Results from Input Sessions, Meetings, and Research

Concerns about sustainability and climate change

• First generation students are more likely to be from families and neighborhoods experiencing negative consequences of climate change than continuing generation students (e.g. floods, air quality from emissions, heat).
• On-campus 1Gen students would like assistance to respond to disasters (e.g. emergency funding for human, natural, and climate disasters). These will reduce harm to students as they deal with challenges.

Curriculum/teaching/community engagement

• Opportunities to co-address the opportunity gap to STEM exposure in intro courses that are designed to scaffold and meet students where they are. Expectations/culture of already knowing things limits who can participate.
• Scaling sustainability curriculum might focus on intro courses because faculty can also learn how to help students who enter with different backgrounds/preparedness.
• Faculty need to learn how to signpost that they are available outside of class and that they are aware it is common for students to come in with disparate previous knowledge, but that they care about bridging this gap and are working on it.
• Better to do things in class. Next best is peer mentoring sessions/outside support, but that places time burden on students who are catching up.
• There are many programs that happen right before class begins in the fall. These could be examined to see who they are serving, resources/design may need to shift.
• Societal issues and community engagement are particularly appealing to 1Gen students AND continuing generation students benefit from knowing that not everyone has their privileged experiences/etc. Students can work to make conditions better.

Specific existing programs students are concerned about

• Green to go pricing may be limiting use now. During peak pandemic it was free and widely used, now a fee may be limiting participation, especially for 1Gen.
• Programs should be designed for equity.

March 5, 2023 session

• More courses
• Advertising how students, especially first generation students, are informing action
• Sustainability fellowship for first generation students
• How to get into grad school
• Townhall, open to all
• Alumni-Student relations, a committee that includes alumni, students, staff, and faculty
• Connections with 1Gen alumni

Survey responses

• Panel with first gen alumni in sustainability
• Internships and opportunities that allow first gen students to get first hand experience and build key life skills that students who have legacy already have
• Experiential or career opportunities and more BIPOC representation in those educational experiences/initiatives.
• There were some instances in my intro CS or intro bio courses where I felt surrounded by people who had much more tutoring and access to resources than I did; it made succeeding academically quite difficult. I think offering more access to first gen-centered academic help would be fantastic.
• It’d be nice to have more mental health and peer-support resources to celebrate and educate others of the diverse student body. It’d be great to make more people from different backgrounds feel more included and have their voices heard. It’s also important to include more people in programs so that we have a diverse group of people that can give new ideas to the college.
• more classes about sustainability
• I’d like to see more representation of first generation speakers at convo and other events
• I’d like to have an opportunity to get to tour the steam stack or learn more about the geothermal bores outside of a classroom setting.

• More siloed & decentralized than Furman
• Open Curriculum, teaching passion
• Has focused on staff 
• Center for Civic: Town & Gown
• Teaching & Learning, pedagogy
• Faculty Gatherings
• Davis Education experiential learning grant
  • Art
  • CCCE
  • Sustainability
  • Faculty/staff field trips (visiting assets on campus); 74 faculty and staff attended 5 events, 28 departments, vary the timing
  • Continuity in Sustainability Pedagogy
  • Monthly gatherings (half hour socializing first, event 1 hour, some mingling at end)
  • Happy to help you ideate & TLC is place to go for pedagogy
• Speed dating (sit opposite someone else, joint research project that married your ideas); looking for commonalities
  • How do we get liberal arts students to do this work?
  • As a liberal arts college, can’t compete with research (e.g. hydrology); own interdisciplinary, get a name in interdisciplinary space
• Bringing in different teams (financial team talking about endowment, and how faculty could get involved in retirement plans)
• 20-30 min presentation, 30 min of interaction/report out
• Funding from 2 different departments and 1 student
• Works with a dozen faculty on syllabi
• Looks at the course catalog, if you have a project component, many ideas for campus of sustainability
• Web app with all of the ideas, with STARS catalog (completed, available, underway)
• Collect projects in google sheet, interface makes it accessible, students wrote a code that makes it searchable, in house design
  • One & Done
  • Multiyear 

