Institute for a Sustainable Earth

Mason as a Living Lab

The Mason Living Labs Initiative encourages and supports students, faculty, and staff to pose questions, experiment, gather data, monitor changes, and propose novel solutions to a range of sustainability challenges associated with the George Mason University campus environment and its socio-environmental systems.

What is Mason as a Living Lab?

With nearly 1,000 acres of land, waterways, forests, and buildings, George Mason University’s campuses are a dynamic, living learning environment. With diverse and growing arrays of buildings, roadways, watercourses, and forests, the Mason campus complex faces the urgent challenge of becoming more sustainable and resilient. In this context, the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit of Mason faculty, staff, and students are critically important resources. Recent and ongoing experiments in research and learning across campus spaces have included the Innovation Food Forest, the Honeybee Initiative, the Green Studio, and the Mason Arboretum.

Given the convergence of the Strategic Master Planning Cycle with the establishment of the Mason Sustainability Solutions Framework and the development of various action plans, the Living Labs Initiative will enlist the enormous talent and expertise on Mason campuses to help achieve Mason’s sustainability goals. Furthermore, with Mason’s commitment to campus sustainability, the Living Labs Initiative serves as a conduit to engage in sustainability oriented curricular and research development. Consequently, the Living Labs Initiative will propel Mason forward as a regional and national leader in sustainability, with explicit links to Mason’s entrepreneurship efforts so that our innovations can be widely adopted elsewhere. 

Core Functions of the Living Labs Initiative

Strategic support with initiatives that are first getting off the ground Coordination of sustainability research initiatives taking place on Mason’s campuses Web presence and communication to amplify campus research and projects to the Mason community and beyond Data catalog for shared learning and understanding of sustainability topics on Mason’s campuses

Benefits of Mason as a Living Lab

There are numerous benefits for participating in the Living Labs Initiative. Projects undergo a review that ensures that project implementation in a living campus environment will be seamless. The projects receive strategic support to help get them started if they are in the inception phase, become part of a dynamic group with other living lab projects, get designated web space and communications support. Opportunities for securing funding or scaling up pilot projects will also be supported.

How to Engage

We are collecting past and ongoing projects in our clearinghouse!  Submit your project to be part of the Initiative using this form

You can also get in touch via email at malila@gmu.edu.

 

Apply for funding! We accepted proposals for new and ongoing projects for the 2023 and 2024 Mason’s Living Lab Research Funding opportunities. Watch this space for new funding opportunities. Read the previous calls for proposals below.

2023 FUNDING CALL    2024 FUNDING CALL

 

Living Labs Projects

We want to know what sustainability work is being done at Mason to propose solutions to sustainability challenges! Be one of the first Living Labs projects to assist with testing our procedures and provide your feedback on the support you need to conduct campus centered projects. In doing so, your project will help determine best practices for wider campus implementation of the initiative and showcase your work to a wider campus audience. 

Ongoing Campus Sustainability Initiatives

Mason Sustainability Council

The Mason Sustainability Council (MSC) is an institution-wide initiative that works to integrate Mason’s research and academic strengths in sustainability with campus operations, enables our campuses to become learning laboratories, and further establishes Mason as an institutional leader in higher-education sustainability. The MSC is currently leading the formulation of Mason’s evolving sustainability and climate action plans.

Campus Partners

Mason Facilities Mason Libraries

Mason Facilities ensures a quality physical environment supporting the mission of the University. Facilities works with faculty, staff and students on implementing MaLiLa projects. One of the ways Facilities supports the Mason community is through the University Sustainability office, which provides leadership in environmental, social, and economic stewardship. The Patriot Green Fund, a program of University Sustainability, is an opportunity for the Mason community to improve our sustainable goals and efforts through infrastructure developments and student research projects.

The University Libraries forms an intellectual nexus for George Mason University. The University Libraries Research Services promotes and supports excellence in teaching, research, and scholarship. Mason Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Center, the Mason Publishing Group, and subject librarians provide consultations to support the community throughout the research cycle. Mason Libraries provides the Dataverse for data storage and dissemination for MaLiLa projects.

 

Questions? Contact us at malila@gmu.edu