Every Warrior Wednesday, the Sustainability team is out on the quad bringing awareness to faculty, staff and students about sustainability on campus.
Students and staff are able to visit or participate in activities regarding how to be more sustainable on campus. Some of the events include, Eco Warrior meetings, Campus Bird Walk, workshops about alternative transportation and the climate impact of food choice and food waste.
Jennifer Daniels’ (Sustainability Specialist for Stan State) role is a more specific position where she coordinates activities regarding sustainability.
“It’s about our programming and outreach and teaching our campus community every aspect of sustainability and what that means,” Daniels said.
Ana Perez Ruiz (Junior, Business) is a College Corp Fellow for sustainability. Her job is to get involved in her community with a perspective of making a difference with her service.
Ruiz focuses on the social media aspect of the sustainability club. She comes up with different ideas that can incorporate student engagement here on campus.
“For Warrior Expo, I planned out an activity to make flowers out of book pages because we have a lot of books that would basically be thrown away. We decided to do that activity as a way to kind of promote upcycling,” Ruiz says.
Gali Avalos (Senior, College Corps Sustainability Fellow), participates in the sustainability booth to help bring awareness to different programs.
“My favorite part about this is to help bring more awareness to a certain cause and how we can hopefully lessen something that’s negatively affecting the environment or our society,” Avalos said.
Her booth focused on how students commute to school. The map included a small interactive activity where students were able to place a small dot and see how they got to school.
Daniels’ office has a poster of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The poster shows 17 goals to look at globally in how the world can become more sustainable.
“When I talk to people about sustainability, usually the first thing that comes to mind is recycling and while that’s important and zero waste initiatives are important, there is so much more to sustainability,” she stated.
This semester, Daniels wants to start adding some expanded programming around the topics the sustainability team has done on Warrior Wednesdays to provide a workshop program to students and staff. She hopes to start with one or two workshops and then expand on that.
“Sustainability is really woven into so many things we don’t really notice or see. We kind of take it for granted. We just want people to be aware of that and our own impact,” she said.
Students, staff or community members who are interested in learning more about sustainability can catch the Eco Warriors out in the quad during Warrior Wednesdays.
