Community Engagement and Sustainability

I am grateful and thankful for all that I learned and gained over the past 11 weeks. The internship was much more than I expected it to be; sustainability really catches hold of you. It is not something you can simply leave at work, you can not help but bring home with you; research it long enough and you’ll start thinking about it *all the time*. Acting sustainable really is a way of life.

The relationship between community engagement and sustainability is abstract and often I found myself explaining the relationship not only for others but also for myself. Not all community engagement is sustainable, yet everything sustainability-related affects the community.

The application of sustainable community engagement at the UR was debated because it could be done multiple ways: through a centralized center or department, multiple departments, or entirely dispersed. Ultimately, the best application for UR appeared to be the infusion of community engagement throughout all aspects of life, requiring one to consider communities when making decisions (regardless of one’s affiliation with the Sustainability Institute).

I sincerely appreciate all the faculty, staff, friends, and community members who helped the interns throughout this process. I am stoked for this upcoming year and the potential to hightail UR farther into the sustainability movement.

Other Highlights of our group work include:

• We've established a working relationship with the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE); we are contributing our research findings to Associate Director, Julian Dautremont-Smith, to add to the AASHE database collections. We also submitted an abstract to AASHE in hopes to present at the first annual AASHE Conference, "The Role of Higher Education in Creating a Sustainable World," Oct 4-6 2006, at Arizona State U.

• We took a trip to Ithaca on June 27^th to meet with Marian Brown, Special Assistant to the Provost at Ithaca College, to learn about sustainability initiatives at IC, and share our vision for sustainability at the University of Rochester. First, we took a tour of the EcoVillage at Ithaca, and the had lunch with MBrown, 3 IC campus sustainability interns and 2 faculty members who are participating in IC's sustainability curriculum development program. It was really inspiring to hear about the efforts fellow upstate NYers are pursuing on their campus. It was great to talk with dedicated faculty and an administrator. Check out some other blog updates for some more details/reactions to our trip.

• The Sustainability Roundtable Steering Committee met once on May 23^rd and is scheduled to meet again on Friday June 23^rd. The full Sustainability Roundtable meeting will converge on July 13^th and our group will help direct the meeting.

• On July 10^th we will help direct a meeting with representatives from Residential Life, Student Activities, the Dean of Students, Dean of Judicial Affairs, Fraternities and Sororities, the Rochester Center for Community Leadership, Athletics and the Chapel.

• Jenny Leonard, editor of Currents, will be printing a cover story on the Campus Sustainability Interns for the student edition of Currents! Our photo shoot is on July 10th. : ) We are also considering other options for approaching the media.

• Don't forget to check out our Wiki ((http://ursustainable.pbwiki.com/ ) too. It's not as organized as we'd like, but it's a great conglomeration of sustainability resources.

Group Accomplishments (there are a lot)

End of Week 6

As alluded to in other updates, during the past six weeks (in addition to individual research in their area of focus), our group has studied the concepts and history of sustainability in higher education and benchmarked peer institutions. The 4 seem to be really glad to have finished up with the benchmarking portion of our research (it's been a lot of time in front of the computers). We now have information on 30 COFHE and Ivy League Universities and Colleges, and they're now experts on campus sustainability programs as well as structures (centers/institutes/coordinators) though...!

We have had 2 really great group sessions during which each intern summarized their benchmarking findings and then we identified trends and voids in existing sustainability programs and structures.

We also had a great planning session on Monday afternoon--each intern presented the components of their areas of focus (community engagement, research/curriculum, and residential living) and then we identified voids in the existing UR structure and how these voids could be filled with the creation of a new Sustainability Institute.

The walls of our office, as well as 2 huge whiteboards are covered with the results of these group sessions... "the wall of creativity" highlights campus programs (on maneuverable index cards and categorized into topics), one half of 2 different walls are covered by poster board-sized summaries of the 28 schools' structures & the trends and voids synthesis, one whiteboard outlines the latest Final Proposal structure and our goals are listed out on a dozen pages above the board....