Auxiliary Services

• Food & Dining is constantly innovating, we are going to get rid of compostables and move to USEFULL cups
• USEFULL has its own advertising
• The Green to Go effort was underway before pandemic, but pandemic accelerated adoption to reduce compostable waste
• Jesse is going to reach out to Barnes & Noble to see if we can replace plastic bags in the Bookstore
• Always open to these easy asks/easy fits
• Jesse is on Transportation committee in town and sees challenges on campus
• Things that are needed, high level conversations about how to move fleet changes forward
  • Need to know what to buy from places in similar climates
  • Bus contracts that consider electricity/sustainability
  • Consolidating experiential opportunities
  • Responding to student transportation needs/affordability

Food Services/Bon Appétit

• They use their own reporting system to drive STARS and prefer it to the real food calculator
• Students drive purchasing innovation
• Carleton is ahead of the curve, a place for testing innovation
• They hold sessions to inform purchasing, etc. every 2 weeks
• Some projects are less feasible, but they work with students

Rachel offered a helpful framework to think about strategic planning:

1. Benchmarking: where are we currently?
2. Futuring: where do we want to go, how do we get there?

Benchmarking

Rachel sees strong student interest in sustainability in the career context. In this sense, there is synergy between the Career Center’s goals for career exploration to be driven by student interest and any goals we set in our plan to prepare students for careers that advance sustainability. 

To illustrate the point that Carleton students are interested in and pursue sustainability in their careers, we can draw on the following data:

Handshake (platform for current students)

• Students identify interests such as “sustainability” and “natural resources” as part of creating a profile. Compute proportion of students with sustainability-related tags.
• Andrea Kubinski is pulling a data report broken down by FY-SR from Handshake.
• Limitation: not all students have a handshake profile, so a rough metric of interest.

Recent survey related to Career Center programming

• Sustainability came out near top of student interests
• Rachel is following up with the person who ran it

LinkedIn

• Within Carleton’s community of graduates, they search keywords like “sustainability” and “climate”
• Limitation: sampling bias

Institutional Research

• They have more systematic surveys of student summer experiences and employment data 1, 5, and 10 years out

We discussed the challenge of understanding links between student experiences at Carleton and careers after Carleton. The Pathways tool that maps alumni majors to the sector of the economy they work in does not seem suited to this task, because sustainability cuts across both categories.

Futuring

Rachel offered a number of ideas:

• Grand Challenge Weekends that bring together faculty, students, staff, and alumni to work on a solutions-oriented case study in sustainability. 
• Career fairs on sustainability and more conversations with employers in this area. Having a named initiative/strategy at Carleton would help validate invitations to employers.
• Invite and fund students to participate in conferences about sustainability in career areas they are exploring
• A stakeholder analysis approach to connecting areas of study at Carleton to sustainability work after Carleton (less linear; stakeholders radiate outward from a central issue)
• More funding for sustainability-themed components of existing programs such as the Carleton Scholars Program and Winter Break Externships
• Think about ways to articulate to employers that students are prepared to grapple with messy problems in sustainability and climate. In particular, distinguish Carleton’s liberal arts education as ideal preparation. Special certification? 
• Sustainability can (and should!) be in all sectors. Students don’t have to become organic farmers to engage sustainability in their careers. For example, someone in the banking sector can be evaluating externalized climate costs. At Carleton, we can build student confidence to trust their own insights, bring change to the sectors in which they work.

Curricular: A sustainability center akin to the Center for Global and Regional Studies.

Curricular: Sustainability is opportunity to uplift the contribution of humanities and storytelling

Additional Ideas for the SWG

• Rachel is familiar with Northfield’s development plan, which includes sustainable building codes. It would be interesting for ACE courses to engage this. For example, case study between Northfield and Faribault (which is focused on attracting outside investments)
• We can think about what role the STAs can play in the future
• Paula Lackie works in data visualization and could be interesting to talk with. She is currently abroad on a Fulbright.

Meeting with Risi Karim, coordinator of Northfield’s Climate Action Plan

Big picture: There are many opportunities for faculty and students to support the realization of city climate action goals. We discussed specific overlaps that exist with what we offer now and there could be a future workshop or discussion series that supports entry into city collaboration formally in this area.

