Dawson College wins international sustainability award

“I was yelling and screaming. We had the opportunity to watch it live and I was like yelling and screaming. I was ecstatic,” said Narcisse Hassan, intern for CI-CAN and the wellbeing and sustainability at Dawson College.

Montreal’s Dawson college wins the sustainability institution of the year award for its living campus composed of a vegetable garden, monarch nursery, bee hives and so much more.

Out of 56 colleges and universities across 19 countries against odds — Dawson is paving the way for the future of sustainability.

“It’s so amazing to be a part of a department that’s won this. And we’re not that we were put behind, but it’s just, you know, we’re kind of the underdog, as in we’re a CEGEP. We’re a bit younger. We don’t have as much funding. And they didn’t want to let us in initially because they don’t exactly know what CEGEPs are,” said Kal Rochon, an intern for CI-CAN and the wellbeing and sustainability at Dawson College.

“[There are multiple] biodiversity zones that we have on the college.  [There’s] a holding pond for aquatic plants where we’re about to begin an intensive course, an eco landscaping course as part of physical education, where we’re going to be catching rooftop water and using these plants to take in greenhouse gases and clean the water before it’s put back into the sewer,” said the sustainability and living campus office coordinator at Dawson College Chris Adam.

Interns Kal Rochon and Narcisse Hassan working on the holding pond for aquatic plants.

“We’ve got ponds here up on the rooftop as well that we’re experimenting with and many students will come in and study these areas. [We] have a mini orchard. peaches, pears, apples, grapes are growing on the roof  and we’re letting students see things that perhaps they don’t see in downtown Montreal.”

Dawson has been carbon neutral since 2018 and its sustainability efforts go beyond vegetation

“What actually sets Dawson and ahead of the curve is how they incorporate wellbeing and sustainability. It goes hand in hand. They have to coexist. And it’s the same thing about social justice issues and sustainability and stuff like that. That really harmonizes all of those aspects and taught me that it’s more than just not using plastic,” said Rochon.

“Implementing this as notion our core value of well-being for all it’s not just taking care of ourselves but other people and the and other species at the same time taking care of the planet,” said Adam.

Dawson College has over 50,000 bees on its property.

When the moss grows in between the cracks of the pavement – they pick it out and lay it around pots – where the bees then drink water from the moss.

Moss laid around a pot of vegetation for bees to drink from.

“We make that connection. Why do we have a vegetable garden? Why do we have bees? Without the bees, we won’t have our vegetables. So we kind of make that connection. Then we actually compost a lot of the vegetables, the leftovers or the when we prune the vegetables. So all of the waste goes into our compost, which then we teach the students to turn the compost into soil, which we then put it back into the gardens. Everything is a cycle here,” said Jennifer de Vera, who’s in charge of program development at Dawson College’s sustainability office.

“The fact that our bio retention projects. So this is going to be a living garden that’s actually going to take care of a lot of the runoff from the roof. So neutralizing the copper, taking care of the greenhouse gases, offsetting that, as well as increasing biodiversity and decreasing the heat island effect here,” said Rochon.

Dawson’s awards and jars of honey collected from its in-house bees.

Dawson hopes to inspire others to accomplish sustainable goals the way it was able to.

“I look forward to taking the projects that we’ve learned everything that we’ve learned about in terms of engineering to communications to ecology to future institutions and I think all the other schools out there if you want to contact us we’re more than willing to give you our plans,” said Hassan.