George Washington University
AC-8: Campus as a Living Laboratory

Planet Forward, a project of the School of Media & Public Affairs, both educates and encourages inspiring stories about solutions and innovations to help our environment. Planet Forward is a GW-based initiative to give students the skills to tell stories about climate change and how to increase levels of sustainability. Student participants in the project make their own videos, write stories, and develop other multimedia projects to highlight successful examples of sustainability on campus and in other contexts. Recent projects have included ""Sustainability that sticks: GW students make reducing plastic personal"" and looked at food insecurity in Washington.

Planet Forward is also the basis for the type of storytelling taught in the course Sustainability Reporting (SMPA 3193). In the course, students practice the skills needed to be an environmental storyteller with a focus on sustainability and climate change in the Anthropocene. Students feature campus projects in their stories. The course teaches them through practice to bring accuracy, research, data, thoroughness, presentation and originality to their journalism and communications.The class also emphasizes creative storytelling and compelling characters and have executed multimedia sustainability stories, including the Planet Forward online platform. Students routinely interview GW operations staff involved in sustainaiblity initiatives, and have traveled to the local materials recovery facility to understand downstream waste management and recycling impacts.

The Worldwide Climate Justice Teach-In: DC on March 30th, 2022 was the first event resulting from a climate collaboration among all of the D.C. area universities, including American University, The Catholic University of America, Gallaudet University, Georgetown University, The George Washington University, George Mason University, Howard University, Trinity Washington University, and the University of the District of Columbia. During the event, each university hosted its own individual events, with GW holding lightning speech and Q&A sessions on several topics, such as Public Health, Education, and Advocacy, that allowed students to engage with speakers across a variety of professions. Following these individual events, universities sent student representatives to GW for a combined event where each student spoke about climate and sustainability initiatives at their respective schools.

GW provides living lab course Engaging Communities to Promote Evidence-Based Environmental Justice for undergraduate students in any school as part of the Sustainability Minor. The course was created out of a partnership between the Office of Sustainabiity, the Nashman Center for Civic Engagement and Public Service, and the Sustainability Minor. Taught and led by Professor Naamal De Silva, students design and carry out research that engages and supports DC residents from marginalized or underserved communities. During this course, students identify, research, and interpret intersections between environmental, technological, socioeconomic, and political problems and opportunities within communities in DC. In analyzing real world problems faced by DC residents, students apply analytical methods from the natural and social sciences, peer-reviewed research, and interdisciplinary knowledge gained through prior coursework. The goal of this community-engaged research is to develop proposals for service learning projects, with the possibility of funding or further development through the Public Service Grant Commission grants, the Eco-Equity Challenge, the Knapp Fellowship, the New Venture Competition, and other opportunities. This course serves as a capstone experience for the Sustainability Minor, but is not limited to students in the minor. Students with existing service-learning or social innovation projects may use this course to support project implementation and adaptive management.

Professor De Silva also taught a course on Environmental Justice Course which trained students in techniques for working with community-based organizations and required them to work with these organizations over the course of the semester, developing projects that addressed community-defined goals. De Silva's course complemented many of the community-based efforts that GW sponsored by giving students the skills needed to engage directly in community-based research.

The GW Sustainability Institute is working with the DC Green Bank, a financial institute set up by the District of Columbia government to finance energy and other sustainability projects in underserved neighborhoods of the District, to launch and run the DC Green Bank University Alliance. The project brings together students from GW, Georgetown, UDC, Howard, and Trinity for biweekly sessions to learn about the work of the Green Bank and to develop stronger ties between the Bank and the DC communities that it serves. As part of this project, students have opportunities to work directly with community groups, including the District government and neighborhood associations. Through this process and by participating in meetings and other efforts, the students gain an understanding of the key challenges these groups face and the complexity of developing effective solutions.

