The University of Rhode Island Student Action for Sustainability proposed the creation of a sustainability center on campus to better facilitate communication regarding student and faculty sustainability initiatives.
The proposal was held on Oct. 21. in front of the president executive council, according to Kiersten Sundell, who serves as the SAS vice president and student senate sustainability liaison.
If approved, the center would serve as a connection point for students and faculty on campus looking to work in sustainable fields, according to Sundell. Sundell presented the proposal alongside SAS President Dylan Murdock.
The approval would also include the hiring of a sustainability director to oversee issues across campus and provide a single source of contact for any sustainability-based issues or work.
“We [SAS] were contacting other students and learning about faculty and the launch lab but we realized that there wasn’t a central point of contact,” Sundell said. “There was no one that knew everyone else and what they were working on.”
As part of the proposal, SAS started an audit to identify every faculty member at URI working in a sustainable or related environmental field. As of November, Sundell’s audit has identified over 150 of these faculty, which Sundell estimates to be about 85% of all sustainable faculty on campus, as well as over 50 sustainability-focused programs.
Sundell boiled down the slow-moving sustainable efforts on campus to a communication problem that caused redundancy.
“They’re repeating these efforts over and over again because they don’t know that other professors are working on it,” Sundell said. “Dining is repeating efforts to do composting and reducing single-use plastics and the students don’t know any of this because there’s no transparent communication between different levels of the university.”
The student senate passed a bill during their general assembly on Nov. 13 in support of the SAS’s proposed center. The bill passed unanimously.
While the student senate has no funding or approval power over the center, Senate Chair Cam Hudson stressed the importance of the proposal, as he believes the senate to be the “voice of students.”
SAS is a student-run organization, but URI faculty members have also taken an interest in solidifying long-term sustainable work on campus. Katheen Gorman, a psychology professor and director of the URI Feinstein Center for a Hunger Free America, has been working on her own proposal for an institute of food systems and sustainability to the faculty senate. Her hope is to connect faculty from the university’s other academic colleges on these issues.
Gorman’s primary focus for the institute is on food systems and insecurity, but she sees her potential institute and the SAS’s potential center as two sides of the same coin.
“You can’t work in the food systems world without thinking about sustainability,” Gorman said. “They just go hand-in-hand.”
Through her work toward establishing an institute, Gorman hit many of the same communication roadblocks as Sundell and SAS. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of her work, Gorman needed to reach faculty across schools and programs, but found a lack of systems in place for her.
While Gorman teaches in the psychology department, she said her focus on malnutrition in human development allows her to work with faculty from other colleges, such as the College of Environmental and Life Sciences, where she coordinates research in agriculture, nutrition and sustainable food systems. Gorman said she is unsure if many of her fellow psychology professors spend time outside of the department.
“There’s no structure at the university to allow for including these institutes,” Gorman said. “They want us to be in a college. Well, you can’t do interdisciplinary work if you’re under one dean and they refuse.”
Gorman and her group of roughly 10 other faculty working on the institute proposal are currently applying for grants in hopes of receiving outside funding and proposing the institute to the senate faculty once again.
Sundell and Murdock received positive feedback from the President’s Leadership Council following their proposal for the sustainable center, but there is no formal timeline as of Wednesday.