Areas of action (with current implementation described):  

Energy: Working on decarbonization plan and trying to get Xcel to take up early grid innovations (e.g. a microgrid); this will involve workshops with Xcel/energy partners. Risi is starting energy implementation planning by looking at city building energy data. She uses the B3 Energy benchmarking tool. Also interested in what the decision tools are.

Transportation: Working on a bikeshare grant to install 30 bikes hubbed at the library, working to diversify transportation. The low-hanging fruit like bikeshare are an easy start to build more community for this category.

Food: Ongoing work with food shelf.

Materials and Waste: City has new zoning to allow composting, but there is no land. A composting company that wants to grow is already asking around to find land and Risi thinks it might need to go into the county, which would have different zoning problems. City is working with Minimize to come up with plans for plastic reduction. This is approached with justice concerns for small businesses.

Water, Wastewater, and Land:  Riverfront development planning is underway, and a dam removal study. These are areas where justice work could be done and a lot of tie-ins for curriculum (economic, history, place, culture, Indigenous knowledge on making this more resilient). Fishing access is important to IDE. 

Other notes:  High receptivity to things not in the plan as work to collaborate on too, such as environmental justice grants/elements that aren’t named in the current plan yet link to decisions underway.

Follow-up Actions:

• Emily passed on a student study of the river (there are many living in a few disciplines)
• Sarah will attend a riverfront meeting and reach out to Baird Jarman to see how he is engaging
• Sarah passed on climate resilience/energy decisions/environmental justice tools including an energy tool Risi was interested in to help understand whether change in energy use is related to temperature, change in building area, or making changes to energy systems.
• Sarah passed on a link to a broader set of tools just to introduce concepts that are in environmental justice/health that are not in the city climate action plan. There are also tools for categories in the plan.

General meeting notes

• Opportunities to engage for social change 
• Open campus and local data as teaching and collaboration opportunities
• Opportunities that are inclusive of courses teaching all time periods and contexts 
• Collaboration with Northfield and St. Olaf 
• Authentic issues invite lived-experiences and identity 
• The major/minor/special opportunities are exciting (Environmental Humanities) 
• Support faculty interests and needs without additive work
• Build in IDE as part of sustainability
• Workshops, grants, and education collaboration is possible with other colleges
• Many connections to Indigenous knowledge 
• Cohorts to support teaching and build connections for collaboration
• Sustainability jobs in all fields (economic risk, community development, policy)
• Big area for alumni collaboration and support for education
• A great place to invite staff or broader community for co-learning and education—expertise lives everywhere

Collaborations that worked well and their ingredients

• Fit with the content of my courses and expectations, easy to enter from my discipline
• Clear benefit to everyone involved
• Spaces that are welcoming and bring us together to sustain community
• Time, funding, and grants for projects that are more intensive
• Course releases for bigger things
• Co-creation with faculty, team teaching, triads between like disciplines
• Incentives for developing activities like quantitative reasoning where learning was an easy lift
• Fellowships/directorships are available for leadership (Broom Fellow, humanities director)
• Writing Across the Curriculum
• Quantitative Inquiry, Reasoning, and Knowledge (QuIRK)
• Humanities Center, research seminar
• Public Works Initiative
• Arts collaborations: Art exhibit to help visibility of Latinos in Faribault, collaboration with youth
• Networks to keep good ideas going and keep up connections between faculty and staff, here and with other places doing similar work (e.g. Twin Cities or St. Olaf)
• Bridge course with the library
• ACE courses and other CCCE offerings
• The Arb is an ongoing collaboration with the community that is welcoming 
• Multi-generational learning opportunities
• Support learn how to make new linkages (e.g. historical times to present)

Areas or strategies that hold potential for you in sustainability and environmental justice

