Emory University
EN-7: Employee Educators Program

To assist Emory in achieving its sustainability vision, Sustainability Representatives have been named for all major campus buildings. These individuals were nominated by a dean or departmental supervisor based upon their respect among colleagues and their leadership capabilities to help Emory achieve its sustainability goals.

The role of a sustainability representative is:
to be an ambassador of the initiative to each school and department and to encourage behavioral changes that will create a more sustainable Emory.
to serve as the interface between this initiative and the building occupants who can make its vision a reality. The building occupants’ daily decisions regarding recycling, energy, water, food, transportation, purchasing, printing, etc. will determine whether Emory builds a truly sustainable campus.

All representatives commit five hours per month to sustainability awareness-building activities and attend a Sustainability Representatives meeting once a month to learn the latest about campus sustainability and to set goals for enacting sustainability practices within their own buildings.

Sustainability Representatives are Emory staff members, and they are expected to lead outreach to other staff members in their buildings and departments.

Zero Waste Ambassadors (ZWAs) empower students, faculty, and staff with the knowledge and resources to actualize the Sustainability Vision goals pertaining to reducing and diverting waste. It is critical to foster a community that recognizes the value of materials management and its intersections with environmental justice, resource conservation, and a regenerative economy. ZWAs gain the tools and leadership skills to educate others and the agency to share feedback on how to improve Emory’s systems, communication, and culture to achieve these goals. The program is designed so that student interns of the Office of Sustainability Initiatives (OSI) look to OSI staff for content contributions, but the outreach, communications, training and programming aspects of the program are all designed and carried out by the students. These student interns train, engage and support student, faculty and staff ZWAs operating across the campus.

All students, faculty and staff of Emory University and Emory Healthcare are targets for this program. We recruit staff from across the University's academic units and departments, so that they can educate their peers in their respective networks. In addition to the 47 Sustainability Representatives, we trained another 33 staff and faculty and 1 alumna in the ZWA program. The ZWA members are embedded in academic units, offices, labs, and healthcare spaces across the enterprise and are all trained to activate their networks to reduce and divert waste through presenting in meetings and classes, circulating communications, answering questions individually and pointing people to resources about the Zero Landfill Waste Emory initiative.

To avoid double counting the Sustainability Representatives, they have been removed from the data below.

Green Offices at Emory and Green Labs at Emory are voluntary certification programs designed to assist Emory employees in improving the sustainability of Emory’s work spaces. To receive these designations, labs and offices team must complete checklists with encouraged sustainable practices to assess their current practices and then they engage in a planning process with the Office of Sustainability Initiatives to develop goals for furthering these practices within their spaces. Each program has an engagement section, where office and lab employees are encouraged to engage with sustainability initiatives and with each other on creating innovation in their work spaces. The PI or department head in addition to one point person are responsible for the program implementation, which requires that point person to engage with their department, office, and/or lab on the sustainability program. In total, 42 offices and labs participated in these programs during FY19. Each office and lab had one main peer educator, working all 52 weeks of the year, for 0.5 hours a week on average. Educators in these programs work 1,092 a year.

The Sustainable Food Committee was appointed by former President James Wagner in early 2007 to develop recommendations for meeting the food-related goals contained in the University's Sustainability Vision. Specifically, the Committee was charged with developing steps to meet Emory's goal of procuring 75 percent of ingredients in our cafeterias and hospitals from local or sustainably-grown sources by 2015. The Committee was also tasked with working with farmers and distributors to bolster regional food supplies, developing a farmers market on campus, developing guidelines for sustainable food procurement, overseeing the Educational Garden Project, and expanding awareness of sustainability issues related to food. The Committee accomplishes these goals by meeting monthly to discuss programmatic, food procurement, research and education updates provided by the specialists in the room. These specialists include HR health and wellness staff, Hospital and University procurement staff, faculty, students, Dining administrators, and sustainability educators. The Committee members are tasked with taking the information and recommendations back to their department and academic unit staffs and student groups to integrate the practices into their own work and outreach. As a result, chefs become reliable purchasers of sustainable and local food; HR staff promote means of eating seasonally through their communications; student groups become communicators about the benefits of conscientious food sourcing; and sustainability educators stay up-to-date on research about best practices. There are 16 total members, of which 12 are employees, who work 35 weeks of the academic year for about 0.5 hours per week on average. Employee committee members work 210 hours a year educating other employees and students.

Since 2009, the Office of Sustainability Initiatives has convened the Emory Healthcare Sustainability Council (formerly the Sustainability in Health Sciences Task Force) to develop a set of recommendations to guide senior administrators in setting goals and year-to-year strategies that will improve current practices or implement new best practices in sustainability for the Woodruff Health Sciences Center (WHSC). Emory Healthcare Sustainability Council members are representatives of their units, departments, and facilities who take what has been discussed and learned during Council meetings and bring the information back to their respective peers to advocate for and implement behavior and operational changes. Vice versa, Council members bring challenges and opportunities discussed in their units to the Council for brainstorming and problem-solving. The 20 employees represented on the Council in FY19 worked 52 weeks of the year for an average of 0.5 hours per week, gathering support for implementation of sustainability best practices across Emory Healthcare locations. They contributed 520 collective hours of outreach and education in one year.

