Notes from “Service-Learning & Sustainability: Avenues for Collaboration”
July 20, 2012 @ Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Notes submitted by Anna Dorman, WS’14
Intro : “New York coalition for sustainability in higher education”
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Beyond just green building folks
Non-profit and companies are part but only high ed has voting rights
Membership is free
Leveraging Academic Institutions for Sustainable Community Development
Lisa Cleckner – HWS Colleges Finger Lakes Institute: http://fli.hws.edu/
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Huge economic impact of higher education in new York state
o 5 counties in New York with 7% or more of population employed in
higher education, 5 counties with 5-7%
o Largest private higher education sector in the nation, 167,450 jobs in 2009
o 40% more than California
o Collect and student spending provided 495,100 jobs and $62.2 billion of
economic activity in NYS
Finger Lakes Institute Overview
o Established because there are 11 beautiful lakes in the area, monitoring
short and long term quality the “mini great lakes”, lots of ecosystems in a
small space
o Research, education and outreach with and economic development base
o Putting dollars on things really helps and makes it a good way to tell the
story
o “Project Spotlight: Aquatic Invasive Species” is the big program this
summer
 Focused on hydrilla
 Huge economic impact of invasive species
 Were able to work with prof. who built the scientific base for FLI’s
outreach and education programs.
o Education focus
 Inquiry-based learning
 STEM education and citizen science
 Obligation to society
 Finger lakes monitoring program with middle school and high
school students with online database with easy access
o Community Outreach and public service
 Primary interface with the public
 Education, information, and service on wide variety of
environmentally related topics,
 Over 4,000 attendees
 Green building- geothermal, solar panels, rain garden
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Really important for the community, important demonstration
space to show new technologies to the community
 Giving people an opportunity to really connect with the
environment
o Finger Lakes Regional Watershed Alliance
 10,000 members 9 watershed alliances
 Really important
o Economic Development
 Land use planning, rural sustainability, local food, tourism,
agriculture
 All of this needs to happen in a controlled and planned way
 Interdisciplinary program with HWS faculty
o HWS Sustainable Community Development
 Working to fully engage student body in this process
 Design things right in the first place
 Systems perspective is really important
 Full time program manager at FLI
 Steering committee of 7 multi-disciplinary faculty
 Certificate options, new courses and existing
 Tangible real world add-ons to liberal arts education
 Finance, real estate development, design, planning, project
management, lifecycle assessment
 ENV101 taught in spring ‘12
 Built environment, energy, waste, food, water, science,
technology
 Panels in the evening in downtown Geneva
o Made the students go off campus
o Bought journals from downtown
o Start first years off early
 Team class projects based on community issues
 Experiential learning
 Materials management
o Diversion of C&D materials from landfills
 Sustainable agriculture
o Supply chain for sourcing local food
 Campus and region
 Green infrastructure
o Rain barrels, rain gardens, and campus plan
 Branding for Geneva community
o What represents the community
 Next steps
 Client-based approach
o Team internship over the summer with a group of
the students from that class
 Case studies
 Upper level course being developed
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We need an actual discipline to fall back on
Assess feasibility of major, minor and/or certification
options
 70 students in first year (all first years and sophomores)
Summary:
 Need to use the research that is generated within these academic
institution especially with cuts in state institutions
 Needs to be translated to some public use
 Save the Rain program in Syracuse in which Onondaga county
reached out to SU to help develop and disseminate information
 Finger Lakes Wine Alliance
 Came looking for a map really simply for the school to do
because of capabilities but difficult for them to develop
 Roles that staff play
 Different stake holders talking together, different
generations talking together
 Business incubators
 Doers that work around the calendar, client based approach
 Adaptive re-use of existing spaces, energy and infrastructure
purchasing
Looking for issues that are always on the wish list and helping community
members get those started
Non-traditional funding sources are great option for small universities
Internships
Capstones, semester-long projects
Networked academic institutions
