After studying Technical Medicine in Enschede for two years, Lora started studying Medicine at Radboud University this year. Since January, she has been combining this with the role of Coordinator of Realize Your Idea. She assists students and staff in implementing their sustainable ideas; from finding alternatives to flower bouquets to setting up a giveaway cabinet in the Huygens building. Lora is currently overseeing around twenty projects to make the campus more sustainable.
She is enthusiastic about all the ongoing projects, but highlights one: creating a repair shop on campus. The plan, submitted by Ruud van Kruijsbergen from the IT helpdesk, envisions a shop where people can have their laptops repaired or turn in old laptops. Lora connected Ruud with the University of Twente, as they already have a Notebook Service Center. "I think it's great to connect two universities in this way."
This idea is becoming a reality: the repair shop will open in October: this fall, the long-awaited shop, named RUpair, will open in the University Library. A great success, beams Lora. Ruud van Kruijsbergen shares the enthusiasm: "Without Realize Your Idea, the RUpair shop would never have happened."
Personal Motivation
Lora has been involved with sustainability for quite some time. There wasn't a specific moment when her interest in sustainability began, but there was a particular topic that sparked it for her: fashion. She realized that she didn't need to buy new clothes every season and that wearing second-hand clothing was actually much more fun and sustainable.
Nowadays, she lives in a small student room in Nijmegen with a large garden, where she maintains a colorful garden and prefers to spend the whole summer outside: "My garden is more important than my room." Entering student life also helped her to think more consciously. "As a student, if you have a smaller budget, you automatically start thinking more about what you do and don't need, and you also start thinking about the impact of your belongings."
For her student organisation IFMSA-Nijmegen, she and other members revitalized the sustainability branch (Green Health), and when she was studying in Twente, she already became acquainted with the "Green Team." Her biggest dream is to work on making healthcare more sustainable in the future. She sums up her ideas with "better prevention than intervention." If people don't get sick, they put less pressure on the highly polluting healthcare system. In this way, she bridges the gap between health and sustainability.
Lora is heavily involved in sustainability: what drives her? She wholeheartedly endorses the well-known slogan "think global, act local." She believes in small steps and that all small actions matter: "If everyone does something, together you can achieve something great, and now I can give this a push within Realize Your Idea."
