Students lead peers in sustainability

As part of an effort to further integrate the College’s sustainability goals with the everyday workings of student life, the Office of Sustainability Integration created the Residential Sustainability Coordinator (RSC) program, an initiative designed to educate students even more about sustainability.

The program designates students as RSCs: one Head RSC for each Commons, and several first-years per Commons who volunteer as RSCs.  Each Head RSC, whose responsibility it is to supervise the first-year RSCs in his or her Commons, can be compensated up to $1,000 for the academic year, or $8.70 an hour.

Administrators associated with the program expressed enthusiasm for its practical applications.

“Middlebury has a reputation as one of the ‘greenest’ campuses in the nation, but there is still a surprising amount of unsustainable behavior that goes on in dorms, classrooms and all across campus,” said Sustainability Communication and Outreach Coordinator Clare Crosby. “We started the RSC program because there is room for all of us to improve by taking small steps to live more sustainably.”

RSCs will monitor their Commons’ recycling using empirical means of data collection, organize environmental events throughout the year and generally be a resource for students, faculty, staff and the larger Middlebury community about living sustainably.

The Head RSCs will meet weekly with their Commons and monthly with the Sustainability Integration Office in order to consistently evaluate the direction of the RSC program.

The program was developed in part out of a collaboration this past spring between the Sustainability Integration Office and the Student Government Association (SGA) Environmental Affairs Committee.

“This was one of the initiatives that we thought would help cultivate more student leadership and engagement in sustainability efforts on campus,” said Jack Byrne, Director of Sustainability Integration. Byrne also noted that the existence of similar programs on the campuses of other colleges influenced the decision to begin developing the program.

This summer, the Sustainability Integration Office began to put together a comprehensive guide for new RSCs, complete with month-by-month ideas for activities and events, as well as an exhaustive list of student, faculty and administrative contacts to whom RSCs can look for support and guidance.

Each month has a theme — October’s is “sustainable food,” November’s is “renewable energy,” etc. The program incorporates competitions between students to make their daily lives more environmentally conscious; for example, it includes a green student certification activity, with rewards for good behavior regarding sustainability in dorm rooms.  This checklist will form the basis of the first event the new RSCs will coordinate: a competition among students to achieve the greatest level of “greenness” in their dorm rooms.  Students will receive two points for using compact fluorescent light bulbs, for example, and one point each for avoiding bottled water and eating local food.

“Our hope is that having a group of students organizing fun events and educating their peers about how easy, fun and rewarding it can be to take small steps to live more sustainably will help motivate the student body to live up to our reputation as a leader in campus sustainability,” said Crosby.

Byrne pointed out the RSC program’s alignment with the College’s goal of carbon neutrality by 2016.

“It’s important to have a program that can support students and provide opportunities for making their own creative and innovative contributions to the effort,” he said.

The RSCs will attend their first training session this Saturday, Sept. 18, during the afternoon.  There they will discuss goals and events that they plan to hold throughout the year.