• Sustainability should be in the strategic plan in some way 
• This would be a great place for sustained and rotating faculty leadership and leadership teams to do things across the college
• This invites many energizing new collaboration around shared goals
• We could have a seminar with a common reading
• Collaborating on week of content is an easy start 
• We could have something like the Humanities Center directorship or the Broom Fellow
• There are exciting opportunities in Environmental Humanities
• This can’t be additive for untenured people, we are concerned about this broadly in discussions about institutional requirements (ILOs, graduation)
• Arts and visualization, values and culture
• Themes (e.g. strategies for engaging past to present, teaching with data or modeling, connecting to place, the Arboretum, local solutions, linking art and science)
• Specific disciplinary examples came up from STEM and humanities 
• Even without specifically incorporating justice in a class, a sustainability course is a way to connect with identity and belonging
• Let’s find ways to expand how we capitalize on the Arboretum
• Community engagement, writing, ethics, and quantitative courses etc. could link
• Some things many can do, some are harder and this could support both
• There are ways to link science and art that would appeal to students and also ways to link history and culture, we can also show how the arts are part of sustainability in Northfield
• Historical concepts of nature 
• Modeling, teaching with data
• Solutions, our program works on flooding, soils, and climate change challenges

• Belonging & community building are central goals/interests that emerged from a first generation college student focus group
• Societally relevant topics are appealing to first generation students
• Exposure to different lives and experiences to environmental topics is important
• Teaching that considers belonging and societally relevant topics is great
• Reduce hidden curriculum and share other inclusivity practices as part of professional development
• Consider a teaching/course or professional development model where experts in belonging and sustainability work together
• Seek people who already innovate across curriculum as partners, people who are willing to change their courses

• Review FOCUS reports to know student interests in sustainability a common topic for FOCUS (but sometimes other topics)
• Support FOCUS with project ideas, data ideas, connections to people
• Encourage students to bring identity into sustainability projects
• Expose students to diverse perspectives and experiences
• Open data is of interest to FOCUS and resources for faculty to create labs with open data or new partners

• Sustainability could easily be a theme, especially a specific sustainable development goal
• Sustainability is also important for student co-curricular activities, expanding internships to include the humanities is a good idea
• Career connections here are valued
• Lots of interest in nature, place, the Arb

• Need a broad community-identified vision for sustainability that helps people see different places to enter, e.g. individually, through campus operations, and through strategies we learn in education to apply to future work/in advocacy for large change. Students want many opportunities.
• Climate change could be included in small ways in many more courses. This is really appealing because climate change is a really important issue and we need to have ideas from many angles. It would also not distract from whatever the other foci are of a class and helps show how climate change is integrated.
• More ACE courses is a good idea
• We like the idea of sustainability designation, or sustainability as a graduation requirement

LTC

• LTC offers a vehicle for PD available to support faculty and staff sustainability interest
• Could reinforce or empower faculty who want to highlight something they did after an annual workshop or a winter workshop, or something external to Carleton that was learned
• Is undergoing strategic revision, could shift in goals that are supported (e.g. move from breadth and opportunities that emerge to targeted growth)

Academic Technology

• Wiebke sees fits for sustainability in e-portfolios and helping students map their experiences to careers
• Data uses a lot of energy, is a big area of concern in academic sustainability

Advice on strategy and structures

• Catalyzed when sustainability named as one of three top challenges
• Established goals and structures
• Organized around the acronym CORE: curriculum, operations, research, and engagement
• Goal of every part of the student learning experience 
• Sustainability the ultimate liberal art (Chronicle of Higher Education)
• Sustainability is broader than environmental studies, but intersecting
• Emphasize the community and justice
• Community is the unit of sustainability (collective action)
• Supported groups of faculty in course design cohort ($)
  • Grant (competitive process); submit application, most funded
  • Justice and Sustainability (Big Ten for Institutional Sustainability); place is always emphasized
  • In collaboration with interdisciplinary program that has a narrower focus
  • June workshop (early summer); monthly meetings for the next six months, produce a syllabus
  • Half paid after workshop and other half paid with deliverable
  • Lunch often at meetings
• UMACS collaborations
  • Mary Savina is a past collaborator
  • Megan Voorhees focused on operations and education side

• Sustainability Council
  • Task Groups (most important level for implementation)
    • Energy & Water (water is energy)
    • Land Use Council 
    • Student learning (gone now, was the start but faded away)
  • Purchasing & Waste
    • Specific waste stream work
    • Not formal
    • Move Out Event is the biggest thing
    • City collaboration
  • Sustainable Foods
    • Education
    • CSA program