The mission of the Fresh Air DC Living Lab is improving air quality through low-cost sensors, data analytics, and university-community partnerships. This living lab course creates an integrated technological system that facilitates urban air quality monitoring and communication using low-cost sensors and Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity (i.e., LoRaWAN). This system is student- and community-driven, and contributes important knowledge and technology to advance distributed urban air quality sensing in smart cities. The course is part of the Sustainability Minor, in which students come together from across all disciplines. In this course, Professor Royce Francis in the School of Engineering and Applied Science introduces students to interdisciplinary research methods, with a special focus on community-engaged research. Each semester of students iterates and expands on the work of the previous semester. Under the tutelage of Professor Francis, students design and create air pollution monitors, which they subsequently place on campus and throughout the DC community. Students work in teams to market the project, analyze data, conduct outreach with community partners, and budget the project. The monitors are also co-located by existing EPA monitors to test the reliability/accuracy of the data. The students in the project/course have relied on partnerships with on entities, such as GW Facilities, GW SEAS, GW Milken Institute of Public Health, and off-campus, community partners like the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) Jr. DC chapter. By setting up the monitors and tracking the data, the students gain firsthand knowledge of how research programs can provide direct benefits to members of the nearby community in terms of monitoring and seeking ways to mitigate air pollution. For more information, see https://sustainability.gwu.edu/sustainability-snapshot-what%E2%80%99s-air-gw-based-research-project-aims-gather-data-air-quality-educate

Saniya LeBlanc, associate professor in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, is using the campus's energy management system as a living laboratory to build a framework that can determine how an urban energy system will hold up to challenges like a major heatwave that taxes the system or a storm that causes a grid outage. Her research team, which consists of graduate and undergraduate students, uses modeling to determine the system’s reliability, resiliency and vulnerability. Professors Ekundayo Shittu and Payman Dehghanian and numerous students participate in the project. The Living Lab builds on five years of previous work analyzing and modeling the Ross Hall power plant, which provides electricity, heating and cooling for four campus buildings, and building collaborations across GW and Washington, DC. Dr. LeBlanc’s team also works closely with the GW Division of Safety and Facilities and the GW Office of Sustainability. The team has gathered data about water, natural gas and electricity being used by many buildings on campus, often manually checking meters and sifting through utility bills to collect the information they need. As part of their research, the team has created a clickable map that shows key buildings on campus and the energy they use. That data is shared with the university to inform decisions about future sustainability initiatives and real-time decision-making about how to respond to weather events or power outages. Mansi Talwar, GW’s executive director of engineering, utilities and energy, values this partnership because it combines the university’s core missions of teaching and research with its ambitious sustainability goals. Since the students are part of a process that includes multi-disciplinary research and practical applications on campus, by collecting the energy data, analyzing it, and using their work to make recommendations on how the GW energy system can be more efficient, they gain practical skills in how to implement energy efficiency innovations in practice.

The Energy Equity Initiative, conducted with seed funding from the GW Equity Institute, brings together a multi-disciplinary team of professors and students to create and implement a community-engaged model for synergistically integrating community needs, values, and contacts within the design and implementation of emergent energy, communication, and transportation technologies. Starting with community needs, priorities, and participation, the project combines sustainable energy sources, distributed healthcare, and transportation electrification. The strategy for obtaining these goals is to engage a variety of community navigators (nursing staff, public housing facilitators, community health workers, and elected residents of public housing) during technology inception, development, and delivery in charette-style forums in which they contribute to and learn about emergent technologies designed with their input. The technology will focus on mobile, electrified, healthcare units equipped with secure communication technology that travel in Washington, DC's Wards 5, 7, and 8 to deliver preventative and routine health care (e.g., vaccinations, diabetes screening, pre-natal education, and more) to underserved residents. Graduate students in the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the School of Public Policy have worked with professors in engineering, law, nursing, and sustainability to launch this project. In doing so, they learn how to reach out to community groups and build relationships of trust. The newly acquired skills will make the students effective change-makers as they start their professional careers.

Research Professor Robert Orttung is teaching a Sustainability Research Methods course each semester in which the students seek to make measurable change on campus. During th2 2022-23 academic year, the purpose was to increase the number of students participating in on-campus composting. Students have engaged in ethnographic research to observe how students, staff, and faculty behave in campus dining halls. Additionally, they have conducted focus groups and surveys to determine how much their peers know about composting and what obstacles they encounter that prevent them from composting on a regular basis. Based on these observations and data collection, the students are designing experiments that will have dorms and sorority houses competing with each other since this technique seems to be the most effective in changing behavior. The faculty and students in the course are also working with campus operations to implement changes, such as making composting bins more widely available on campus and instructing campus denizens how best to avoid contaminating the compost they produce.

Biology Professor Tara Scully's course is conducting a sustainability audit of the plantings currently on campus. Students receive instructions on identifying plants, learning which ones contribute to a healthy ecosystem (including native and adapted species) and which ones do not (invasive species, for example). They gather data across the campus and then compile it into a report for the Office of Sustainability. This work builds on a long history of students at GW conducting site inventories and contributing to the university's Sustainable Landscape Designn Guidelines document, which provides a wealth of information about campus landscaping and a variety of ideas about where and how improvements can be made.

