Testimonial
Making events in Wageningen more sustainable
Multiple groups of students in the course Academic Consultancy Training (ACT) collaborated with non-profit organization Stichting Onderweg naar Duurzaam to make events in Wageningen more sustainable – by means of providing hands-on solutions for local entrepreneurs and policy advice to the municipality.
The students were very professional and eager to learn, took feedback well, and really wanted to think along.
Stichting Onderweg naar Duurzaam is a non-profit organisation based in Wageningen, and is dedicated to making events more sustainable. They do this by providing practical solutions for local entrepreneurs and other event organizers. In addition to this, the organization helps to translate national policies to the local context and provides advice to the municipality. One of the projects for this commissioner was all about waste management at festivals and tried to answer the question “how do you get visitors to a festival to throw trash in the bin and then pick the right one?”. The students used visitors of Wageningen festivals in the Torckpark as a case study. The research outcomes were used for further development of event policies in Wageningen and helped to form a solid, well-based advice.
The commissioner was involved in the day-to-day process of the ACT group and held a meeting every week to stay up to date, answer questions that came up, discuss research methodologies and provide feedback to each other on collaboration.
Working with the students was top notch! They were very professional and eager to learn, took feedback well and really wanted to think along with the problems we encountered as an organization in the field. A very nice and serious collaboration.
The students used literature research, interviews, and field experiments with hardware materials. They discussed all their findings with the academic supervisor and produced a very informative and robust report. “The outcomes of the study were used by us in our role as advisor to the municipality in forming a new policy on events.”, Casper states.
“Our original question was actually; how do you ensure that visitors keep your grounds and surroundings clean and don't pollute? Thanks to the group's insight, the research question was divided into two, and it became clear that if you make sure food and drink packaging materials are appropriate, visitors correctly dispose of their waste more easily. This provided the insight to decide in advance what types of waste are going to be generated on the festival grounds.”