Do we know any one at these schools that are willing to help the students out?
Also, several of these student who are either currently Sierra Club members or SSC members and have some interest in taking some outings training along with going on and leading some outings. What can we do to help get these students more involved?
Date: Sun, 25 Oct 2009 12:08:06 -0400 Subject: POWERSHIFT 2009, MARSHALL'S GREEN FEE AND PROGRAMS...and an idea for future Ex Comm meetings From: william.depaulo@gmail.com To: jim_scon@yahoo.com; jkotcon@wvu.edu; kgrubb@fairmontstate.edu; freesource@cheat.org; fmoose39@hotmail.com; blittle@citynet.net; monwimmer@gmail.com; EC@osenergy.org
This is a spin off of Sierrafest, which I still consider the most successful event the SC has held since I've been on the Ex Comm, admittedly not very long.
Kevin Fooce and I met Erin Chalmers and Danny Chiotos at Sierra Fest. Erin is the person presently in charge of the Sierra Student U at Marshall. She led the effort to adopt a "green" fee -- $5 tacked on to each student's tuition and the initial effort to get the greening process going. Danny Chiotos is located in Charleston and works with the Student Energy Action Coalition.
At Sierra Fest, both Erin and Danny invited Kevin and me to come to "Powershift 2009" which is/was (good faith effort to intuit here) a three-day set of workshops covering a whole range of stuff, but energy efficiency and the environment pervaded them all. It was located in Huntington but was the Appalachian regional event of what has in the past apparently been a national event focused on Washington, DC. As an Appalachian event it attracted presenters and attendees from WV, KY, TN and environs.
Kevin brought a pile of Sierra Club material, and I paid an artist on site 20 bucks to make a "Sierra Club" sign to put on a table, forwhich we paid a hundred bucks. At that table or later we met students active in environmental groups at Marshall, Wheeling Jesuit, WV State Univ, and Shepherdstown. One idea that emerged from the day was to use the Marshall "greening" exercise as a model for other schools, and as a bridge to merging the efforts at those schools with our efforts generally.
THE "MARSHALL TEMPLATE"
Lauren Kemp is the current leader of the SSU at Marshall. She related that the $5 green fee has generated a green budget that funds 12+/- jobs on campus, 9 of which are student jobs. In addition to the $5 green fee, Marshall's SSU apparently applied for and got a $60,000 grant from WV's much (and deservedly) maligned DEP...to buy recycling units that are just now being distributed all over the campus, and for a series of "hydration stations" -- free filtered water that is also distributed over the campus.
The 9 students with green jobs collect the contents of the recycling bins daily at a central compactor where it is picked up once a month. Trash collection for the school has dropped from 2 X per week to once every two weeks. The hydration stations aren't up and running yet but they are coming shortly.
While Lauren was explaining this to Kevin at the Sierra table, Sarah Elliott from WV State was telling me about the difficulty she and others experienced at State getting the campus people to even listen to them about recycling. When I brought up the idea of creating a web page to "capture" the Marshall experience for other schools she made the point that they need to do it simply to pass on to next year's and the year after's students the institutional memory of what had already happened at Marshall, so they could go forward.
At lunch Bri Clark of Wheeling Jesuit also explained that they had had great difficulty getting recycling listened to by the administration there. She was more than receptive to the idea of a "model" to follow, like at Marshall. Calvin Smith of WVU -- to date our model of a great student group led by some guy named Coatsun, or something weird, -- said WVU needed to learn how to get a green fee adopted also. Anis Elkharroupi of Sheperdstown was interested in pursuing it also, with a slightly optimitic view of passing a $75 green fee, exactly equal to the athletic fee there.
I've asked about have a dozen or so of these students to come to the Nov 7 ex comm meeting in Lewisburg. I don't know if any or all will, but it strikes me that there is more than a kernel of an idea here, and it follows:
1. Capture the Marshall "green" fee and program experience on line. Make it available to schools throughout the state for sure, but also make it a WIKI-like page that can be edited by users to capture and share the greening experiences at schools elsewhere.
2. Continue to make connections with the student leaders/participants in SSU
3. Help finance the efforts of SSU's to start a greening program at their campus, possibly with funds from the Longview settlement)
4. Start holding our Ex Comm meetings on campuses in order to engage students. This would require that we:
A. Greatly reduce the amount of time we spend on administrative matters and reading reports we've already distributed
B. Move the locations of Ex Comm meetings from homes of members to campuses across the state, hopefully greatly diversifying our reach
C. Maybe increase meetings to every other month to make it possible to get to more schools, like
Marshall, WV State, Sheperdstown, West Virginia Wesleyan, Wheeling Jesuit, Concord SEE LIST OF SCHOOLS AND LINKS TO THEIR WEB PAGES HERE
D. Accepting the real prospect of change in the way we go about our business and where we spend out time and effort -- to accommodate the interests of students which are not always going to be in sync with our own --- altho there is just as much opportunity to influence their interests.
5. The ultimate objective would be to greatly expand our numbers and effect state-wide. In essence, we will be erasing the line between "us" (old farts with whiter hair who've gone square in the head and round in the belly) and "them" (young whipper snappers who think they know it all and have had life handed to them on a silver platter only because the ever brilliant "we" did all the heavy lifting decades ago - PLEASE NOTE POSITION OF TONGUE -- YEAH -- IN MOUTH)
6. We've talked about increasing membership exponentially...I see no better opportunity to do that than the low hanging fruit right in front of our eyes.
7. I'd like this item - RESTRUCTURING AND RELOCATING EX COMM MEETINGS -- to be added to the Agenda for our Nov 7 meeting.
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