lives. One lesson I pulled from our conversation, is that knowledge exchange happens in many forms; most powerfully however, in face-to-face learning that is also supported by web-accessible information and institutional enablers. I was inspired and hopeful after this interview. I hope that you are too.
Peter: I'm in the Earth Sciences building at the University of Toronto with Beth Savan. Beth thanks for taking the time today and can you just introduce yourself and tell people a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Beth: Sure Peter. I'm the Sustainability Director at the University of Toronto and I've been on the faculty at the Centre of Environment and previously at Innis College teaching environmental studies for 25 years now. During the course of that period, I've worked extensively with environmental, non-governmental organizations off campus both in terms of providing support for them and also…of various kinds…and also in terms of providing venues for students to learn on the ground, off campus. So I've facilitated a kind of an exchange between those outside community groups and the University over many years and I've now taken that experience and the knowledge of how to harness the resources both on campus and off campus to my current position which is really an internal university position where I'm trying to marshal grass roots support and use grass roots energy to green universities as a whole. Peter: Okay. The environment is on everybody's agenda now, whether they are actually doing things or not…and one of the definitions of knowledge exchange or knowledge mobilization is bringing people and evidence together to influence behavior. What does this mean to you? If you were to think about that in the context of the environment, what is knowledge exchange for you?
Beth: I think that there are many kinds of knowledge that need to be brought together with people and with their values in order to influence behavior and we're involved in a very specific example of doing that with the goal of conserving energy and other resources on campus. So we have a program which we called Rewire and it was…the initial impetus was provided by two, second year graduate student who piloted it 3 years ago – it's now expanded and is in seven residences and several offices on campus and we expect within the next few years, to go campus-wide. What we do is we bring information to people about practical methods that they can undertake to conserve energy and other resources and we marry that to the information that they already have from the outside society in terms of impacts of climate change on their own personal environmental values and we do so in a quite calculating way that brings together all of these motivators and results in concrete behavior change and we've accomplished savings of 10% in terms of electricity use in residences and 6% in offices. So it's a very carefully orchestrated campaign which builds on knowledge that we provide but also knowledge which is outside in society and which people have access to through all the usual media. Peter: So how do you actually align those various forms of knowledge? Do they compete with one other? Can you get them to work together?
Beth: I think that behavior change is likeliest to happen and may only happen when they are aligned. When you're competing with other sources of information so that if, for example the media were still saying climate change is a mirage and the evidence doesn't support it and the icecaps are getting bigger and polar ice is expanding and the summer ice is lasting longer and we were telling everybody, you know what climate change is an imminent issue and you've got to cut down on your energy consumption in order to reduce emissions, I think we'd have much less success. What the psychological literature shows and what we also have found is that when people have an internal set of values which motivate them to act in a certain way, they find it very difficult to act otherwise and so if they have failed to act consistently with their values, it's very often because they don't know how perhaps because they feel that there is not peer support for acting in that way but most importantly, they don't know how or it could be inconvenient. Peter: That's an interesting piece because the not knowing how fits in with what the Canadian Council on Learning is doing on trying to create a culture and a context of supporting life-long learning. So in the context of the environment and of changing behavior with regards to emissions, how does that process of knowledge exchange and life-long learning fit together within the context of learning how to do something very practical like reduce your emissions?
Beth: What we have found - and we've tried a variety of techniques over the 3 or 4 years that we've been doing this - is that a combination of techniques works best. So we tried to rely on the Web and with some paper feedback to people about what their behavior change was resulting in and that had limited success - it had some success but it was limited. What has been the most successful is that when we have information available on the web that we make widely available to everyone but the primary form of contact is face to face with somebody they know ideally on their same residence floor, in their same suite of offices, someone they bump into everyday who is promoting the kinds of simple changes that we're advocating and when they get that face to face information – when it's modeled for them – when they are shown how they can make very small, very easy steps that make a difference and then build on those smaller, easy steps to more difficult undertakings, we find it's been quite successful. So I think that relying exclusively on technology, relying exclusively on words on paper or images on paper is going to be much less successful than when you can harness peoples relationships. And so I think it's those relationships that provide the avenue and I think that's important in the environmental area but it's important in all other areas as well and when there are people that can model behaviors and model a role that others can follow then that can be very powerful. Okay so to give an example I think that increasingly, people in the downtown area are using bicycles and walking to work and there's been a whole change in the real estate market, at least in Toronto, where downtown condominiums have become extremely desirable and there's been a dramatic increase in the population of the core area of downtown Toronto which has exceeded the increase of population in the greater Toronto area. One of the things that's happening is that what was 10 or 15 years ago, a relatively small active transportation movement, has now become very mainstream and so that the model developed by early cyclists and enthusiastic pedestrians has now morphed into something that is very much mainstream, that these downtown condo owners are recognizing and they are actually purchasing homes that enable them to use those active transportation methods and it's one of the real draws for people to move downtown from outer areas. And so I think those models, those early models that can be provided, can legitimize a new kind of behavior and it's through the face to face modeling of the those new behaviors that people see that it's possible for them. Especially when carried out by someone they admire or a peer who they feel has similar values.