So I had a great meeting with Laurel today. She liked the idea of stickers on the light switches. She spoke with the ResLife facilities person and he likes them too. She's finding out how to print them or buy them now. ResLife is also going to purchase compact fluorescent light bulbs for students to use in their floor or desk lamps. The other lights in the rooms are already CF. In addition, they are working on changing their website, and the new one will include a sustainability page with information on sustainability, what residents can do, competition information, and hall program information. We're still working on how to exactly go about RA training, but it's definitely going to happen. :)

So Tuesday was a great day. We took a field trip to Ithaca, and their school is awesome. It 's really motivating to see what other schools are doing. They have cool programs like Resource Reps, who educate other students. and special interest housing related to sustainability. I think it's neat how we've made connections to another school, because now its even more people to bounce ideas off of. I've already gotten emails from some of their interns with ideas and information.

Today we've come up with a name for my living program, the “sustainably conscious living program”. A new idea that was recommended for me to work on is co-ops. I'm going to bring up the idea of having a co-op on campus, or having the school sponsor or support one off campus. I met with some NASCO (North American Students of Cooperation) people, and they gave me info on co-ops in universities. I've also started formalizing hall programs “in a box” where RA's will have an organized info sheets on the what, when, preparation, location, and how the program relates to sustainability.

Community Engagement Update

Community Engagement update:

First, we have renamed Community Outreach; it is now Community Engagement. This was done because Community Outreach often implies community service. If the Sustainability Institute only proposes community service, it suggests that the city is simply full of problems, that it can offer nothing but opportunities for students to provide charity; thus the relationship between students and local residents would be unequal, lop-sided. However, Rochester has so many resources and opportunities. There are a multitude of things the city can give back to the University and students: internship and work opportunities, various social and expansive cultural opportunities, restaurants, parks, sports games etc. There are chances for students to apply the education and lessons (academically and non-academically) learned at the U of R into real-world settings. If it is called Community Engagement, it will hopefully encourage more equality between the university and the city and the town-gown relationship can grow beyond community service into one that is better balanced.

Regarding the creation of an RCCL sustainability policy and incorporating sustainability into student group workshops, I meet with Dean Asbury and Bryan Rotach of the RCCL regularly. We are currently revising a new sustainability policy for the RCCL that we hope also to discuss and/or present at a meeting with Deans and various staff members on July 10^th. Also, in the informational booklet given to all student group leaders, there will be a page on sustainability and how to make one's group sustainable, as well as a sustainability section in the booklet's Leadership portion. After the pages are designed we will focus on a Sustainability workshop for group leaders.

I am contacting and have begun interviewing various community leaders: directors of neighborhood groups, planning communities, and others to gain insight into their feelings towards the communication and relationship between the University and the community. University interactions can be viewed in multiple levels, those of students, faculty and staff, and administration. It has been interesting hearing the community leaders' views thus far and I'm definitely looking forward to meeting with more people.

End of Week 5

These days I buy my coffee from the hot drinks vending machine on the first floor of Hutchison Hall. I'm up to at least 2 cups a day- sometimes I bring some coffee from home in a glass pickle jar. After all, what environmentalist actually buys their coffee from a vending machine on a daily basis? -it just seems wrong.

But, yesterday morning I didn't bring any coffee from home and so I descended the stairs to the vending machine. Inserting my dollar bill, the green lights lit up, acknowledging I had a credit, “$1.00.” I pushed the buttons, “1-A-3,” for a large, black coffee. However, in lieu of a plopping-down of a paper cup, and a spilling-out of coffee, my dollar bill was instead spit back out at me and the machine alerted me, with its' green lights and bleeping, “WINNER!” Winner?! Yes, I won my Thursday morning coffee from the vending machine on the first floor of Hutchison Hall. I took my dollar bill back from the machine slot, grabbed my coffee that had emerged, and, with a laugh, walked back upstairs to our office to start our day of work.

Last week or so, we received office supplies. The luxury of being able to print out a document, staple the pages together, 3-hole punch it and add it to our binders was to be ours... I retrieved the supplies (a three hole punch, a stapler, tape, a tape dispenser, and computer paper), all of it neatly fit in a cardboard box, from the CS department to bring it back to our Sustainability office summer home. On my walk back over, as I approached the Hylan building, the door opened... No one was around, no one had touched the button to electronically open the door...the door simply opened for me. The door opened for me and, clutching our box of office supplies, in I walked, with a laugh, back up to the sustainability office...

