Thompson Rivers University
AC-10: Support for Sustainability Research

The TRU Sustainability Research Grant for Students: the purpose of the grant is to encourage interdisciplinary research and expand knowledge of sustainability and sustainable development, defined in terms of sustainability’s four pillars — environmental, social, economic and cultural. Preference will be given to applications incorporating interdisciplinary perspectives and/or methodologies. The grant is a prestigious internal fund award that may be held only once and for one year at an annual value of $5,000 for two separate students studying in any TRU for-credit program.

The TRU Sustainability Research Grant for Faculty: the purpose of the grant is to encourage interdisciplinary research and expand knowledge of sustainability and sustainable development, defined in terms of sustainability’s four pillars — environmental, social, economic and cultural. Preference will be given to applications incorporating interdisciplinary perspectives and/or methodologies. The grant is a prestigious internal seed fund award that may be held only once and for one year at an annual value of $10,000. With the approval of the grant holder’s department and dean, a portion of the funds (up to $7,500) may be used as a research time stipend. The grant holder must be a tenured or tenure-track faculty member not currently holding a major multi-year Tri-Agency external grant or contract (over $50,000) as the principal investigator.

Part of the TRU procedure for deciding which prospective faculty members receive tenure and promotion is that they have to demonstrate adherence to the overall guiding principles of the TRU Academic Plan (2011) http://www.tru.ca/__shared/assets/Academic_Plan24460.pdf). The plan states clearly that interdisciplinary research is highly valued: "Thompson Rivers University has strengths in undergraduate and graduate research; interdisciplinary studies; and academic, applied, vocational and trades programming, and thus is well equipped to provide students with a critical education on the intersections of science, technology and society" (page 5). TRU pursues "interdisciplinary approaches, courses, programs and research in environmental, economic, social and cultural sustainability" (page 8). Under the Statement of Purpose of the Academic Foundations of the plan, it is stated that "particular priority will be given to those developments that generate interdisciplinary connections between the academic themes" (page 9). Moving forward, TRU plans that "interdisciplinary Studies options should be re-conceptualized as university-wide, and thus mechanisms must be developed to accommodate interdisciplinary methods and programming across and between all university faculties and disciplines" (page 12).

TRU encourages and/or supports sustainability research through ongoing library support and does so in the form of:
• Materials selection policies and practices: like many university libraries, TRU Library’s over-arching materials acquisition policy coincides largely with the course material taught throughout the university. As such, since TRU teaches so many courses that either focus on or relate to the broad spectrum of issues to do with sustainability, it has a substantial collection of books, e-books, periodicals, and other materials to do with sustainability.
• E-learning objects focused on sustainability: on top of the fact that this issue ties in directly with the above-mentioned practices, TRU is actively collecting e-books on all subjects instead of paper books whenever possible. The library has seen a huge increase in e-books over the last five years, and currently the collection is at approximately 40,000,and trending upward.
• Research guides: the main system used by the TRU Library is called LibGuides and it has over200 e-guides; this includes an extensive collection of e-indexes for research periodicals.
• Sustainability literacy promotion: The TRU Library’s own 2012 Strategic Plan identified six core values that it focuses on throughout its operations, and one these is “support for environmental sustainability”. Another core value is “life-long learning”, whether by TRU students or staff. As such, all Library staff are encouraged to learn about issues to do with sustainability on an on-going basis.