During the reporting year, the Waste Think Tank (WTT) met every other week to brainstorm improvements in staffing, policies, and infrastructure necessary to adopt and implement the 2018 Waste Management Policy designed to guide the University’s progress toward the goal of 95% landfill waste diversion by 2025. The work of the WTT also resulted in the hiring of a third party consultant to do a comprehensive review of Emory's current waste materials handling. 14 employees representing various customer groups and operations teams represented in the WTT worked 52 weeks of the year to roll out the 2018 Waste Policy and accompanying communications plans and operational systems. On average, the 14 members spent 4 hours per week year-round training and educating other staff on the waste policy implementation to lead or co-lead presentations, trainings and tabling outreach. These core WTT 14 employee members 2,912 hours that year to training staff and faculty. The Waste Think Tank members did not have an exact way to track how much outreach and education these trained staff and faculty members did individually, but we estimate that the following trainings from the Waste Think Tank members and OSI interns reached at least 800 staff and faculty directly:
* Deans of all 9 academic units
* President's Leadership Council
* University Senate
* Campus Services employee training for 200+ managers and hourly staff
* Emory central and departmental communications staff
* Health Sciences administration
* Sustainable Events Symposium w/ 100 staff, faculty and student attendees
* LITS administration
* Sustainability Representatives
* Procurement & Business Practice Improvement leadership
* EVP of Business & Administration leadership
* Campus Life leadership team
* Emory Alumni Association
* Committee on the Environment
* Employee Council
* Theology & Ethics staff
* School of Nursing staff & faculty
* Student Government Association
* Graduate Student Government Association
* Business School staff
* Anthropology, Sociology, Political Science, Modern Languages staff
* School of Public Health staff
* African American Studies Department faculty & staff
* Admissions and Career Center staff
* School of Law staff & faculty
* Department of Chemistry, Psychology, and Math & Sciences faculty and staff
* Music Department staff
* School of Medicine staff
* Carlos Museum staff
* 1599 Building staff from IT, Finance, HR, Payroll, Research Administration, Master's in Development Practice program
* Oxford Dining staff
* Emory Dining staff
* Atlanta campus retail staffs of Highland Bakery and Kaldi's locations
* Schwartz Center staff
* Faculty Council
* Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine staff
* Student Health Center staff and faculty
* Transportation & Parking Services staff
* School of Public Health lab waste trainings with 7 PIs and an average of 7 other members from their labs, reaching about 50 people directly
* And over 60+ outreach tables at all areas of the campus and at major campus events when OSI staff and interns engaged with students, faculty and staff to answer their questions about waste diversion and reduction

In August of 2019, a multidisciplinary team from Emory Lifestyle Medicine and Wellness, Emory University Hospital Food & Beverage, Healthy Emory, the School of Medicine and Rollins School of Public Health launched the Healthy Kitchen Collaborative to train 40 Emory University and Emory Healthcare staff to employ lifestyle medicine practices in their own lives. Participants join a hands-on, 10-week course with continued support and resources for a duration of a year. Participants will attend five Saturday classes (one every two weeks) which will include a combination of lectures, cooking demos, skill-building activities and group discussions, covering topics of nutrition, exercise and mindfulness. The 10 employees behind this program support participants throughout the 52 weeks of the year, though most intensively during the 10-week course, which averages out to about 1 hour per week contributed to the program and 520 annual hours. The 40 employees participating in this program most likely also become peer educators, but not in a formal way, so they have not been included in the calculations below.

Wellness Champions serve their individual departments and divisions by promoting health and well-being resources and programs to their co-workers and colleagues. These employees of Emory University and Emory Healthcare meet monthly and are the champions of Healthy Emory campaigns, such as the Colorful Choices program that incentivizes eating more produce, the Refresh from Stress campaign, the Move More Challenge, promoting the Better Choices food labeling program on campus and more. These 140 employees work 2.5 hours per week on average when actively campaigning for 30 weeks of the year and .5 hours/week for the other 22 weeks (1.65 hours/week on average), totaling 12,012 hours annually.

Since Fall 2010, a Sustainability Faculty Advisory Council (FAC) has advised the Office of Sustainability on issues related to curriculum and research. This is convened by the OSI faculty liaison and includes distinguished faculty from Arts and Sciences, Medicine, Business, Law, Nursing, and Public Health report to the Provost. The FAC members receive outreach directives pertaining to critical issues regarding sustainability in the curriculum within and across departments. Pursuing these directives requires members to educate and advocate to other faculty and staff within their areas of University. These 27 faculty members contribute about .25 hours per week for the 35 weeks of the academic year, totaling 263.25 hours annually.

The Piedmont Project is an interdisciplinary summer development program which has given scores of faculty members and administrators the tools, connections and inspiration to infuse sustainability and environmental issues into the classroom and beyond. The Project is run by 3 faculty advisors whose role it is to engage with faculty, recruit them to the Project, and to lead them through the faculty development process. These 3 faculty work about .75 hours/week throughout the full year to run this effort, which totals to 117 hours a year.

Data reported for 2018-2019 academic year.

* Green Labs: https://sustainability.emory.edu/programs/green-labs-at-emory/
* Green Offices: https://sustainability.emory.edu/programs/green-offices-at-emory/
* Sustainable Food Committee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g03AfrrO5hE&feature=youtu.be
* Zero Landfill Waste Emory: https://sustainability.emory.edu/programs/zero-landfill-waste/
* Healthcare Sustainability Council: https://sustainability.emory.edu/healthcare-staff/
* Health Kitchen Collaborative: https://www.emoryhealthcare.org/lifestyle-medicine-wellness/healthy-kitchen.html
* Wellness Champions: https://hr.emory.edu/eu/wellness/wellness-champions.html
* Faculty Advisory Council: https://sustainability.emory.edu/get-involved/volunteer-opportunities/
* Piedmont Project: https://sustainability.emory.edu/programs/the-piedmont-project/