Starting a Movement
SustainabilityintheCurriculum_StartingAMovement (click PDF)
Spring 2013
Team members: Trevor Turner, Annie Plotkin, Michael Light, and Christian Ostberg
Starting a Movement aims to expand student knowledge of the sustainability methods and initiate a trend that inspires long-term student participation and awareness.
The construction of a social movement requires fervor, vigor, and most importantly opportune timing. Throughout the project, Starting a Movement directed its efforts towards understanding and assessing the status of the sustainability movement at the University of Virginia. Collecting information on the students’ opinions toward sustainability allowed our efforts to focus on the pressing issues that inhibit current efforts from achieving institution wide success. Our conclusions for the project determined that entering First-Year students are most likely to entertain social activism. Searching for a new beginning and to establish themselves, we proposed to resident advisors a dorm sustainability, flash-mob challenge. The objective of this idea is to encourage a continuing active participation in the sustainability movement through dorm competition. Despite the popularity of events such as flash mobs resident advisors rejected the proposal. Our efforts lead to new contacts with dorm sustainability advocates, First-Year residents who represent their dormitories promoting programs and acting as peer educators. Contact with this organization led proposal of a dorm sustainability inventor’s competition. Students’ would establish teams from their respective dorms, identify a sustainability related issue, invent a viable solution, and enter their idea in a competition among other dormitories. The winner’s idea would be considered for implementation.
Contracted Independent Organizations were another avenue for promoting awareness and engagement in the sustainability movement at UVA. Starting a Movement drafted plans to create an additional organization that would meet once per semester with all organizations at UVA. The objective behind this participation is to encourage sustainable practices across the entire university and address all three spheres of sustainability: society, economics, and environment. The organization would also look to improve public relations efforts with university students. Offering new outreach programs that modeled off of successes such as The Stall seat Journal. To assess student involvement and the progress of student organizations thus far, representatives attended meetings and events. From attending meetings and events we are able to understand the goals of many individual sustainability movements and understand the issues that are faced regularly. In addition Starting a Movement attempted to observe the attachment of students to sustainability. A poster hung in heavily populated Clemons library, allowed us to evaluate opinions of students and determine that the moment to take action for a sustainable University of Virginia, was now. The report concludes by offering proposals for future implementation.
