Month: February 2015

Progress:

• Krygier has completed a first draft of Sustainability Plan and opened it up to comments from Geog 499 students.
• Krygier has revised President’s Climate Commitment page on Geog 499 Class blog (in tabs at top of page, or here). Use this Commitment to generate some goals for the Sustainability Plan.
• May Move Out meeting Tuesday Feb 24 at noon (207 Sci Ctr) to review draft of May Move Out plan and schedule.
• Proposal for Legacy Internship position for Food Sustainability distributed for comments. Due Friday, Feb. 27.

For the next week:

• Review draft sustainability plan for adjustments prior to distribution to STF members. Discussion in class Tues., Feb. 24. The draft goes to STF members on Wednesday Feb 25 in preparation for the Wednesday March 4 STF meeting at 4pm. Please plan to attend that meeting if possible.
• Review President’s Climate Commitment page on Geog 499 Class blog (in tabs at top of page, or here) for ideas for sustainability plan goals. We have to review the 2009 report and focus on the issues which led to OWU not signing the Commitment and address those.
• Another source of ideas for goals are the Ceres Principles.
• Hold off on the grants issue until next week.

 

Progress:

• drafts of content sections complete and to Krygier for review & revision
• draft of May Move Out plan and schedule completed
• draft of proposal for Legacy Internship position for Food Sustainability
• meeting with Karen Crosman & discussion of Dominion Foundation grant

For the next week:

• prepare yourself for specific requests from Krygier as he reviews the content of the content sections. The draft goes to STF members on Wednesday Feb 25 in preparation for the Wednesday March 4 STF meeting at 4pm. Please plan to attend that meeting if possible.
• review key sites related to foundation funding and begin to document potential projects and foundations for funding the projects
• Foundation Center (Karen Crosman has a subscription and can search more options through the Center; I suggest compiling any questions you have or searches you suggest and we will send her a list from all of us).
• Columbus Foundation: several people with OWU connections are in significant positions at this Foundation, which is more or less a “meta” foundation which administers many smaller foundations and grant sources. Some are limited to the City of Columbus or Franklin Co., but others are available to Delaware Co.
• General Foundation Search: keep in mind what Karen talked to us about foundations and search for additional options. Sometimes it helps to have a project or projects in mind (dishwasher, natural gas powered vans) other times it helps to see what a foundation funds (to get ideas for possibilities on campus).
• Document what you find with links and questions and we will compile this information together as part of the Sustainability Plan.

As we scoot towards our rough draft of the sustainability plan by Thursday Feb 19 make sure you review the additional student projects I uploaded to the Geog 499 shared folder:

Info: More Past Student Projects

Grants:

Building on the excellent news about the May Move Out Grant, Thursday we also have Karen Crosman (OWU Development) coming to talk about the Dominion Foundation Grant – take a look at the details before we meet Thursday.

Interviews:

First round of interviews: make sure you have your answers typed in the form in the shared folder.

Second round of interviews: I am thinking this is the round (a different group takes over) where we talk to (email, Skype, phone, in person) alumni, Sustainable Delaware, etc. I propose we wait until we have a revised draft of the plan (Wed Feb 25). I think we can also include Mary’s idea of random interviews of selected students, faculty, staff.

A third round of interviews can happen in early April after we have a 2nd draft of the plan. This can be an online survey, in part to get feedback from as many people as possible but also to help promote the plan.

External Reviews:

External Reviews of OWU’s Sustainability Efforts: One more task (probably in the Co-curricular & Community category – Sarah, Thomas, Cindy) is to compile the various places OWU sustainability efforts are documented and review them for accuracy. There seem to be cases where students submitted information, other cases where we are not sure who submitted the information. The Sustainability Task Force can oversee these external reports in the future, but we need to gather the relevant information in one place. A few of these (I am sure there are more):

Campus Sustainability Report Card

The Princeton Review Green Colleges

Digital Tasks for Each of You

Please do the following:

Follow this blog so you get an email when I put up a new posting (this is not working at the moment, will let you know when it is)

Follow the Sustainability and Environment blog

Join the OWU Alumni LinkedIn group, and also the Environmental Studies Sub Group.

Scrappy Sustainability

Finally, in an interview with the OWU Magazine I talked up our efforts and suggested they get a photograph of our group for the article. I also started calling what we are doing “Scrappy Sustainability” as per our discussion about schools with large endowments (who can easily afford the costs of sustainability) vs. our situation at OWU. Might be a good sound bite, but we should discuss more.

Live long and vesper,

John K.

Week 5:

News: May Move out is a Go (grant money or not)!

1) updates from the interview group on progress (Thursday at 10:30)

2) updates on alumni outreach and ideas for how to use LinkedIn contacts

3) updates on the content groups

• make sure to organize your sections per our discussion last week:
  • current practice
  • recommendations / goals
  • responsible persons, offices, people
• any impediments to progress, people who need to be contacted
• we should continue to discuss any changes in format you think may be
  appropriate – ultimately, the sections need to follow the same format
  so any insights you get while working should be shared.
• ideas for continued work towards a draft (see calendar) Feb 19

4) Meeting with Karen Crosman regarding Dominion Foundation grant: Feb 19

5) Query from Rev. Casto. How to respond to this, from the perspective of
campus sustainability?