Rendering of the Lawson Centre for Sustainability - Rooftop Garden and surrounding landscape

Integrated Sustainability Initiative

Trinity College’s Integrated Sustainability Initiative aims to transform the student experience by integrating sustainability education and practices into daily life at the College, from academic and co-curricular programming to research opportunities and experiential learning. The Initiative includes a number of innovative features, such as a farm-to-table program, which will serve as a vehicle for integrating sustainability across both academic and student life experience through urban agriculture, a community kitchen for teaching and learning, and food-systems research. Through the Initiative, the College also seeks to bring awareness to environmental and human connections, and to support students by creating a healthy living environment.

In October 2019, thanks to a generous $10 million gift by Trinity alumnus Brian Lawson and U of T alumna Joannah Lawson, the College launched the Integrated Sustainability Initiative. In addition to integrating sustainability into all facets of the College, the Initiative will transform the built environment through the College’s new building, the Lawson Centre for Sustainability. The Lawsons’ vision and support will enable Trinity College to build upon its commitment to the environment and responsible stewardship by creating a new model in which students both ‘live and learn’ sustainability.


“We strive to create a community with awareness of our personal and structural impacts on the wellbeing of the human and more-than-human environments. This is an urgent time, a time that various governmental bodies have declared a ‘climate emergency’ and thus a ‘business-as-usual’ is no longer viable. We recognize that issues of environmental sustainability are also inherently issues of equity, and that land degradation is a matter of Indigenous injustice. We believe effective action on sustainability will require sober and sustained conversations and the ability to perceive complex problems through many varied lenses. This approach also requires a sense of self-reflective humility and an openness to multiple ways of knowing including Indigenous wisdom, traditions and other worldviews that speak to the deep interconnectedness of all reality.”

– Professors Stephen Scharper and Nicole Spiegelaar, Integrated Sustainability Initiative 


We acknowledge that the land on which Trinity College and the University of Toronto operate is part of the traditional territories of the Huron-Wendat, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the Mississaugas of the Credit, an Anishnaabe people, land covered by the Dish-with-One-Spoon wampum belt covenant. We acknowledge the stewardship of this land by First Nations, the continuing presence here of Indigenous people from across Turtle Island, and the harm caused by colonialism. We commit ourselves to seeking a new and honourable relationship with the First Peoples of this land.