• Equity and justice space important
• Education space: institution putting itself in a student-to-teacher relationship with Dakota neighbors
• Prairie Island energy injustice history
• Sustainability doesn’t only happen in the classroom
• Better account for extracurricular education like Aida 
• Activism class with Meredith
  • Planning intergenerationally
  • Future that is many thousands of years
  • Megan V., 80% of biodiversity is in 5% of earth where Indigenous people live
  • How do we think about our responsibility collectively?
• Michael
  • Shared watershed
• Marcy
  • Environmental Office at Prairie Island (Marcy)
  • Summit with Tribal Ed Staff (Meredith); Departments of Natural Resources (with Tribal nations); four Dakota nations, Shakopee might help lead
  • Establishing Indigenous Climate Resilience Planning
  • Ear marking funds specific to this 

Michael/Meredith

• One of our assets to Dakota, is that we occupy a big chunk of Dakota homeland
• Put feelers out to Ioway tribe, or Prairie Island
• Space, occasion, and funding to have whatever conversations they want to have
• A few events, round table
• Plan for our land could include possibilities of co-management with Dakota
• 800 Acres of Arb

More

• Bringing farm land into new management
• Ensuring that engagement is not harmful
• Mutual need and mutual benefit
• OCS: Constanza and Dan
  • Local and international
  • Foodways in Yucatan

Carleton will establish a new carbon neutrality goal of 2025, placing us among a small number of top liberal arts colleges to achieve carbon neutrality before 2030. 

The college has made enormous progress in reducing carbon emissions on campus over the past decade. In its 2020–21 review of the College’s Climate Action Plan, the Environmental Advisory Committee (EAC) concluded that we are well positioned to deepen our sustainability efforts and accelerate our progress toward carbon neutrality. Setting a goal for achieving carbon neutrality by 2025 reflects the urgency of the climate crisis, aligns with Carleton’s position as a leader, and pushes us to address remaining carbon emissions in the near term. Achieving carbon neutrality and the continued climate work that lies beyond will require full campus involvement in sustainability efforts, in which the College’s educational mission, curriculum, operations, and community activities and programs are coordinated in a unified and integrated approach.

• Institutions should be able to demonstrate that offsets is not the end and that incremental progress will still be made
  • Saying that there is a cost of carbon for all of our activities
    • It is either a low cost or a higher cost (actual social cost)
    • Scope 1, 2 are higher, Scope 3 is lower
  • % of emissions are covered by mitigations vs. offsets
  • Social Cost or Tax could be a substitute (UC System)
  • Decarbonize + Offsets = Net Zero/Net Neutral
    • Crediting emissions for Scope 3
    • Could also work on local projects and not claim the credits
    • Claim of Net Zero/Net Neutral has to be verified
    • SiMAP calls for Offsets, additionality, purchased offsets
    • Colgate calculates “arboretum” every year, need a management plan
    • President’s Climate Commitment
      • Hypothetical NGO planting trees, we are going to buy an offset that was unverified
      • Offset Network supports peer review for new projects to add accountability
      • No school has achieved neutrality without offsets 
• Now the structures are around carbon neutrality
  • Not everything is measured (e.g. not all Scope 3)
• Reporting is needed on offsets even if they aren’t your emissions

Center for the Environment, Ecological Design, and Sustainability (CEEDS) is home to:

• Environmental Science and Policy Major
• Concentrations (Minors with Applied/Research/Intern Experiences)
• Staffing
  • Director of Sustainability
    • Engaging Partnerships to Support Program Directions 
    • Supports Climate Change Group Implementation 
    • Grants/Development Collaboration
      • Emerging Landscape, Nature Based Solutions, Food Systems
    • Teaching a Course
    • Managing Staff
    • Committees
  • Associate Director (Supports Education Implementation)
    • Chairs ES&P Concentrations
    • Brings alumni in and broader networks 
    • Arts Afield Effort
  • Assistant Director of Sustainability
    • Operational Sustainability Pieces 
    • Some Work in Field Station
  • Administrative Coordinator
    • Move Out Program
    • Sustainable Offices Program
  • Spatial Analysis Lab
  • Field Station Curriculum and Research Coordinator
  • Faculty Director of Sustainability (Academic Program Development)
  • 4 FTE

Most recent framing developed with a Study Group on Climate Change that included trustees.

