The Rhine-Ruhr 2025 FISU World University Games take a holistic and participatory approach towards sustainability. To achieve this target, the organising committee organised a "Legacy & Sustainability Workshop". Representatives from universities and the participating national sports organisations met at the event. The special feature of the workshop was that it was organised for students to jointly develop a sustainability concept.

Co-creation took centre stage in the workshop. The participants worked together to design an optimal but also realistic scenario for the sustainability strategy and legacy vision of the games. This involved working on specific questions, the answers to which were collected digitally in the form of keywords and short sentences and then discussed. This method encouraged a lively exchange and mutual inspiration.

The workshop format was used to outline a vision of the future that is both ambitious and realisable. The participants provided impetus and concrete ideas with regard to the ecological, social and economic dimensions of sustainability. This approach means that an event is not only designed for the target group, but together with the target group, and promotes solution-orientated, sustainable thinking and actions.