These 2 events really did happen. And now I can't help but imagine similar occurrences taking place in our larger sustainability efforts—doors suddenly and miraculously opening, and money flying at us... “you are a WINNER....” “Yes, this really should happen, here are the resources, let's make sure it happens.”

Today marks the half way mark of the summer Campus Sustainability internships. We are making great progress. We also have a lot of information to pull together in the next 5 weeks. I'm inspired daily by my fellow co-workers. We are individually and collaboratively collecting and synthesizing many resources, building many new relationships and creating new connections throughout our own University as well as with individuals involved in sustainability efforts throughout the country. We'll keep knocking on doors, opening the ones we can, and being thankful for the support we do receive. Of course, I think we'd all be excited for some more doors to open on their own and free coffee too.

Staying Motivated

I am having difficulty staying on task. I am finding the benchmarking process to be really tedious and it seems as though we already have a lot of resources on the schools I have been looking at. I want to do do do and it is hard to read read read.

Last Thursday, when meeting with Profs Hursh, Martina, and Ebenhack, we talked about applying for a really big NSF grant. The idea we came up with was to create an Institute that deals with all of our areas of focus. That meeting really gave me a jolt of energy and excitement about our work. Then I had to come back down to earth on monday when we went back to benchmarking.

Now we're talking about branding sustainability and PR. How do you brand sustainability so that students will care about it? How do i make it interesting to the administration? I think the faculty are already interested in it. We'll see when our faculty survey goes out this week.

That is all for now. Do people actually read this?

Whats New

Completed the Faculty Sustainability Assessment Questionnaire today-- I think it looks fabulous and I am excited to read responses when they come in. Still checking with ORPA to see if the questionnaire is alright to publish-- a bit frustrating to continue to deal with red tape.

On a few other notes- our projects seem to be coalescing very well-- it is exciting to see the ties between the categories we have arranged ourselves in. I think that it displays the inherent interconnectedness of sustainability and of our work. It's impressive. It also feels good to have our feet on the ground and be off and running. However, time is pressing and we still have a lot to do in the remaining six weeks. An exciting part of this project is seeing where our research leads and doing foundation work for the people who will pick up the project. We are trying to ensure ease of understanding and access to our information in order to develop an institutional history for the next people to work on this project. Interesting that our areas of focus are not only interconnected but we are avidly working to be connected to the next group of people who take on sustainability work. The exciting part of sustainability for me is how it relates to EVERYTHING-- what is done to a part affects another portion. Note, what is exciting is often also one of my complaints about sustainability-- the task is continually changing and challenging and amorphous. Yet, solving a problem does not mean completing scattered pieces of it or masking the part that does not yet have a solution; it is interesting and disturbing how often bits and pieces of social programs are completed-- not keeping in mind the big picture seems to do little to aid the big picture. But it happens with some regularity. I see our work this summer as continuing a fundamental foundation for the sustainability initiative at UR and I hope that the efforts we are making to pass this work on are recognized and found as useful.

On a side note, I am delighted to be working with so many faculty members who are interested in this work and excited about it. It is refreshing as a student to have faculty support on a project-- it is something I wish I experienced and observed more on the U of R campus.

Previous Thoughts June 5th

I was productive today-- it felt wonderful to cross-off my to-do's (something i usually find stressful and obtrusive). I worked through a pile of emails and coordinated for a faculty assessment questionnaire about academics and faculty development. also, i read over Cornell's Task Force on Sustainable Development and the document was excellent-- something that I think will be valuable when we begin to write our own proposal. Additionally, I did well with faculty contacts and am continuing to compile information about what interdisciplinary work is continuing at UR. We have been working on some strategic planning, which is both tiresome and draining and also really interesting. I think that our ideas and plans will inevitably change, but it remains valuable to letting those changes happen to have our ideas, values and goals written down and hanging up to “guide our principles”.

