Interdepartmental Green Team Meeting

I was finally able to attend the interdepartmental green team meeting last week and I am so happy I went! I believe that if we would like to move forward as an active green team, these meetings are critical to our success. They allow for a pooling of resources, are great motivation, and the people leading them are so helpful!

I would like to share with you what I learned at the meeting (as I will recap at our April meeting). I hope this reflection will allow us to start thinking about the future endeavors we would like to take on! I certainly have a few ideas about this and am hoping to spark some brainstorming this upcoming month!

Below were the main things I took from this meeting:

Green Teams on Campus:
There are currently 23 active Green Teams on campus!
(However, remember that we are still one of the few academic green teams- a kudos to us and a reason to be motivated!)
There are 3 Recycle Works awarded Green Teams, including HATS and HR (an endeavor that I believe we should take on in the near future!)
Green Teams are quickly growing and it is Sustainability's goal that soon the Green Team grass root movement will meet a Top-Down movement and PSU will unite in endeavors to make PSU as sustainable as possible.

Upcoming Themes
As a result of the feedback they have gotten, all Green Teams will soon be united in specific focuses each quarter. The Sustianability team will gear all their endeavors each quarter toward those themes to aid green teams in our focus! I think this is a wonderful idea and will be helpful not only in helping us succinct goals, but will unite the Green Team force. I have outlined the "themes" for each quarter of the upcoming year below:

Winter 2009
Recycling, Waste Management

Spring 2009
Transportation, Food, Green Events (Kelly is currently working on coming up with a green guide for events! Keep a look out for this!)

Summer 2009
Purchasing, Planning

Fall 2009
Paper, Energy Conservation

Motivation, Resources
Another major topic of discussion that came up during the meeting is how to get people motivated when there is so much to do and this is such a large goal. Obviously, the themes will be an attempt to make this a little easier. However, there was also a lot of discussion about feeding off of each other. I believe we, as one of the few academic departmental green teams, need to make an effort to make our presence known & to pool resources as much as possible! Sarah, Kelly, Thomas Wah (BAO), and Noelle have made themselves extremely available to us as resources & we should attempt to communicate with them about our needs. Kelly likes to come to green team meetings & I plan on inviting her to our next one. Let's utilize the enegery & motivation that this group has started!

My thoughts on things to think about for our April meeting:
1) I believe we should at least start investigating what we would need to do to get Recycle Works Awarded. I believe Kelly will be a good resource to start this endeavor.
2) I believe we need to come up with goals each quarter associated with the theme & attempt to meet them
3) I would like to see us attempt to recruit other academic departments (especially School of Education). This would be a great motivator for us to start the "competitions" we would like to see happen!
4) Staying updated on the Ecowiki is imperative! If we aren't paying attention to the resources we have, we are missing out on opportunities.
5) I would like to brainstorm about campaigns to get our faculty involved. This could be as simple as "advertising" to them in their office hall ways. The Applied Linguistics department attended this meeting and they were faculty members & super excited. It was great to see & I would love to see more faculty take an interest in making the SBA Greener. I think we just need to target them more & they will be motivated :)


All right! I believe I have said enough for now! Thanks for reading & I look forward to seeing you at our next meeting in April!