California Polytechnic State University
IN-25: Innovation B

For the past three years the Energy, Utilities, and Sustainability staff have been working to build a active and resilient core of student sustainability leaders on campus. Staff recognized a need for this leaders program after countless situations where students seemed to be recreating the wheel on ongoing campus projects or programs. The staff also found that it had been difficult to recruit active sustainability related clubs to attend events and volunteer on projects. The team continued to invite clubs and club leaders to events and activities and saw little to no participation. Inspired by the need for people power, staff developed the Student Sustainability Leaders series that includes the Student Sustainability Leaders Summit in the fall, a leaders retreat in the winter and monthly round table meetings throughout the year. The goals for these events are to build community among student leaders, draft workplans for each club or group, share event information and recruit volunteers. Additionally one major skill that is continually reinforced is the ability to recruit leaders to succeed those that may be nearing graduation. Occurring the week before school started, the Student Sustainability Leadership Summit provides on-campus club leaders with the opportunity and training to plan for the next year of managing their club, while working more effectively and collaboratively to be impactful. Students participate in workshops oriented towards developing goals, understanding context of issues on campus on a larger scale, and gaining leadership and management skills. Following up the Fall’s Leadership Summit, the Student Succession Summit takes place at the beginning of Winter quarter and is aimed at providing club leaders with a proper plan to ensure their club continues growing after they graduate. Presentations on shared humanity, succession planning, and recruitment strategies ensures the energy of the room is active and engaged. To bring together the student sustainability community more regularly sustainability club leaders attend a monthyl roundtable meeting to give updates and foster collaboration and communication between groups. Over the last three years of hosting this series, nearly 200 students have attended one or more of the events and gained valuable sustainability leadership skills. The sustainability staff have seen meaningful projects and programs resulting from the work of the summits and retreats and most importantly have almost completely eliminated the duplication os efforts and challenges with student leadership succession. Examples of projects that have succeed from the series are the Real Food Collaborative vegetable box subscription program, the Green Campus Team Eco Reps Program and Green Living certifications, and the Climate Change Action Research Group (CCARG) Sustainability Assesment Survey.