Current Foci for Smith:

• Academics
  • New offerings with climate change
  • More experiential opportunities
• Programming
• Operations
• Investments/Finance
• Institutional Change
  • Incorporate sustainability into the work plans of administrative and departmental offices and explore the development of sustainability innovation funds to implement cost- and carbon-saving programs
  • Develop a new campus landscape master plan that promotes use of the physical campus to demonstrate best practices in ecological management and climate-change adaptation. 

Next Big Things at Smith will be: 

• Food Systems Committee
• Nature-based Solutions
• Science-based Target Initiatives

Worked with Advancement to come up with a suite of giving priorities:

• Faculty Fellows
  • One month summer salary, 2-4 student interns, funding for research
  • DOE proposal for Geothermal Energy Solutions
  • Moth populations and Climate Change
  • Regional Magnolia transplant for adaptation 

• Curricular Enhancement Grants
• 15 faculty/year, module to course, Ecological Design or Sustainability, working to expand humanities now

Centers have development liaison

Capstone Course 

Dual Reporting (Staff to facilities, faculty to provost)

Financing and Administration (Facilities)

• CFO
• All funding from Provost
• Landscape Master Plan, Resilience

• STEM Faculty are interested in more interdisciplinary collaboration
• Sustainable development goals are a framing that some faculty see themselves in
• This is a place for an ALL STEM discussion to support additional idea generation on connections that are both STEM specific and part of desire interdisciplinary growth

• Students have driven a lot of sustainability accountability
• Student life buys their own compostables
• The Wellness Office posts materials in digestible formats on their website that Student Life picks up to post in dorms
• RAs plan one activity with a campus partner
• Need for ongoing sharing of accomplishments in sustainability because people only process what they are seeing in front of them
• Pay attention to who is asking for sustainability things
  • Waste management/composting is whiter and higher income, vs transportation and funding to support family
• Agree that annual sharing should cover all areas of sustainability
  • Operations, Education, Student Life/Clubs, Community Engagement

May 7, 2023

• Interested in funding/training/freshmen orientation for more people to do trash talk at events
• Interested in supporting custodians with waste concerns/contamination
• Interested in increasing number of courses that include environmental topics (e.g. in a discipline like math)
• Courses that consider sustainability, environment, and climate are clustered in some disciplines, we don’t have many themes (that we can easily find to participate in across disciplines)

Started 2016–17, 8 years

Collaborative: Office of Sustainability, Lang, EST, and President’s Office

President Program format

• Paid internship during course of year
• Co-taught with SUS/ENTS
• Coordination with interns (SUS office)
• Lang provides money and staff time
  • Sustainability and engaged scholarship fellows
  • Fellows help as teaching assistant, all hiring, updating Moodle, etc.
• President in name and to attend student presentations
• Started with this model

More

• Process: Faculty & Staff propose projects (Fall)
  • Purpose
  • Background
  • Outcomes
  • Resources
  • Students can have autonomy within these broader goals
• Application Dec/Jan
• Students matched the Spring the prior year
• Spring orientation with mentors
• Full day training before semester begins
  • Team Building
  • POP (purpose outcomes process)
  • Project Management
  • Change Management for Sustainability

First 6 weeks

• Background
• Figuring out what will be done
• Project Planning (education)
• Systems thinking
• Collaboration
• How Swarthmore makes decisions (board, faculty, staff); how do you make change
• Inquiry
• Project Workshops to create a workplan for the year
• Former Director of Sustainability at Swarthmore is now at Stanford leading this model out

Project Board

• 4-8 individuals (have a stake in the project, expertise)
• Chairing station project (had the people involved in this decision)
• Meet 2-3 times per semester
• Project mentors meet once a week
• One main point of contact works better than two
• Every year a team does restoration work and that is always ongoing
• Strong record keeping helps people see what is underway

Longer history in Sustainability

• Started buying recs in the 90s
• First staff in 2012 (President’s Climate Commitment, 2010)
• Carbon Neutrality Date
• First plan loose commitments, hiring a director, expand opportunities
• Came up with programs and then donors (not other way around)