GW School of Business Professor Scheherazade Rehman teaches a class on sustainable purchasing in which business students survey local businesses to determine which ones use single-use plastics. The Law School also teaches courses and conducts research in this area. Students in the sustainability minor capstone class have taken the initiative to audit the purchasing habits of local coffeeshops. They discovered that similar shops in California use only compostable materials and have begun a campaign to ensure that the shops in DC meet similarly stringent standards.

In 2021, the George Washington University adtoped a policy eliminiating single-use plastics to the greatest extent possible following a commitment by the GW Board of Trustees. This commitment includes all non-essential, non-compostable, single-use plastics with available alternatives. Single-use plastic items should not be procured using university funds for use in university operations and activities held on GW property (owned or leased) where alternatives are available. Students participate directly in the effort to reduce the purchase of single-use plastics by implementing these policies in their clubs and organizations. Often, GW professors work with student groups on projects to advance policy implementation and/or measure the effectivenss of the policy.

GW is located in the heart of the District of Columbia, a city with a rich transit and active transportation network, including Metro rail, Metro bus, bike lanes, bikeshare, and multiple micromobility options. All students on campus benefit from these amenities as it helps them discover ways to live without relying on automobiles. Students studying in the GW School of Professional Studies' MA program on Sustainable Urban Planning gain direct benefit from studying the transportation system in DC and the safety of area bike lines. With support from the National Science Foundation, they have also compared local bike lane opportunities to those in Europe, identifying best practices in Europe that eventually can be transferred to the U.S.

The GW Center for Real Estate and Urban Analysis offers a 12-credit graduate certificate in Walkable Urban Real Estate and Place Management for both MBA and MS in Finance students and non-degree students. Taking advantage of metropolitan Washington, D.C.’s walkable urbanism, students work with faculty in specific neighborhoods to map and understand transportation needs and opportunities to expand walking and biking as transportation options.

In 2018, GW celebrated the first graduating class from its new Master of Science in Environmental and Green Chemistry. The coursework for this program is unique to GW, with a proactive approach to addressing toxicity and learning how to apply state-of-the-art processes and technologies to evaluate environmental impact. A capstone project gives students an opportunity to work with organizations such as the Environmental Working Group and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), or apply their focus to GW's campus operations.

GW has adopted a zero waste approach which provides ample opportunities for campus as a living lab projects. Students in Professor Tara Scully's Food, Nutrition, and Service course routinely participate in on-campus waste audits with Colin O'Brien, GW's lead on zero waste initiatives. Through these exercises, students have learned the process and benefits of such audits, how to categorize recyclable, compostable, and landfill-bound material, and the impacts of discarded resources on the environment. The GW Office of Sustainabilility uses the data generated by these audits to enhance GW's zero waste initiatives on campus and in Washington, DC.

Part of GW's zero waste effort is increasing composting. The Office of Sustainability hires five composing interns each semester who set up sites on campus to collect compost from members of the GW community. The student interns and the community members who bring their compost learn through their experience how best to eliminate contamination from the compost so that the university can improve the efficiency and cost effectiveness of the program. Students who gain this knowledge are encouraged to actively spread it among dorm mates and others living off campus.

In 2022, Professor Robert Orttung taught a sustainability minor capstone course in which students explored food waste on campus. In spring of 2022, students deployed a composting behavior survey to students, faculty, and staff to understand how frequently individuals in the GW community are composting, their motivations for doing so, and the barriers that prevent them from composting. In fall of 2022, students conducted an observational study of student composting behaviors in an on-campus dining venue, setting out a compost bin and evaluating the resulting participation and impact.

Each May, students have the opportunity to donate, rather than dispose of, items they no longer need. Green Move-Out makes the residence hall move-out process more environmentally and community-friendly through a multifaceted donation drive to collect and redistribute clothing, household goods, and non-perishable food to those in need.

As outlined in the 2011 GWater Plan and consistent with the GW Board of Trustees Task Force on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Responsibility commitments, the university is committed to reducing its water consumption, increasing rainwater retention, enhancing water quality and reducing the use of bottled water. GW has eight campus locations that retain and reuse stormwater for everything from irrigating plants to providing water for toilets and decorative fountains. In 2010 GW transformed a parking lot into a water reclamation park (“Square 80”) that offers a respite from the busy urban activity that surrounds it. In addition to reclaiming green space, this park features pervious paving, biofiltration planters, rain gardens, bioswales and roofwater collection. The stormwater captured can be reused on campus, and the park includes educational signs to explain the various features and their significance.

