Overall Rating Gold - expired
Overall Score 68.17
Liaison Ian Johnson
Submission Date March 4, 2020

STARS v2.2

Colorado College
EN-5: Outreach Campaign

Status Score Responsible Party
Complete 4.00 / 4.00 Ian Johnson
Sustainability Director
Office of Sustainability
"---" indicates that no data was submitted for this field

Has the institution held a sustainability-related outreach campaign during the previous three years that was directed at students and yielded measurable, positive results in advancing sustainability?:
Yes

Has the institution held a sustainability-related outreach campaign during the previous three years that was directed at employees and yielded measurable, positive results in advancing sustainability?:
Yes

1st campaign 

Name of the campaign:
Recyclemania

A brief description of the campaign:
Recyclemania is a nation-wide competition to promote waste reduction on college and university campuses. Colorado College participates in Recyclemania to foster behaviors that both minimize waste and increase the campus's waste diversion rate.

A brief description of the measured positive impact(s) of the campaign:
The college's waste recycling rate since the first year of participating in Recyclemania has increased from 38% in 2012 to 54.4% in 2018.

if reporting an additional campaign, provide:

2nd campaign

Name of the campaign (2nd campaign):
Real Food Challenge

A brief description of the campaign (2nd campaign):
The Real Food Challenge is a national organization that educates and supports student food justice activists in implementing change in institutional food purchasing. They've developed the first comprehensive food auditing tool, the Real Food Calculator, which allows students to gage how much their institution's food procurement helps or harms our overall goals of human, animal, and environmental protection. "Real Food" is defined as food that fits into any or all of the following categories: local/fair trade & labor/ecologically sound/humane. By necessity, the criteria applies only to the production level of food items, as distribution and sale is often much too complicated to track.
By student initiative, Colorado College got involved with RFC in 2013, performing an initial audit of two weeks worth of BonApp's purchasing. In 2017, the initiative got stronger and a team of student volunteers performed a two month audit. They found that CC had 87% conventional food purchasing (meeting none of the aforementioned criteria); 11% Real Food Category B (meeting one of the criteria) and 2% Real Food Category A (meeting more than one of the criteria).

A brief description of the measured positive impact(s) of the campaign (2nd campaign):
A comprehensive audit has helped gage how socially and environmentally sustainable our campus food purchasing actually is, and has been a driving force of student activism around the issues of food justice. (Food Coalition and RFC Club both formed as initiatives at the end of last year). There has also been collaboration with the Butler Center on issues of race and socioeconomic disparity in the food system (Ex. RFC and SOMOS co-hosted a screening of "Food Chains", a documentary on the Coalition of Immokalee workers unionizing for fair wages for farm workers in in CA's Central Valley)
2017: 11% Real Food "B", 2% Real Food "A"

Optional Fields

A brief description of other sustainability-related outreach campaigns:
Colorado College Office of Sustainability has worked in conjunction with Bon Appetite to create a 'Ditch Disposable Campaign'. During Recyclemania, anyone who brings their own mug, cup, or cutlery to Colorado Coffee on campus receives a discount on their purchase as well as a sticker to encourage people to stray from landfill waste and encourage the use of reusable cups, cutlery, etc.

Additional documentation to support the submission:
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Data source(s) and notes about the submission:
http://www.realfoodchallenge.org/

http://calculator.realfoodchallenge.org/help/resources

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