Peter: You're based at the University of Toronto and it's a large institution – how does the institution or the organization support those processes? Are there particular incentives put in to place? Is there a particular infrastructure put in place that supports modeling, supports those relationships, supports the face to face?
Beth: Ah, there wasn't four years ago but there is now. Peter: Okay, so how did that come about?
Beth: What happened was the Toronto Atmospheric Fund provided a significant grant to the University to set up a sustainability office to look at various techniques for reducing energy consumption. One of which was a major retrofit of some of our largest buildings which was spearheaded by Facilities and Services.
So over the last three years the Sustainability office has been developed, it's grown, I've been installed as the Director and we predicated our efforts on engagement of students so the first that we did were hire 35 work studies students, we engaged many coursework students in independent study courses and they did things like start this Rewire project, they've started a paper conservation project called Resource and they started a transportation project called The Bikechain and all of these have been student initiated. So we engage about 100 students a year and when the University saw what was going on, both in terms of enlivening the experience of our students and giving them an outlet beyond their normal course work and when Facilities and Services saw the kind of gains in terms of energy conservation that we were able to support, a number of units at the University pitched in money, both to support the student engagement and to support the energy savings so we now have a base budget which allows us to continue.
So it's a kind of a marrying of the engagement with the very focused activities and the research that goes into monitoring those activities so that we can demonstrate what the concrete savings are and what the financial benefits are of those savings that has, I think has allowed us to become institutionalized. And one of the outcomes is that not only the students who are mostly green when they get here, at least in mind if not in action, but the staff have become extremely enthusiastic about these initiatives and are really gung-ho about doing things in the offices and in their buildings in a way that I never anticipated. So there's been really quite a groundswell. Peter: There's an interesting piece because one of the…people getting together to create actions and create these initiatives have lead to a series of other things being implemented and one of the arguments I've heard from some places is that we actually need good evidence – we need to have this all very well grounded before we actually move forward. So when you hear the word “evidence”, what does that mean? Do you actually act only when you have all the evidence or is there a tipping point where you can put something into practice?
Beth: Well Facilities likes to know for sure, that they will save money when they invest in capital projects and they have…there's a history of green buildings being put forward and they turn out to be less green than they were supposed to be so that you end up with an increase in operating budget where it was expected that there would be a decrease in operating budget. So for very good reason, Facilities and Services want to have clear, demonstrated savings before they'll put their money into something that costs more upfront. So that's one kind of evidence. The kind of evidence that interests me is…I'm interested in pushing the envelope more than that and I'm interested at looking at what can be done that might not have been done before but I'm also interested in finding out whether it really can be done and not just functioning on the basis of wishful thinking. All of our projects marry research and monitoring with experimentation so for example with our Rewire project, we aren't just going into it an relying on surveys that people say “oh yes, they are more environmentally friendly at the end of our project then at the beginning”, we're actually carrying out detailed site-specific monitoring of electricity consumption to find out whether it has gone down on an annual basis, pre and post our Rewire intervention. Peter: So no just proceed but there's actually a measurable change? Beth: Yes, so and I think…we don't wait to see that measurable change before we intervene – we intervene and during the intervention we monitor to find out what the outcome of that intervention is. So I have a slightly different approach from Facilities – they want to see those results before they'll invest. I won't do that. I get funds from various sources including research funds to do those experiments to find out what works, to tailor the approach to make sure we have the maximum beneficial outcome and then we can say “okay, we've got the evidence, we've done the monitoring, this works, let's spread it out and use these programs more broadly.