I was productive today-- it felt wonderful to cross-off my to-do's (something i usually find stressful and obtrusive). I worked through a pile of emails and coordinated for a faculty assessment questionnaire about academics and faculty development. also, i read over Cornell's Task Force on Sustainable Development and the document was excellent-- something that I think will be valuable when we begin to write our own proposal. Additionally, I did well with faculty contacts and am continuing to compile information about what interdisciplinary work is continuing at UR. We have been working on some strategic planning, which is both tiresome and draining and also really interesting. I think that our ideas and plans will inevitably change, but it remains valuable to letting those changes happen to have our ideas, values and goals written down and hanging up to “guide our principles”.

Today I had a meeting with the director of Residential Living, Laurel Contomanolis. My eventual goal is to incorporate sustainability into all aspects of residential life. For that, I want a type of "Green Living" program to be institutionalized that would include different types of programs such as RA training, hall programs, and competitions. From my meeting, I realized that to create an overall program for ResLife, there needs to be proof that it would work. So for now I need to start creating an RA training program, and models for hall programs to be used by the RAs so that their residents will constantly be aware of the simple actions they can take to reduce their waste and consumption. I also need to perfect the model for UR Unplugged, along with helping create one for Recyclemania. If these smaller programs are successful, then the likelihood of ResLife adopting an overall "Green Living" program is pretty high.

Yesterday I did some more research on other school's residential living programs. I finally found something that mentioned RA training from UNC Chapel Hill. They did a whole day workshop training session which seems like a pretty neat program, that I might try and have work here.
:)

Community Outreach

Hi! I'm Katie and I'm working on Community Outreach and am really excited. :) One may ask what is Community Outreach and why is it important for sustainability ... Community Outreach is establishing communications, associations, and relations between different communities, in this case U of R and the local Rochester community. Establishing positive communications, associations, and relations incorporates the crucial social aspect of sustainability. If there are positive and healthy social relations, personal well-beings will be raised and people will be more likely to support one another and work together. If communities join together they will be able to accomplish more in whatever areas they deem important, including perhaps economic or environmental achievements.

Regarding the U of R and Rochester, both have untapped resources for social, economic, and environmental vitality. The College is a large consumer and work force that is not fulfilling its potential impact on Rochester while the city has many resources for entertainment, volunteer, and work activities; both communities could greatly profit from the knowledge of each other's needs and wants. However, both the U of R and the city have suffered lost opportunity cost due to the lack of communication. While there already is fairly good, positive communication between the U of R and Rochester, it can always been improved.

For some Community Outreach projects I will be working with the Rochester Center for Community Leadership (RCCL). The Center officially began in January 2005 under the College Dean of Students Office, specifically Dean Asbury, in order to “develop, coordinate, and promote a variety of programs to connect college students to their community and to encourage them to become engaged citizens and leaders during their college years and in the future.” RCCL, for example, organizes the Urban Fellows program. The RCCL website can be found at http://www.rochester.edu/College/rccl/index.

This summer I hope to accomplish four goals: incorporate sustainability into RCCL training, establish a sustainability policy with/for the RCCL, increase the number of academic internships offered through the RCCL and Academic Support, and organize a meeting, ideally regular but I am keeping things in perspective, between UR faculty, staff, students and the city of Rochester officials and businessmen/women to further positive communication. I have meetings next week with various staff and faculty to discuss ideas and information, and hopefully as a result we can start to get things rolling. :)

Curriculum Update

As i mentioned in an earlier blog, I, David Ladon, am working on Curriculum development.

These are my goals.
Develop comprehensive list of "sustainability" related classes
Develop new sustainability clusters
Assess faculty interests
Develop interdisciplinary courses
Plan/Propose faculty development program on sustainability in curriculum for
next summer. As a part of that, apply for grants for this program.


Status of Goals:

As of today, I have researched other universities models for integrating sustainability into the curriculum. Out of this research, I have come to the conclusion that a list of sustainability courses must come from faculty. I am using the faculty assessment as a way to develop that list. As opposed to last year, when Becca approached a variety of faculty, I am going to approach the members of the round table because they have already shown interest. The faculty assessment is going to be a survey with 5-8 short answers. The questions are very open ended and encouraging. e.g. "If you had $100 million to work with, what would a sustainability program look like on campus?" and "What would be an incentive for you to incorporate sustainability into your coursework?"
I have also spent time researching the Piedmont Project (Emory), Ponderosa Project (NAU), Ithaca's work, and the Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service (Tufts). I am using these programs as a foundation for how I would create a summer faculty development program. The Tisch Col lege is most useful in how I would organize a "Center for Sustainability" if I had $100 million. I don't have that much, but I am now registered through UR to the InfoEd SPIN grant database. Hopefully something good turns up.

