Hello sustainability supporters,

During Spring 2017, members of the Sustainability Office, SAGE, and faculty from the Environmental Science program joined forces to participate in a LEAP Team focused on integrating sustainability into academics. This effort will hopefully help us highlight the important work done by faculty that highlight sustainability topics in curriculum and research while exploring new opportunities for partnerships and engagement in our co-curricular (out of class) programs.

LEAP, Liberal Education & America’s Promise, is a national higher education initiative established by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). Wisconsin was the first state to adopt the LEAP initiative, with campuses in the UW-System working together to define shared learning goals for all undergraduate students that mirror LEAP’s Essential Learning Outcomes (ELOs). LEAP embraces the value of a broad-based liberal education and stresses the importance in preparing students with a variety of well-developed skills that will make today’s students stronger candidates for 21st-century careers and citizenship.

LEAP emphasizes a number of important educational outcomes that closely relate to sustainability, as evident when one reads the ELOs linked to above.  Additionally, the Sustainability Office engages or participates in a number of High Impact Practices (HIPs) that provide immersive and meaningful experiences for students to learn about sustainability topics.

For example, we have a robust student employment program that has grown exponentially since our first official paid internship was added in 2015.  Just two years later, we have five students regularly employed with the Sustainability Office in a variety of functions, from managing our marketing efforts to planning and maintaining the Campus Garden.  We also have unpaid internships working with us on specialized projects and participate in the Community Health Internship Program (CHIP) out of UW-Madison that brings a focus on nutritional outreach to our Campus Garden efforts.  We also collaborate closely with students fulfilling other sustainability positions on campus to ensure we have unified efforts.

Since 2008, the Sustainability Office have engaged in various student projects at all levels of academic achievement, from participation in core or introductory classes to advising on capstone projects.  We engage in Service/Community-Based Learning through partnerships with various faculty and have connected with students working on both individual and collaborative/group projects.  We work with First Year Experience and have connected with New Student Seminar and Learning Communities to get students directly involved in campus sustainability issues over the years.

However, all of these accomplishments lack consistency and sometimes can lose focus as partnerships are not fully managed in the long-run.  To help combat this, our LEAP team is focused on providing better infrastructure to support the connection between the Sustainability Office and academic efforts related to sustainability.

Our short-term goals include creating a better communication strategy for managing academic contact lists and maintaining a contact log, establishing transition materials for the Sustainability Fellow faculty position to be seamlessly passed from one faculty member to the next, and developing example coursework and projects that use LEAP as a common language to better understand how sustainability can be integrated into a wide variety of academic disciplines.

Our long-term goals include rebooting some elements of our sustainability program that have gone neglected, including the Savanna Project faculty training workshop and the Sustainability Council committee that focused on a variety of campus sustainability issues.  We hope that continuing to deepen our relationships with better managing ongoing partnerships and exploring new opportunities will broaden the reach and influence of the Sustainability Office and allow faculty to better utilize sustainability as a topic with practical real-world applications in a world where managing scarce resources is an increasingly important focus for many industries.

If you are a faculty member interested in collaboration or a student looking to get more involved in our campus sustainability efforts, please contact our office through our homepage.