Places for Donors

• Revolving Fund
• Education
  • Leadership Program
  • ENTS is not a department, but is a tt program with 1 FTE faculty
  • Future could be additional FTE
  • Sustainability and Climate Change Institutional Planning Now
  • Thinking about Curriculum integration now

Staffing

• 3 full time: Director (reports to President), Associate Director, and Climate Action Manager
  • Plus drawdown, outreach (facilities)
• Partial FTE from Lang
• Most mentors are staff

Attractive to donors

• Fellowships
• Program Support 

Navigating Multi-year

• Would like more co-curricular experiences in sustainability
• Would like more applied and experiential opportunities in major 
• Climate change in more courses 
• Leadership opportunities

• Support culture of custodian innovation
• Desire for the sustainability office to attend meetings once a term and support signs/engagement around waste reduction
• Could use STAs, or a program that invites volunteers that commit to 1-2 trash talk activities in a sign-up
• The work of custodians in building culture could inform new models where more programs identify sustainability opportunities
• Ongoing need for student projects and learning, e.g. centralized waste management would require cost feasibility

Calandra Waters Lake

Calandra Waters Lake is currently executive director of Wild Virginia and was the inaugural director of sustainability for the College of William & Mary, where she was also adjunct faculty for the environment and sustainability program.

Green Fee- only toward sustainability, broad criteria supported broad entry

• Internal granting system
• Fall and Spring Semester
• Students with faculty or staff
• Faculty and Staff
• Partners with faculty and staff
• Building garden into class

Class taught by director

• All projects would be posted with expected outcomes (end of Spring for Fall)
• Then Calandra would advertise list of projects
• Project money sometimes
• Course Credit
• Could be used as a capstone
• Mark which projects
• Skills they bring relevant to projects
• Taught 3-credit course, recruit projects and advisors from across campus and community
• Mentored advisors in how to support students with content
• How to talk about climate change?
• Used the course to match
• Course would meet every week or two, readings on sustainability, how to talk about climate change, big broad ideas, what are SDGs
• Internship started right away

Tiered internships (student leaders)

• Social Media

Office was structured initially at a Strategic Level (report to VP)

Philosophy mattered. Sustainability:

• It’s the smart thing to do
• Faculty and student interests/needs to match the incentives offered
• Ability to see into the future to adapt
• Business side
• Everyone needs to be working for sustainability
• What do you bring
• Students most important

Heather Macdonald ’76

Scales education at William & Mary

• Access: Sustainability Work On President’s Cabinet
• Values team teaching 
• Incentives matter
• Criteria will really matter to our success at interdisciplinarity and sustainability (in funding and institutionally)
• Strive for institutional learning outcome
  • Labeling can be contentious
  • Do it, but with discussion
• Many opportunities for interesting courses
  • Are there other requirements, where such courses could help meet requirements
  • What’s the money (PD, courses, within courses)
• Sustainability Fellows
  • Small grants to students (supervisor on projects)
  • Taught a course (project management, etc., common threads in mentoring)
  • Connected to broader university
  • Blurbs
  • Working for change across the whole environment
• Wendy Bohon and Karin Kirk (Workshop)
  • Invite to support strengthening communication
  • How to listen and how to ask questions
    • Way to talk to people about climate change
    • Roleplay a conversation
    • Repeating what you learned
    • What can you infer
    • Finding a shared connection
• Career Center/Alumni
  • Start programming on jobs, work with alumni
  • Building connections, including early career
  • Goal to help students learn about how to get somewhere
  • Bringing people into classes
• Environmental Studies
  • Humanities/Ethics
  • All disciplines
  • To address these important
  • Jim Caste
  • Guest speakers, high budget people (1 credit for going and discussion section)
• New trends
  • Community Engagement and EJ
• Conference Proposal
  • Solutions
  • Equity/Community Engagement
  • Virtually