Maddie Cutrona and I met with Ben Ebenhack (CHE), Camilla Martina (Enviro Medicine), and David Hursh (Warner). That meeting was really great. They are going to be working closely with both of us to help us in fulfilling these goals. Maddie is working on Research so a lot of our work is overlapping and we will be working together in those areas. But that is cool because Maddie and I already have a good working relationship and know how eachother work.

That is all for now.
peace

Hi, I'm Julie and my area of focus is the residential living aspect of sustainability. I am most interested with this focus because I think it's important to constantly be conscious of your actions in day to day life. I want to educate others to act sustainable in their everyday lives.

It's inspiring to see what programs other school have. It helps to see what other schools have been doing since it gives me many different ideas and options on what our school can do. One program is Recyclemania: a recycling competition held between universities across the nation, and one which I hope ours can be a part of too. Many universities have different types of energy competitions as well, and I will try to make our own energy competition, UR Unplugged a tradition in our school. Harvard has an incredible sustainability program. They hire about 20 students to engage the student body in their campus sustainability. I'm working on some type of RA training that is similar to what those hired students do. It would also be fun to create a model for a hall program. I want our students to be aware of simple and easy steps they can take to create a sustainable environment such as turning off lights, putting computers on standby, using alternate modes of transportation, and the list can go on.

The director of Residential Living, Laurel Contomanolis seems very interested and is meeting with me this week to talk. I'm really excited to see what our school can accomplish.

Tuesday May 30, 2006

This morning we spent a couple hours working in our focus areas. Maddie had her first meeting (contact in research), and I met with Professors Allen and Hook to discuss logistics, funding, and Roundtable work.
Afternoon work was focused on getting a better understanding of past sustainability work by reading documents and reflections Andrew, Nils and I have written. It's a balancing act for me to figure out just how much background work we should do versus learning about different issues as we go along.
Discussions (during lunch with Professor Ebenhack and afterwards in the office) included:

*what makes us as a University stand apart from others? what could when concerning Sustainability? (how could we incorporate sustainability in a holistic manner)
*university structure, leadership and politics
bottom up grassroots work and/vs. top-down administrative
--institutionalized changes vs./and the grassroots cultural changes

*coming up with a more original/meaningful name for our initiative
-eg: environmental stewardship, social responsibility/ethics
-How actually IMPLEMENT and not just utilize the word
*brainstormed research grants/grant process and both sides of being funded by the University vs from other sources
*creating a clear strategic plan with defined goals and objectives
*concerning the change creating process, a focus on the actual process vs. maintaining an emphasis on outcome

It is increasingly clear to me that the sustainability movement is not just about greening campus or adding a new center or institute here and there (as many Universities have begun to do)--it's about encouraging new decision making processes and shifting educational pedagogy to embody an evolving consciousness (how we teach, where we teach, drawing connections)....

I'm looking forward to working through the Mid-West Academy's Strategic chart ( http://slac.rso.wisc.edu/flyers/strategy-chart.pdf ) on Thursday and continuing to discuss and work out more concrete values/goals/objectives. As we continued to delve into complicated questions, I started to get overwhelmed with the scope of what we are potentially undertaking. It's easy to get lost in the complexity of issues, possible frameworks/structures/action plans. Hopefully this strategic planning process as a group will provide some more solid grounding. I'd assume then we can go from there and get feedback from Professors, members of the Roundtable, etc.

Updates and Thoughts

I finally learned how to post and how to log in.

Currently I am busy researching and deepening my understanding of how faculty research works at the University of Rochester. So far, I have learned the basics of how grant proposals work and where the money comes from and where it goes. I am investigating interdisciplinary research opportunities and speaking with professors who are already involved in this work. I am interested in learning more about faculty development programs and incentives that other institutions use to promote interdisciplinary sustainability work.