 Including community colleges
Sarah Brylinsky- Program Associate at Second Nature
 Leads American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment
o Founded in 2007
o Deeply integrate sustainability, greenhouse gas inventory, Climate Action
Plan
o 677 ACUPCC signatories
o 465 Climate Action Plans have been submitted (submitted every two
years)
 Qualitative update
 First ones submitted this January
o 235 Progress Reports on the Climate Action Plan
o Approx. 7 million students represented
o 198 signatories offer 9,548 sustainability based courses
 153 have undergraduate degrees in sustainability, 78 graduate
degrees
 Needs to be deeply integrated
 92 schools where research is a priority provide incentives for
developing or incorporating sustainability into existing courses
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Only about 54% of schools
Which means faculty are taking that on without additional
institutional support
 Community colleges are actually doing a lot better with
integrating sustainability into courses
 Graduate programs are doing the worst
 97% of signatories have a climate/sustainability community
partnerships
 Normally a high level program
 A lot of times it identifies needs without a system for
implementing those
 Preparedness
 Are students prepared for the new green economy, how is it
integrated, are they prepared to be sustainable members of
the community
 Corporate sponsors are looking for people who are
sustainability literate and are ready to contribute at a
community level and have experience working at a
community level
o Students need hands on experience, local
experiences, need to understand civic responsibility
o Personally she really credits those hands on
experiences for where she is today
 Programs that are most effective are those with faculty
incentives
o Need dedicated resources
 Information:
 Celebrating Five Years of Climate Leadership
o Lots of data and case studies
o Create for developing an argument for your own
school
 Adaptation Committee White Paper
o How are we mitigating impacts and adapting to
changing climate
o Best practices resources
 Both on president’s climate commitment website
 Challenge: October 24th is Campus Sustainability Day
 Have a conversation about preparedness
 Have a virtual conversation on Google hang out
 Student leadership, developing students list of best
practices
 Sbrylinsky@secondmature.org
 6177220036 (X205)
o Question: How do you assess student literacy?
 Working to develop that this year
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Preliminary resources on president’s climate commitment website
under resources
o Question: How do you get others to sign? How do you get the rest to
report accurately and on time? Can Second Nature co-sponsor an event?
 Reporting is required annually, timing isn’t that important as long
as people are working on the ground
 A lot of campuses with no higher level institutional support
 Need peer to peer conversations between high level senior
administrations at different institutions
 Second Nature hosts conference in June for presidents of
institutions that are signatories
Service Learning and Campus Operations: Student Projects to Integrate Food,
Food Waste and Energy Production at Clarkson University
Susan Powers PhD, PE- Clarkson College
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Need to send students into schools and let them come out with a variety of
different skills and the ability to think and represent their diversity
o We want diverse thinking, 21st century skill sets
o Why getting students into real world, no right answer type projects
Sustainability Strategic Plan
o Students need to graduate with an understanding of the concepts of
sustainability and the skills to shape a sustainability
o Get clubs involved
o Effective experiential learning
Students have started their own coffee company using fair trade coffee and a local
roasters
Engineers without boarders going to Ecuador
Zero Emission snowmobile
Sustainable Foods in Cold Climate
o 4 years ago student started this program and he got funding for a research
experience over the summer looking into high rise cold weather farming
o Got 75,000 from EPA3 competition to construct greenhouse
o Construction finish a year ago
o Students designed and built a ventilation system
o Currently growing peppers
Campus food waste goes to anaerobic digester
o “gotta go at student pace and letting students figure it out”
o Feasible on a college campus
Ongoing challenge to integrate the rest of the student body into this program
Making it happen
o Commitment to making students’ ideas happen
o SPEED program
o Paid positions
o Shipley Center for Innovation/ Reh Center for Entrepreneurship
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o Utilize campus infrastructure as experiential learning sites to promote
sustainability education
 Who is the leader? Faculty, student, staff?
