URI Housing distributes eco-friendly desk lamps
After a semester-long delay, residents at the University of Rhode Island were treated to energy-efficient lamps and power strips by Housing and Residential Life (HRL) in late January.
The lamps and power strips were planned to have been distributed at the beginning of the 2019 fall semester, according to HRL. However, issues arose when Director of HRL Frankie Minor and the other housing staff ran into issues with distribution and timeliness. The lamps and power strips were sent to the University in January of 2017, according to Minor.
The University had been holding onto the lamps and it is unclear as to why and exactly for how long. Minor said National Grid provided the items for all students before his arrival.
“We’re talking [about] shipping containers of this stuff,” Minor said. “We were going to try to distribute them this fall, before opening. We had a lot of challenges getting the Roger Williams Complex ready. So what we ended up doing was when we were looking at the opening of Brookside, we said, ‘okay this is a prime opportunity to get these out into the Brookside rooms, we have completely empty rooms, let’s just kind of put them in there.’”
The distribution is part of an HRL initiative to make dorms more energy-efficient. Any student that lives in a residence hall on campus is eligible to receive a small, energy-efficient desk lamp and power strip.
While the lamps and power strips were given to Brookside Hall students, HRL struggled with getting them out to the rest of students. Students’ first hall meeting in the fall was supposed to include distributing the lamps, but the date was pushed.
Some of the difficulties HRL had occurred during the period when the items were arriving on campus. According to Minor, a team member of HRL who would have normally been in charge of the lamps and power strips was seriously injured at the time which rendered them unable to organize the distribution.
Minor also said that the former Director of HRL left in April of 2017, three months after the lamps and power strips arrived.
“There was a real void in leadership here,” Minor said.
Resident advisors (RAs) across the Kingston campus began giving these items to students at the beginning of the spring semester. According to Minor, the approximate 6,000 lamps and 3,000 power strips were being held in storage rooms in residence halls.
According to Minor, there was a largely positive reception from the students in Brookside. After seeing these residents’ happiness with the lamps and power strips, the items were set to be further distributed throughout the campus as quickly as possible.
Ultimately, HRL wanted to get these useful tools out to students across campus, but minimizing the cost for the University was HRL’s second priority. Maintaining the storage of the items in the containers includes renting out shipping containers, according to Minor, and has not been cost effective.
Minor said that if all of the lamps and power strips are not distributed, HRL will reassess the leftovers and find a new home for them.
“After a few weeks into the [spring] semester, we’re going to find out, ‘okay, did everyone distribute what they’re going to distribute?’ collect them back, do an inventory of how many we have left and [find a way to get rid of them],” Minor said.
The lamps came from a partnership between National Grid and the University. According to the Assistant Director of Facilities Operations Dave Lamb, National Grid directly offered to provide one lamp for every student and one power strip for every room.
“The intent here is that these are desk lamps that stay in the room,” said Lamb. “The students aren’t to take them home. They’re to stay in the rooms, and that way the next person who comes into the room has an LED lamp that they can come in and use.”
Despite the delay in receiving the items, students were enthused to receive the free lamps and power cords.
“I expected it to be cheap, but it became a fixture item on my desk,” Zack Ross, a resident of Hillside Hall, said.
Students that have not received a lamp or power strip and live on campus can speak with their RAs to obtain one.