Scaling

Conclusion: Scaling

Getting your intervention project to have a meaningful impact that can last beyond a one-time initiative is a distinct challenge in promoting sustainability on campus. Overcoming this challenge takes dedication, vision, collaboration, and strategic effort, making it important to consider how you might scale (increase the extent of) and sustain (increase the endurance of) your project throughout the intervention design process.

Building Blocks for Scaling and Sustaining

Being able to create a successful intervention entails different key factors that can lead to the project's ability to expand and endure. These factors, or building blocks, include:

Laying the Foundation of the Program

Being able to develop strategic plans and foster connections with project partners and between the different building blocks involved in the project

Building Pathways to Solutions-Oriented Sustainability Learning

Being able to develop capacity for educational design oriented towards sustainability and positive campus and community impact through a focus on context-specific, collaborative sustainability problem-solving

Connecting Projects to Programs

Being able to develop and maintain frameworks, partnerships, and resources that allow individual projects to be linked to broader programs and initiatives

Creating and Enabling Institutional Environment

Being able to navigate the drivers and barriers within the organizational structure and find ways, through stakeholder engagement and strategic planning, to cultivate support, resources, and opportunities for your project to be implemented and grow over time

Phases of Scaling and Sustaining

In addition to considering these different building blocks, you will also need to plan the different phases for scaling and sustaining your project. Progressing through these phases in strategic ways can support your project to evolve from an individual prototype effort into a collaborative and comprehensive initiative. These phases include:

Pre-development

Having a vision and a strategic plan to move it forward

Take off

Growing the vision and bringing others in to support

Acceleration

Empowering others to participate and drive innovation and impact

Stabilization

Adapting and evolving the program into a new normal in which scaling and sustaining your project are possible

Integrating Scaling and Sustaining

Bringing together the building blocks and phases suggests a framework for you to consider how to scale and sustain your project over time. While this is only one way to approach this process, we encourage you to think about the opportunities and barriers that you face in your context, as well as the collaborations and resources that you have to help you navigate your situation. Scaling is not just about sustaining but the depth and spread of change, as well as the shift in mindsets and agency that the process facilitates. By taking a strategic, collaborative, and iterative approach, you can find ways to generate lasting impact that fulfills your sustainability vision.

This section draws from a publication of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education developed through a joint effort of scholars and practitioners at the School of Sustainability at Arizona State and the Institute for Sustainable Solutions at Portland State University. Learn more here: A Guide for Applied Sustainability Learning Projects: Advancing Sustainability Outcomes on Campus and in the Community.

NEXT: Conclusion - Application

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