 Continuity
 Funding
Key Points
o Real world programs
o Experiential Learning Sites
 21st century skills
o Lots of ways to get students involved
www.clarkson.edu/green
www.clarkson.edu/projects/cehrf
Campus-Community Engagement for Sustainability: Building Clean Economy in
Southern Tier
 Tompkins County Climate Protection Initiative, Cornell Cooperative Extension
Tompkins County
 Time of unprecedented change and this is the context in which students are going
through their education and wanting more than ever before to really be involved
in those areas
 Cornell put up $1,500 to do something in the community. Decided to deliver a
sustainable lightbulb to every person in the community in a single day. Organized
over 100 volunteers and actually did it. Saved the community $70,000 in energy
savings.
 Brought in students to learn about home assessments
 These improvements are economic development very labor intensive
 Southern Tier:
o $1.2 billion in economic activity
o $120 million annual energy savings
o 150 energy efficiency businesses
o 4,000 jobs created
 3 things needed:
o Market demand, jobs, financing mechanisms
o Energy Corp. trained 95 undergraduate students
 Really hands on work and show community members how to
update homes
o Get people talking about what opportunities are there
 Upgrade Upstate with guides, steps, interactive house, checklists,
how to get a home energy assessment, financing incentives,
contractors in your area, testimonials of residents
o LightenUp Tompkins
 Over 5,000 CFLs delivered in 3 hours across Tompkins County
 Delivered by students a lot of fraternities involved
o In last 4 years delivered over 20,000 CFLs
 Manual and all the materials are available online
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Binghamton University has adopted this and are bringing it into poorer
communities as a job creation method
Question: Where does funding come from?
o Use what you have where you are. Funding is pretty minimal, employ
work study students and funding from Cornell to pay students
Post-Lunch discussion, Facilitated by Katie Flowers, HWS Colleges
Words from word chart:
Service Learning: reciprocity, reflection, experimental, dual learning, collaborative,
authentic, rigorous, constructive
Sustainable Development: systems level, resilient, equity, dynamic, economic viability,
place based, civic responsibility, environment
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Barriers/obstacles when service learning and sustainable development try work
together?
 Lack of funding, continuity, perceptions, big companies, lack of
ownership or unclear ownership, being an add-on, there is an image
problem with both of these topics so combined it is just compounded, lack
of faculty incentives and community partner incentives, need to engrain
civic engagement and sustainable development in an institutionalized
fashion in tenure process, differing expectations, tension over priorities,
burn out,
 Opportunities existing to combine the two and where they overlap
 Need matched capacity, novel solutions, both provide space for civic
responsibility as shared vision, sustainably literate society student by
student, holistic learning environment, interdisciplinary, cognitive
dissonance, improve town gown relationships, reduce energy
consumption, make the community more sustainable, having students
connect in a way that makes them want to stay, student retention, change
of perception
Small Universities group one:
 Groups of students alternative spring breaks shared across institutions. So each
school sends a group of students. Thus they are capable of actually getting
something done
Large Universities:
 A lot about faculty incentives, not necessarily monetary,
 Parallel between sustainability and sustainable education
 Keeping everyone on the same page
 Getting partners and making connections
Small Universities two:
 Need to network on campus between service learning and sustainability
 Association of Colleges can share information and collectively accomplish goals
 Sharing expertise from different types of schools such as St. Lawrence and
Clarkson
 Economic development zones are great for getting students involved
Contact Information:
Michael Jabot, Ph.D. (Professor of Science Education)
T: (716) 673-3639
F: (716) 673-4664
Michael.jabot@fredonia.edu
www.fredonia.edu
Department of Curriculum & Instruction
21 Houghton Hall
Fredonia, NY 14063
Campus Compact: www.compact.org
NY Campus Compact: www.nycampuscompact.org
Rust 2 Green (I can’t find the website they have a twitter feed/facebook page though)