As part of the project NucleusJena, the Sustainable Campus Cafés have been established at Jena's universities: Once a semester - i.e. twice a year - students, professors, administrative, technical and scientific staff as well as stakeholders from civil society come together for a workshop evening and discuss how university life could be made more sustainable, efficient and healthy. Small project ideas and experiments are used to find solutions that may also work on a larger scale or at other universities.

Each Sustainable Campus Café is dedicated to a key topic under the umbrella term ‘Sustainability plus X’. The first workshop in November 2023 focused on the so-called ‘Twin Transition’: How can the dual transformation of sustainability and digitalisation be innovatively implemented and shaped?

The second Sustainable Campus Café in May 2024 focussed on sustainability and health and their dual connection: on the one hand, health and well-being are a separate goal of sustainable development in the sense of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. There is now a growing awareness that unsustainable development patterns also have fatal consequences for health. On the other hand, healthcare institutions themselves also have an ecological, economic and social ‘footprint’.

The Sustainable Campus Cafés are part of the ‘Open Sustainable Campus Lab’, a participatory format organised by NucleusJena in which sustainable practices for everyday university life are developed and tested together. The laboratory character of this project offers space for joint reflection, experimentation and implementation. In this way, the lab not only helps to make the two Jena universities more sustainable and to network more closely in this area, but also to strengthen students‘ and employees’ commitment to and participation in shaping their own university.