It is encouraging to work with faculty who are interested in making sustainability happen on the University of Rochester campus. Also promising are responses from universities and other organizations involved with sustainability programs who have responded to our questions. Many of these coordinators and project leaders and faculty members outside UR have responded and given ideas for direction. Working with other institutions lays the foundation for the University of Rochester to develop a sustainability policy. It is exciting to view the work that we are doing in the context of a larger movement and not confined to a forgotten computer lab in Hylan.

It is frustrating to read about the fabulous sustainability programs that other institutions have-- I am a bit jealous that the same situation is not part of the University of Rochester. We have a lot of faculty support, but our administrative support is not as vibrant and our financial resources are minimal. Upper-level administration support has played an important role in many of the schools that I have looked at and it disappoints me to recognize this level of involvement is not currently present at UR. I hope that our work this summer will play a role in changing that.

Time is moving intensely quickly with this project and there is a lot of work for us to still get done. As we continue to plow through the project we are simultaneously endowed with more focus and more questions. I think this means we are moving in a positive direction.

Friday June 2, 2006

AASHE business:

We need $1,000 to become members of AASHE so that we can access their resources that are only open to members. Who at the UR could fund this? Maybe we can work out a deal with AASHE- do some research for them, and, in return, gain access to their resources? I'm waiting for an email back....

The other ladies and I got really excited about presenting at the AASHE conference in October (Dave will be out of the country). Abstracts are due on June 19^th. Funding will follow sometime after that.

We'd also love for other faculty to attend the AASHE curriculum development workshop (July 20-21 (Thurs-Fri), 2006, San Diego, CA, Application Deadline coming right up on June 09, 2006). If we had the money, Dave and Maddie (our sustainability research and curriculum interns), would love to go.... What a great way to jump into sustainability curriculum development (learn from the best)!

I think AASHE should offer student organizing resources. Maybe we should put together a proposal (ha)? Maybe they'll hire us? : )

Ruminations 1

Our internship is two-fold. First, each of us is taking on one aspect of sustainability and higher education: 1) curriculum (Me); 2) research (Maddie); 3) community outreach (Katie); 4)student life/residential living (Julia); and 5) structural/strategic planning (Becca). Also we are working as a group to develop a proposal for an office of sustainability, which would include a sustainability coordinator. The internship is being funded (we hope) by the President's and Provost's offices. Professor Alan from Comp Sci is overseeing us and each of us has a faculty contact.

I had a really good moment of reflection this morning. Currently, we are working on our projects in the morning and the group part in the afternoon. This seems a little overwhelming to me. Perhaps it is my ADHD, but i would rather focus in depth on one project for a few weeks and then work on the group project - which will include our individual research - intensively for a few weeks. I tend to get hyperfocused on things.

Anyway, at the meeting yesterday with faculty, Prof Martina from Environmental Medicine suggested that we apply for grants. This really resonated with me. Right now we are getting paid to do research by the people whose minds and policies we are trying to change. Let's say, hypothetically, that at the end of the summer, when our report is presented, we are told that it is too much, that it compromises the neutrality of the institution. So we start a campaign to approve our proposal. Doesn't it then appear as if we are biting the hands that feed us? A grant would give us the autonomy to do real research without being dependent on those whose minds we are trying to change. If we could secure funding, we could then the internship and the office could be less vulnerable to the internal politics of an institution of higher education.

So here is my idea. Understanding that each individual project will probably take a lot of time, we spend the first few weeks working intensively on those. When we are coming to conclusions, we begin to switch over to half the day working on our projects and the other half on the office of sustainability proposal. We should try to complete the proposal (at least a draft), by week 7 so that weeks 8,9, and 10 may be spent seeking out grants for an Office of sustainability, courses related to sustainability, and the sustainability internship next summer. I don't think there is one way about going to do this, and i don't think the issue of funding is black and white. In fact i think there are positives and negatives to both internal and grant funding. However, i recognize that, at this point, after jumping through so many hoops and still feeling as though we are being strung along, we may be better off seeking outside resources to help us fulfill our objectives.

The First of Many

Today is day 2 of the UR sustainability internship. We are just compiling data for now and devising strategic plans to help us carry out our projects. Yesterday, we met with the Sustainability Roundtable Steering Committee and it was a really great time. The Profs we talked to seemed really into all the work we were doing and wanted to get things done. It is a good sign.
peace for now