Eastern Mennonite University
PAE-2: Strategic Plan

One section of the strategic plan specifically addresses green building, committing the university to constructing LEED certified or better buildings. Since then, the university has had three LEED Gold buildings certified.

"Establish a Sustainability Office to facilitate ongoing development of campus sustainability initiatives and to partner with Creation Care Council to continue the work of the QEP Implementation Team." Some history: the initial strategic plan focused on university-wide curriculum integration of sustainability through a five year Quality Enhancement Plan. That effort has been quite successful and is wrapping up, so the strategic plan was updated in 2011 to reflect a desire to provide long term support for sustainability in the curriculum and in the administrative decision-making process through the establishment of an Office of Sustainability (Creation Care Council is EMU's institution-wide sustainability committee). Later on the plan posits to "develop sustainable (green) campus facilities to provide optimal teaching and learning environments". Both points show the institutional learning that has come through early efforts in sustainability (QEP and Creation Care Council), which now necessitate a more robust institutional set of resources (Office of Sustainability) to carry out a deeper and wider vision of sustainability. The plan also asks that "All students meet the cross-cultural requirement and a majority of students will participate in a semester long cross-cultural experience", a key piece of EMU's sustainability education, where students integrate the three areas of sustainability from class during home-stays and interactions with community groups in marginalized communities in the global south for a semester with 30 other students and two EMU professors. Last, the plan addresses diversity among students on campus: "Twenty percent of full-time traditional undergraduate students will be AHANA students and six percent will be international students."

Section F of the Strategic Plan is titled "Steward financial resources to support continuous quality improvement." In that section and in the following section "Develop sustainable (green) campus facilities to provide optimal teaching and learning environments", there are references in particular to funding for repairs and re-purposing of older buildings through extensive remodeling, rather than building new, as had been considered for two major current building projects. There are also references to improving faculty, staff and administrator salaries to meet medians for similar colleges which speak to the socioeconomics of higher education.