On Monday, February 25th, we hosted an Earth Week Brainstorm workshop.  The goal of this event was to gather people from different organizations in order to learn what fresh minds could contribute to our cause.  We hosted not only members from the American Marketing  Association(AMA) and Creative Marketing Unlimited (CMU), but members from S.A.G.E., Water Council, EPO, Safety Org, PEACE, CEO, and ResLife.  The event was a spectacular success with 46 people coming to share their ideas!

The evening began with CMU board members greeting participants in the workshop.  Qdoba came, and kindly served free chips and queso to all who came.  Wes Enterline then delivered an  excellent presentation on the history of Earth Week efforts on campus, which also served to help give people an idea of the kind of events we were looking for.

Finally, the creative portion of the workshop began.  Groups were formed with members from each organization present being teamed with CMU board members familiar with the Earth Initiative.  The groups were given a prompt to spur creativity, and everybody did a fantastic job coming up with new and creative ideas. Tons of new event ideas were created that can engage students in Earth Week activities and show them how to become more sustainable.

In addition to creating ideas for events, the event also served to bring
together students from various campus orgs and get them motivated to
live more sustainable lives. It is certainly exciting to think about all of  the organizations that attended  and how many potential members of those organizations can be reached through  the cooperation and outreach  that began at Monday’s workshop!

Dylan Waldhuetter from water council said “Not only would I like to see the Water Council get more involved on campus but a large part of our campaign is focused on increased sustainability efforts on campus.”

After the event planning commenced, participants in the workshop volunteered to be filmed for short videos.  Many talked about things that they do to be sustainable, while others talked about all the things they have seen CMU accomplish with the UW-Whitewater Earth Initiative around campus.  Keep an eye out in the coming days for another great  Sustainability video from that the clips that were collected in this workshop!

A special thanks to all attendees, we truly accomplished something for the greater good of our campus by coming together!

Until next time, thank you for joining the Conservation Conversation!