Community
At our University of Applied Sciences, people and growth are at the core. Acting together creates humanity, which promotes quality. This is how we achieve results. Community is the cornerstone of our activities. Therefore, most of our sustainability goals relate to it.
Our goals:
- We actively involve staff, students and stakeholders in sustainable development work.
- We strengthen the sustainability and responsibility expertise of the SEAMK community among our entire personnel.
- We make sustainability and responsibility work visible both inside and outside the community and strengthen communication.
- We develop and utilise SEAMK’s sustainable development goals and indicators and strengthen their utilisation.
- We promote the implementation of joint sustainability and responsibility programme and sustainability reporting of the universities of applied sciences.
- We develop the actions of SEAMK towards a university of applied sciences with less emissions.
How do we implement responsibility of the community?
At SEAMK, we make things together, respecting each other. We advance equality in our community. Our principles of safe space ensure that everyone can work in an open and respecting community. We want everyone to be equal and to be able to work and study in an open and respectful atmosphere. We take care of the wellbeing of our personnel in many ways. One of the indications is the recognition ”The most inspiring working places in Finland 2025” that our university of applied sciences has received. At SEAMK, our strength is leadership based on respect and trust, as well as good working conditions. We promote the language and culture awareness of our community and strengthen everyone’s togetherness with the community and involvement. We act according to our values in the spirit of SEAMK.
We pay attention to our students’ needs for wellbeing, as well as to their multicultural and individual support. We also offer guidance through internet connections. In addition to this, the students receive low-threshold support from the Studies Back on Track Clinic.
Find out more:
Responsible work is best done together. The work group of sustainability and responsibility promotes the responsibility work by developing activities both by planning and implementing practical measures of responsibility goals. The work group includes representatives from our key functions and a student representative from the student union SAMO of the Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences. Experts from our other operations participate also in the responsibility work, when necessary.
We collaborate closely together and share our best responsibility practices with our partners from the universities of applied sciences. We act in the joint sustainability and responsibility work groups of the universities of applied sciences. This gives us insight into goals and best practices of universities of applied sciences.
Our research, development and innovation activities produce a lot of fresh information. Our aim is to strengthen the collaboration between RDI and education. This gives our students the opportunity to utilise the latest research data and build a sustainable future in their own field.
SEAMK is part of the International HEROES Alliance of the European Universities which was launched in 2025. The partnership brings together nine practice-oriented universities from all over Europe. The mission of the HEROES is to strengthen regional smart resilience for people, companies and nature, in other words, to strengthen regions’ ability to anticipate, to adapt and to recover from changes by the help of digital innovations. Through this collaboration, we have offered students multiple short-term intensive courses related to responsibility themes (Blended Intensive Programmes). In addition to this, our international students participate in writing a Times Higher Education Impact Ranking report, where the responsibility work of SEAMK will be observed, reflecting to the 17 UN goals of sustainable development.
The responsibility skills are considered in the employee orientation and in the orientation material. We strengthen competence of our personnel through open education for everyone, discussions in team meetings and by testing different ways of learning. The responsibility theme will be taken into account in planning and organising internal training. The competence of our personnel is also deepened through practical responsibility projects, where new things will be learned and activities will be developed together.
We make the SEAMK responsibility work visible on the students’ orientation day at the beginning of their studies. We communicate about our responsibility activities to our personnel at our common events and through internal communications channels. We also talk about our responsibility goals and activities openly on our website.
For our staff and students, we organise various campaigns and competitions related to responsibility. Examples of these include student-oriented Sustainability Olympics and a competition open to the entire community, which seeks ideas for promoting responsibility at SEAMK.
In our development work, we take into account the development of reporting models for cooperation between universities of applied sciences and, where possible, the harmonisation of these models.
In our actions, we pay attention to the Sustainable Development and Responsibility Programme by Arene, the Rectors’ Conference of Finnish Universities of Applied Sciences. We have assessed and positioned the level of our sustainability and responsibility work on a five-step-scale from different perspectives. Our goal is to develop our actions and reach the next level in each evaluated aspect. We continue to develop our responsibility reporting and processes related to it. We take into account collaboration between universities of applied sciences in developing reporting models and unifying models according to possibilities.
At SEAMK, we promote sustainable development and responsibility through concrete actions on our campus:
- Renewable energy: We have changed to use 100% of renewable electricity, and reduction of emissions corresponds to approximately 866 000 km driving by car. A part of our energy is produced by the solar panels installed on the roof of building F.
- Reducing printing: We monitor the number of printouts and organise campaigns to reduce paper consumption.
- Waste sorting: We are constantly developing waste management, sorting and recycling solutions. We aim to reduce the amount of generated waste.
- Sustainable mobility: We have acquired campus bikes and added the number of bike racks. The staff can use shared electric cars on campus. We also enable remote work.
- Sustainable food choices: Our campus restaurant supports environmentally friendly choices by offering a vegetarian option daily.
SEAMK is committed to the common goals of the universities of applied sciences to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and develop their monitoring.
Since 2021, we have been involved in the UI Green Metrics system that evaluates the sustainable development of the institutions of higher education. It is used for measuring, among other things:
- the environment and waste management of campuses
- energy and water consumption
- practices and actions of sustainable development
The results help us recognise our strengths and areas of development, as well as develop the indicators of our responsibility work and its monitoring.
