California State University, Sacramento
EN-8: Staff Professional Development

Professional development about sustainability concepts is delivered by the Sustainability Department in the form of Earth Day. Celebrating Earth Day on campus is an important and collaborative event that enables fun and promotes awareness around being green and a vast array of sustainability learning concepts. Each year, the campus celebrates Earth Day within the month of April, inviting external vendors to booth and provides interactive activities such as campus sustainability tours, recycling drives, and tree planting/mulching. Education is the entire purpose of Earth Day. Interactive activities such as the campus tours include the campus sustainability highlights, highlighting more than 20 points of sustainable interest on campus. This tour points out highlights such as the solar panels located on top of the Library and The WELL as well as the bioswales throughout campus. The arboretum guided walking tour highlights the extensive and in some cases rare variety of plants and trees located on campus, with 1,200 of our over 3,000 campus trees located in the Arboretum alone. The Sacramento Tree Foundation attends Earth Day and teaches how to properly plant a tree including root care, watering practices and benefits of various tree species as it relates to the environment and reducing CO2 emissions. Staff learn about how to implement their own at-home aquaponics technology to grow their own produce. This training is provided courtesy of faculty and staff from our Sustainable Technology Optimization Research Center (STORC). A mobile display of aquaponics is put on display with experts on hand to explain how the technology works and how anyone can create it at home. Other professional development is provided by the external vendors that are on campus for the day to educate about such topics as starting your own garden, participating in community gardens, locating local farmer's markets, what locally grown and organic food means, how electronic waste is recycled, what products are recycled at local facilities, how to save water during the drought, how to reduce your utility bill, and much more. Vendors typically use visual displays, hands on and interactive components and samples as well as printed literature and hand outs. Earth Day is open to everyone and ample marketing and advertising is done weeks prior to encourage mass participation, such as the staff Monday Morning Bulletin, which is an announcement bulletin that is emailed out to all staff each Monday. Earth Day is held outdoors in the heart of the campus (Library Quad) where maximum exposure to the campus community is greatest.