CONWAY, Ark. (February 20, 2015) – Hendrix students and the
Board of Trustees have approved a Campus Sustainability Fund to support
sustainability projects on campus.
The proposal, led by the Environmental Concerns Committee,
was approved by 80 percent of the 600 students who voted on the initiative. The
fund was formally approved today by the Hendrix College Board of Trustees at the
February board meeting.
The fund will be created by a dedicated $20 student fee per
semester. Money from the fund will be allocated, on a competitive basis, to
large sustainability projects designed by students, faculty and staff.
ECC Chair Elisa Rivera ’15 visited with Colorado State
University sustainability coordinators and program managers who said a
sustainability fund was the best method for sustainability on the right track. William
O’Brochta ’16 joined a listserv of sustainability managers across the country
to research sustainability funds and how they can be implemented.
“We both felt that getting money for sustainable projects
was the best way to start addressing the problem if that money could be
distributed by students to student-, faculty- and staff-designed projects,”
said O’Brochta, who researched and developed the proposal during the summer. “From
all my experience working with Facilities, I know they have tons of projects
ready to implement that are sustainability related but can never get the
funding.”
By creating a new fund, rather than re-allocating money from
the general budget, students get to decide where the money goes, O’Brochta
said.
“Being student led, students, faculty, and staff only
benefit from what they want to happen, they know where their money is going,
and they help keep the fund accountable,” he said. “It’s a great way to develop
an open and transparent system.”
ECC presented the idea of the fund at a Student Senate
meeting and then conducted a survey to determine student interest in creating a
fund and to determine the amount of money that students were willing to pay. ECC
presented the proposal and invited input at several Student Senate meetings,
during a meeting about the fund with Hendrix President Bill Tsutsui, at a panel
event co-sponsored by the Young Democrats and College Republicans, at several
special ECC meetings, by speaking directly to several members of the Board of
Trustees, and in meetings with the Dean of Students.
“We tried as hard as possible to make sure that everyone
who wanted to have input into the proposal was able to do so in as many
different opportunities as possible,” O’Brochta said. “We spent all of last
semester working toward this goal.”
“Passage of the fund is something for the student body to
celebrate having achieved,” he said. “This was a true grassroots movement that
could not have happened without the support and hard work of students.”
O’Brochta sees the fund as a catalyst to bring more
sustainable projects to campus, perhaps including a sustainability coordinator
and increased sustainability education.
“A dedicated sustainability coordinator is something that
is even more popular on college campuses than a sustainability fund. The
sustainability coordinator would be able to focus full-time on the issues that
many different people are currently working on in their spare time. This would
mean a holistic approach to sustainability and would provide the best mechanism
for developing projects for the fund to award money to,” he said. “Additionally,
the fund hopefully pushes students toward learning more about sustainability
and environmental issues because of the research required to develop and
implement a sustainability project like the kind we would fund. There is a
massive trend in colleges toward sustainability education and making sure that
all students have some environmental literacy when they graduate from college.
The fund would be a catalyst for such a push to occur on the Hendrix campus.
So, I characterize the fund as a huge first step.”
The Campus Sustainability Fund Committee will begin
developing this summer. Students, faculty and staff are encouraged to submit
project ideas at HendrixECC.tk or prepare funding proposals for projects to
send the Committee when it begins its work this fall.
Founded in 1876, Hendrix College is a national leader in
engaged liberal arts and sciences education. This year, Hendrix was named the
country’s #1 “Up and Coming” liberal arts college and #8 in the nation for
“Best Undergraduate Teaching” by U.S.
News and World Report. Hendrix is
featured in the 2015 Fiske Guide to Colleges, Forbes
magazine's list of America's Top Colleges, the 2014 Princeton Review’s The Best 378 Colleges, and the latest
edition of Colleges That Change
Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think about Colleges.
Hendrix has been affiliated with the United Methodist Church since 1884. For
more information, visit www.hendrix.edu.