| Overall Rating | Gold |
|---|---|
| Overall Score | 74.46 |
| Liaison | Ciannat Howett |
| Submission Date | Oct. 9, 2024 |
Emory University
EN-7: Employee Educators Program
| Status | Score | Responsible Party |
|---|---|---|
|
2.57 / 3.00 |
Cyrus
Bhedwar Director Office of Sustainability Initiatives |
Part 1. Percentage of employees served by a peer-to-peer, sustainability educators program
Total number of employees served by a peer-to-peer sustainability outreach and education program:
Percentage of employees served by a peer-to-peer sustainability outreach and education program:
1st program
A brief description of the employee educators program (1st 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 on their respect among colleagues and their leadership capabilities to help Emory achieve its sustainability goals. In the event of staff turnover, successors are recruited by the position holder or OSI as circumstances warrant.
The role of a sustainability representative is: to be an ambassador of the initiative to each school and department; to encourage behavioral changes that will create a more sustainable Emory; and 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 up to 1 hour 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.
Given their position in most departments and buildings, Emory considers the Sustainability Representatives program to serve a significant majority of University employees.
A brief description of the employee educators program’s target audience (1st program):
Sustainability Representatives are Emory staff members, and they are expected to lead outreach to other staff members in their buildings and departments. They share news from OSI on enterprise-wide sustainability achievements, engagement opportunities, and signature sustainability programs (Green Office/Labs, etc.). Sustainability Representatives also carry feedback and insight back to OSI to inform and improve sustainability activities.
Number of trained employee educators (1st program):
Number of weeks the employee educators program is active annually (1st program):
Average or expected number of hours worked weekly per trained employee educator (1st program):
Total number of hours worked annually by trained employee educators (1st program):
Website URL where information about the employee educators program is available (1st program) :
If reporting employees served by additional peer-to-peer programs, provide:
2nd Program
A brief description of the employee educators program (2nd program):
Waste sorting is "the gateway to sustainability" at Emory. Following the 2018 adoption of a comprehensive waste policy and associated sorting protocols, one cannot avoid facing decisions about what to do with waste on campus. Emory's five-bin system requires specific knowledge and the ability to evaluate the material one wishes to dispose of.
Zero Waste Ambassadors (ZWAs) empower students, faculty, and staff with the knowledge and resources to actualize the Sustainability Vision goals about 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 complete training and 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.
In addition to education and support conducted by individual ZWA in their primary departments, buildings, or offices, ZWA staff several of Emory's large campus events, including Homecoming, Commencement, and Staff Fest, making them a prominent presence on campus and available to a significant majority of employees on campus.
A brief description of the employee educators program’s target audience (2nd program):
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. Since 2021, in addition to the 47 Sustainability Representatives, we have trained another 48 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.
Number of trained employee educators (2nd program):
Number of weeks the employee educators program is active annually (2nd program):
Average or expected number of hours worked weekly per trained employee educator (2nd program):
Total number of hours worked annually by trained employee educators (2nd program):
Website URL where information about the employee educators program is available (2nd program):
If reporting employees served by more than two programs, provide:
Additional Programs
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 workspaces. To receive these designations, lab and office teams 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. In total, 13 offices and 30 labs participated in these programs during FY2023. 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 1,118 a year.
The Sustainable Food Committee was created 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 staff and student groups to integrate the practices into their own work and outreach. There are 19 total members, of which 18 are employees, who work 35 weeks of the academic year for about 0.5 hours per week on average. Employee committee members work 315 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 FY23 worked 52 weeks of the year for an average of 0.5 hours per week, gathering support for the implementation of sustainability best practices across Emory Healthcare locations. They contributed 520 collective hours of outreach and education in one year.
The Piedmont Project is an interdisciplinary summer development program that 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 is to engage with faculty, recruit them to the Project, and lead them through the faculty development process. These 3 faculty work about 0.75 hours/week throughout the full year to run this effort, which totals 117 hours a year.
Healthy Emory's large network of Wellness Champions serves their departments, helping to promote a healthy lifestyle to their colleagues. These employees of Emory University and Emory Healthcare meet monthly and are the champions of Healthy Emory campaigns, such as Operation Eat Right incentives for eating more produce; Move More incentives for getting at least 7,000 steps a day, Sleep Better, Feel Better incentives for getting at least 7-9 hours of sleep, and Stress Less, Live More that incentives establishing stress management practices. There are currently 138 Wellness Champions (https://hr.emory.edu/eu/_includes/documents/sections/wellness/wellness-champions-list.pdf) who work about 2.5 hours per week for 30 weeks when actively campaigning and about 0.5 hours per week for the other 22 weeks, averaging 1.7 hours over the year, for a total of 12,144 hours per year.
Number of trained employee educators (all other programs):
Number of weeks, on average, the employee educators programs are active annually (all other programs):
Average or expected number of hours worked weekly per trained employee educator (all other programs):
Total number of hours worked annually by trained employee educators (all other programs):
Part 2. Educator hours per employee served by a peer-to-peer program
Hours worked annually by trained employee sustainability educators per employee served by a peer-to-peer program:
Optional Fields
Additional documentation to support the submission:
Data source(s) and notes about the submission:
All data reported in this section are from September 2022-August 2023
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/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Healthcare-Sustainability-Council-Mission-and-Goals_July-2019.pdf
Wellness Champions: https://hr.emory.edu/eu/wellness/wellness-champions.html
Piedmont Project: https://sustainability.emory.edu/programs/the-piedmont-project/
The information presented here is self-reported. While AASHE staff review portions of all STARS reports and institutions are welcome to seek additional forms of review, the data in STARS reports are not verified by AASHE. If you believe any of this information is erroneous or inconsistent with credit criteria, please review the process for inquiring about the information reported by an institution or simply email your inquiry to stars@aashe.org.