Draft Key Ideas

1. We celebrate a Carleton education that supports students wherever they go from every discipline. How we tackle climate change through education, operations, and community engagement is part of bigger work in supporting students in their capacity to integrate their learning and use it in new ways, especially for equity and justice.
2. We support an inclusive and whole campus vision for sustainability that will accelerate carbon neutrality and advance campus and beyond campus mitigation, adaptation, equity, and justice. 
3. We will strengthen sustainability education at Carleton through robust support for learning and collaboration. There are both institutional and ENTS-specific opportunities to advance sustainability education. We will seek to strengthen ENTS, support participation in improving sustainability education, and build leadership opportunities for our students. 
4. We will also start with curriculum and then work to increase learning and sharing across offices; every office is accountable to sustainability.
5. We have a high capacity in sustainability in all of our work such as education, operations, community engagement, student development, career support, professional development, and engaging national education networks. Sustainability expertise is everywhere and in every office. We could create more opportunities to share that expertise and learn from each other or to explore what makes this place special. There are many examples to learn from that span from Days of Action, to month campus expertise sharing and community building activities, to a “Year of Climate.”
6. Food systems were of special interest to students with concerns around access, sustainability, and increasing student education or co-curricular experiential opportunities. A food task force is needed to better map our strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities to strengthen our local food system. Many of our food activities could be made more intentional to provide deepened support.

7. Our operational goals will expand from a focus on reducing emissions to also including support for adaptation, resilience, and environmental justice as we address change underway. We will recommend:
   • Adaptation planning in our landscapes and spaces to existing and future risk.
     • Some of our adaptation responses must include relocating or repurposing vulnerable places like West Gym
     • Excessive heat and air quality
     • Supporting broader community
   • Developing a formal climate leadership offering with campus and/or community partners to increase resilience & adaptation projects

8. Students are leading our climate response through their advocacy. We could strengthen how we support climate advocacy, solutions, and leadership skills in curriculum or distinctive programs.
9. The Arboretum is a distinctive place, central to Carleton’s identity. We should increase how we actively support education and local to broader collaboration here. 
10. Shared administrative support across offices (ENTS, Arb, Sustainability) and synergistic planning could catalyze sustainability work, especially in interdisciplinary and place-based education and related supportive programming and/or communication (e.g. speaker series, socials). Shared space could create welcoming interdisciplinary and place-based collaboration.
11. Alumni from every major express interest in supporting climate action with their time and resources. We have many graduates excited to support current students.
12. We will need new teams and resources to advance a whole of institution approach and might also more intentionally stage progressive growth. There are examples for this and opportunities to innovate using our strengths.
13. Waste energy savings have long been realized through major systems and big events, we should continue to support outreach and education and seek to streamline now-cumbersome waste management policies.
14. We will electrify within 10 years and establish fleet goals.
15. A purchasing task force will be formed to support offset decisions, travel emissions discussions, and purchasing.
16. We will explore opportunities for impact investing.

What’s Ahead

• Revising key ideas to inform goals, targets, and strategies
• Seeking additional feedback to fit goals, targets, and strategies to folks directly involved in implementation and understand management/time/resource needs

Resource needs

• Hiring needs (faculty lines, another sustainability staff, so I can also move into academic support)
• Department level funding for ENTS (or more given programming opportunities)
• Special leadership programs/applied opportunities that capitalize on place/Arboretum, or that expand student capacity in solutions with campus and local partners (donors like these)
• Professional development funding and support; we propose an annual workshop that first supports our faculty in developing shared work/ideas, then evolves into a leadership institute (e.g. open to nearby colleges/linked), and/or enhancing teaching excellence in through supporting research pilots and faculty grants (see SERC contributions in National Academies, 2020 Strengthening Sustainability Programs and Curricula at the Undergraduate and Graduate Levels, a report which currently informs most higher education sustainability education funding)
• Phased: Programming/Speakers, social funding and support for students
• Communication/Administrative support

There will also be operational support/fundraising needed related to: 

• Electrifying within 10 years and operating on a diverse portfolio of entirely renewable energy
• Upholding the highest industry standards for new buildings
• Landscape planning and implementation for mitigation and adaptation
• Strengthening food systems; this could start with a task force to set goals for strengthening food equity and sustainability, but could strengthen farm and local food systems education and partnering collaboration for student experiences and food equity/sustainability outcomes