Furman University
PAE-20: Inter-Campus Collaboration on Sustainability

In May 2011, the Shi Center hosted its third annual faculty development workshop, titled Infusing Sustainability across the Curriculum. Over three years, 59 faculty members from Furman and four faculty members from Warren Wilson participated. The primary goal of these workshops was to assist faculty in incorporating sustainability and full cost analysis concepts in their existing courses. A secondary goal and a unique feature of this approach has been the development of an interregional faculty learning community through partnerships with Middlebury and Warren Wilson Colleges. We have further expanded and improved our programs across all our institutions by sharing lessons learned. Our assessment of students in the modified courses shows a marked increase in the number of students who understand sustainability as a holistic concept, taking into account environmental, social, and economic concerns.

-Teams from Middlebury College and Furman collaborated to share their differing strategies for integrating sustainability into the curriculum at liberal arts universities. The resulting book chapter, titled “Shaping Sustainability: Emergent and Adaptive Models from Furman and Middlebury,” is included in the 2012 book Taking it to the Next Level: Strategies for Adaptation across the Sustainability Curriculum.
Furman Authors:
Dr. Angela Halfacre (Shi Center for Sustainability/Political Science/Earth and Environmental Sciences),
Dr. Michelle Horhota (Psychology),
Katherine Kransteuber (Shi Center for Sustainability),
Brittany DeKnight (Shi Center for Sustainability),
Dr. Brannon Andersen (Earth and Environmental Sciences)
Middlebury Authors:
Jack Byrne (Sustainability Integration Office),
Dr. Steve Trombulak (Biology),
Dr. Nan Jenks-Jay (Dean of Environmental Affairs)
-In April 2012, Shi Center for Sustainability Director Dr. Angela Halfacre gave a keynote address for Rollins College’s undergraduate research symposium entitled “The Synergy of Sustainability: Campus and Community.” In the same month, she also gave an invited address at Stetson University entitled “Conservation Culture and Sustainability Science: Studying Problems, People and Place.” She served as the keynote speaker for Stetson’s undergraduate research day, and served as a consultant for Rollins as the school investigates sustainability options. At Stetson, she also spoke to three classes, its development division, and other student forums about Furman’s approach to sustainability. At Rollins, she provided a workshop about how to connect campus to community for sustainability partnerships based on Furman’s approach. She also met with other faculty and administrators about sustainability curriculum and research at the private liberal arts school level. A result of the workshop is that Rollins has gained a national grant to promote more sustainable transportation in the region and include students/faculty in the study of progress.

-In October 2011, a group of students from Davidson College visited Furman and learned about Furman’s commitment to sustainability, as well as sustainability in the greater Greenville community.
-In January 2012, a team of administrators from Georgia Perimeter College travelled to Furman in order to learn about our university’s sustainability efforts. The staff of the Shi Center for Sustainability presented them with examples and advice on incorporating sustainability into their curriculum.
In July 2012, Halfacre was invited to Boone, North Carolina, for the Appalachian Energy Summit, a meeting of the University of North Carolina 17 school system. She led a day-long curricular workshop for the group that included faculty leaders from each of the schools. Furman was the only school represented at the event that was outside the UNC system (that has 250,000 students).
In October 2012, the Center’s Program Coordinator Katherine Kransteuber, including participating in a panel titled Small Colleges, Big Impact. The panel showcased four liberal arts colleges with strong sustainability records, particularly sustainability in the curriculum, and was presented at the conference of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education in Los Angeles.
In November 2012, Kransteuber co-led a panel on food systems curriculum, research and practice at the southeastern regional symposium of the American Colleges and Universities Presidents’ Climate Commitment in Atlanta. Attendees learned about ways in which they might focus their schools’ efforts to create a comprehensive sustainable food systems initiative.

-American College and University Presidents' Climate Commitment
-Associated Colleges of the South Environmental Initiative
-The Duke Endowment Task Force on Community and Environmental Sustainability
-Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education
-American Council on Renewable Energy

The Duke Endowment Task Force on Community and Environmental Sustainability was created in 2008 as an innovative way for institutions to collaborate in the move toward campus sustainability. The Duke Endowment, an approximately $2.5 billion endowment based in Charlotte, NC, supports four institutions of higher education in North and South Carolina: Davidson College, Duke University, Furman University, and Johnson C. Smith University. Furman's Shi Center for Sustainability Director Angela Halfacre serves as the chair of the task force. For more information, please see http://www.dukeendowment.org/issues/improving-rural-communities/sustainable-campuses. Additionally, the four Duke Endowment schools have recently begun collaborating on food systems and farm research, which will continue through fiscal year 2013.
The Associated Colleges of the South (ACS) is a consortium of 16 liberal arts institutions in the southeast, including Furman. Through this network, institutions collaborate on projects and share lessons learned. The ACS has funded post-doctoral fellowships focused on teaching; Furman’s first fellow focused on Sustainability Science, and Furman’s second (and current) fellow has expertise in environmental sociology, teaches in the Sociology and Sustainability Science programs and has been intimately involved with curricular innovation through the Shi Center. The post-doctoral fellows and their faculty mentors participate in annual meetings where ideas and lessons learned are shared across schools.

In June 2012, the Piedmont Natural Gas Foundation awarded a $75,000 grant to fund a unique partnership among Furman, Duke and Vanderbilt universities that will support student-led development of environmental stewardship and energy sustainability initiatives. Two students from each school were selected as Piedmont Natural Gas student fellows through a competitive application process. Beginning with a 400-hour summer fellowship, the students will continue work on their projects throughout the academic year with the goal of implementing a sustainability initiative in collaboration with a nonprofit agency or government partner in the schools' communities of Greenville, S.C., Durham, N.C., and Nashville, Tenn. Unique to this program is the collaboration among the students from the three universities; the students have monthly check-ins to learn from each other and meet at the beginning and end of their fellowship year.

Beginning in February 2012, collaboration among institutions in Vermont (the University of Vermont), South Carolina (Furman University), and Puerto Rico (the University of Puerto Rico) around place-based themes was seeded. The objective of this project is to build a Research Coordination Network (RCN) to further develop place-based theory and practices that foster resiliency in coupled natural and human systems. Specifically, this RCN will provide a diverse geographic context for research on the theory and practice of PLACE (Place-based Landscape Analysis & Community Engagement), a program model originally designed in Vermont to provide community members with a forum for exploring and understanding the natural and cultural history of their town landscapes. The PLACE network will, over time, expand to include a broader set of geographic representation.