George Washington University
EN-4: Outreach Materials and Publications

Sustainable GW sends out a biweekly newsletter that provides stakeholders with a snapshot of what is happening in the sustainability community at GW. It contains sections to promote upcoming events and internship, grant, and service opportunities. It also contains a section for updates and highlights in each of the three areas of concentration: sustainability in action, sustainability in the classroom, and sustainability in research. The intention is to not only highlight opportunities for students, staff, and faculty to get involved with Sustainable GW's programs, but also to provide alumni and external partners with a briefing on the overall impact of the University's sustainability programs and initiatives.

For new LEED buildings on campus, GW incorporates signage and tours in the buildings to help educate the community about the relevant green features.

GW has published a sustainability campus map, paired with its progress report. The map is distributed at events across campus throughout the year, and features include Green Roofs, Solar Thermal displays, bikeshare stations on campus, and much more. The university also provides a green tour to interested parties. Due to the rapidly changing nature of the GW campuses and diversity of tour requests, students are trained by Office of Sustainability staff. Additionally, the Office works with tour guides on campus to incorporate sustainability into their year-round tours for prospective students.

GW features guidelines for green living and incorporating sustainability into the residential experience on its sustainability website. Student Eco-Reps conduct peer-to-peer education in the residence halls helping to disseminate information to students. Training is also conducted with Resident Assistants on campus to help them understand sustainable living and pass the information along to their students.

Sustainability is featured in the new student orientation in several ways. As one example, the Office of Sustainability encourages student orientation leaders to demonstrate what sustainability looks like in practice, like composting, proper recycling, energy conservation, and waste diversion. Additionally, Campaign GW disseminated sustainability lifestyle tips to new students at an information table during orientation.

In 2018, GW released its first comprehensive sustainability progress report, which evaluates GW's progress toward urban sustainability against its own goals laid out in the Ecosystems Enhancement Strategy in 2012. The process of publishing the progress report included a robust stakeholder engagement process by which campus partners were briefed on the findings of the report. To accompany the full length report, we also issued an updated sustainability scorecard. Designed as a tool for stakeholder engagement, the scorecards have a map of sustainability features on campus. When printed, the scorecards fold up to the size of a credit card for convenient portability.

The Green Office Network is the primary faculty and staff sustainability engagement program. Since its origin in 2014, more than 65 offices have become certified and joined the Green Office Network. The program includes the certification program that encourages staff and faculty to implement sustainable practices in their office spaces as well as ongoing education and engagement opportunities like meetings with other Network members, breifings on sustainability initiatives across the University, and educational activities.

Add'l URLs for the vehicle to publish and disseminate student research on sustainability

https://www.planetforward.org/
https://gwupstartblog.wordpress.com/tag/eco-equity-challenge/
http://researchdays.gwu.edu/
https://blogs.gwu.edu/greenhub/

Add'l walking tour map URL:
https://sustainability.gwu.edu/campus-map

https://sustainability.gwu.edu/green-office-network