Square 80 provides a valuable educational opportunity for GW students. The Office of Sustainability provides regular sustainability tours of campus and uses the opportunity to show students how permeable pavement can improve water management practices on campus. Students in the Sustainability Minor capstone are working on ways to transform some campus streets into pedestrian zone where there will be more permeable pavement, enhanced green space, and more opportunities for members of the campus community to engage with nature. Working on this project gives the students skills in designing a more sustainable campus, building coalitions among stakeholders to make the needed changes, and skills in holding charettes to solicit community input and ensure any changes made to the campus meet community needs and desires.

In spring of 2023, Professor Royce Francis' Research in Sustainability course deployed a group of students to focus on potable water use reduction on campus. Specifically, students designed a behavior change campaign utilizing small stickers applied near faucets as a reminder to practice water conservation. The students are working to capture data from a performance period to compare against a baseline to measure the effectiveness of the campaign.

The Board of Trustees created the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Responsibility Task Force to establish a long-term, proactive approach to managing ESG responsibility. The Board of Trustees committed to receiving robust input and feedback from the GW community and worked with the Student Association, the Faculty Senate, and the GW Alumni Association to identify representatives to serve on this important initiative.

Students were heavily involved in the process. The Task Force held a number of town hall meetings that included students, and many used the opportunity to present their opinions. These efforts created an atmosphere in which students gained skills in co-producing knowledge along with Trustees, university administrators, faculty, and experts about how to ensure that future changes to the campus achieve sustainability goals. Through this process students gained the ability to define their own goals, articulate why they think their priorities are important, and experience in convincing others to go along with these plans.

Created and taught by internationally chef and humanitarian José Andrés and Professor Tara Scully as part of the GW Sustainability Minor, the course ""World on a Plate"" surveys the many ways in which food and society interact. Faculty and guest lecturers expand the experiences of students who choose to participate in this exciting exploration of a truly interdisciplinary topic. In this course, students think deeply about food in its many different roles, e.g., as a critical factor in public health, as an industry, as a science, as the medium of the craft of cooking, and as a political instrument. The course objective is to teach students to:

1. Identify the importance of food in many different spheres of modern civilization.
2. Compare similar views and contrast divergent views of food’s role in history.
3. Articulate, both verbally and in writing, how food has shaped civilization through its multiple connections with everyday life, as well as with national and international affairs.
4. Critically evaluate the role of food in the future of a global community with a growing population on a planet with limited resources.
5. Create and execute an action plan to address at least one food-related issue of importance to society.

Through the course, students provide critical analysis of the food systems on campus, in the community, and beyond, resulting in service projects, activism, and cooking events that contribute to a more sustainable future of food at GW and in Washington, D.C. The campus dining related learning and analysis inform practices that contribute to student and employee wellbeing at GW.
https://gwtoday.gwu.edu/world-renowned-chef-jos%C3%A9-andr%C3%A9s-reintroduces-course-food-and-social-issues

David Michaels, a George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health epidemiologist, recently launched a new project aimed at reducing workplace injuries and deaths in the post-pandemic work environment through improved data collection, analysis and policy development. With an overarching goal to reduce fatalities and serious illnesses and injuries, Michaels will focus on gathering and analyzing the data needed to develop effective government policies that will encourage employers to make workplaces safer. Additionally, the Sumner M. Redstone Global Center for Prevention and Wellness, directed by Bill Dietz is working to increase access to green space on campus and in Washington, DC. Access to green space for recreation and physical activity provides important benefits for human health as well as climate change mitigation and adaptation. Students benefit directly from this research by having opportunities to work with the faculty members who are leading these efforts as PIs. As students define their own projects in Sustainability Minor capstone classes, they can call on this expertise to shape their own thinking and project proposals.

Living laboratories merge academics and campus facilities management to provide students with real-world skills, and for GW, an opportunity to meet its sustainability goals with enhanced student and faculty engagement. GW sees tremendous potential in the campus living lab concept, since it breaks through the current curricular and operational paradigms to add a new model for both education and sustainability action. In theory, a living lab is a given place where problem-based teaching, research and applied work combine to develop actionable solutions that make that place more sustainable. Living Labs have the potential to engage students, staff and faculty in citizenship, leadership in sustainability, and to provide a service that benefits the GW campus. The Living Labs concept speaks powerfully to both sustainability and to further enhance our commitment to service.