Humber Students Win Grand Prize at Ontario's WWF Sustainability Competition

On Saturday, March 24, to kick start Humber Earth Week, six of our students participated in the World Wildlife Fund’s first ever Designing Change for a Living Planet 2018 Competition. 14 other Ontario universities and colleges participated and our Humber College students took home the grand prize!

The following post-secondary schools participated in the challenge:

  • Algonquin College
  • Centennial College
  • Fleming College
  • George Brown College
  • Wilfried Laurier University 
  • Mohawk College
  • Niagara College
  • Seneca College
  • University of Toronto
  • University of Windsor
  • University of Waterloo

Humber College is a pilot member of the WWF Living Planet @ Campus for post-secondary schools in Ontario. The Office of Sustainability also served on the competition’s steering committee over the last four months and helped develop the program that included support of over 10 industry partners and subject matter experts.

The goal of the competition was to develop a develop a disruptive innovation idea solving a day-to-day sustainability issue. Student participants were provided two hours to develop the idea and present the idea to over 80 audience members and three judges within five minutes. Our students presented a concept that involved an app with an algorithm, connecting tenants, landlords, and roommates to encourage lower footprint co-living (even taking into consideration childcare, meal sharing, transportation, and food gardens to mitigate emissions caused by distribution). The students won the grand cash prize of $1,200 and an opportunity for each of the students to meet with an industry leader of their choice.

A huge congratulations to the following students:

  • Ankit Joshi – Civil Engineering Technology, SAT
  • Avita Ragnauth – Tourism – Travel Services, HRT
  • Ezgi Cokuysal – User Experience Design, Media Studies
  • Graham Budgeon – International Development, Business School
  • Jasmine Wong – Sustainable Engineering and Building Technology, SAT

The Humber team members were selected from the IGNITE Sustainability Club and based on recommendations from our faculty members. We are already receiving an increase in interest in our Sustainability Club and we hope to see more interest from our students to participate in competition in the future! 

Photo credit to Kathy Nguyen, WWF