At the beginning of the 2018-2019 school-year, the International School of Beijing made the transformative decision to create a long-term plan of what sustainability should look and feel like at ISB. An essential part of the process is understanding what issues (e.g., climate change, green buildings, healthy food) are important to not just the school leadership but also to the students, staff, parents, alumni and our major partners. To this end, we assembled 25 stakeholders representing all sections of the ISB community along with representatives from the US Green Building Council and a leading green energy company. Using the same L21 skills that are fundamental in our teaching (e.g., global thinking), this stakeholder working group explored the question:

How does ISB impact people and the planet and how can we make sure that impact is a positive one?

During the process, we have identified a number of areas where we have an opportunity and responsibility to generate positive impacts and these were incorporated into the Roadmap. From this Roadmap, we aim to create a sustainable community that contributes to our community and planet. We are dedicated to institutionalizing best practices in sustainable operations and translating teaching into practice by using our campus to pilot innovative solutions. We also have a deeper mandate that goes to the heart of our teaching mission: to educate and empower our students to become the next generation of leaders who will use their knowledge to create sustainable impact in service to the world.

Our approach towards developing ISB’s first Sustainability Roadmap was to bring together all parts of the school to provide a diverse set of perspectives. To this end, a Sustainability Working Group of 25 stakeholders including students, staff, parents, leadership, major partners, and external experts was assembled to represent the ISB community. At key stages within the Roadmap’s development, feedback processes were opened up to the entire community with the findings fed back to the Sustainability Working Group to support their work.

Our desire with this process was to create a document that represents the ambitions of the entire community, one that everyone will be committed in making a success.