Hope College
EN-10: Community Partnerships

www.hope.edu/sustainability-institute
Holland-Hope College Sustainability Institute - Cultivating a sustainable community.

Together Hope College, the City of Holland and Holland Board of Public Works developed the Sustainability Institute to support outreach, education and practices geared toward creating a more sustainable community.
VISION
Our vision is a healthy and economically vibrant community that promotes environmental stewardship and mutual respect for people and the planet.

MISSION
Our mission is to foster collaborative efforts to infuse sustainability into the minds and practices of the greater Holland community.

PURPOSE
The purpose of the Holland-Hope College Sustainability Institute is to support growing efforts to encourage, engage, educate and drive sustainable culture in water and air quality, energy efficiency, land use and environmental innovation using a sustainability framework evaluation process and other best practices.

The institute grew out of an education and outreach task force, one of seven citizen-led task forces launched in conjunction with Holland’s Community Energy Plan.

http://www.macatawaclarity.org/
Our goal is to remediate the water quality issues of Lake Macatawa and the Macatawa Watershed.
Water Festival: https://outdoordiscovery.org/education/community-events/macatawa-water-festival/
Day 1 Research: WATERSHED
What is the impact of human activity on our local rivers and lakes?
https://www.hollandsentinel.com/news/20191216/living-sustainably-research-gives-residents-look-at-lake-macatawa-health

Hope College has partnered with Florida-based Sawyer Products and Give Clean Water, a California-based nonprofit, to help provide clean water to residents in Fiji. Devastation still lingers there after three hurricanes pummeled the island in the past two years, leaving about 500,000 people -- nearly 50 percent of the island’s population – without access to safe water.

Two staff from the Hope College grounds team and the Director for the Office of Sustainability serve on the award winning Holland in Bloom committee. https://www.cityofholland.com/837/Holland-in-Bloom
http://hollandannualreport.com/holland-brings-home-awards-at-america-in-bloom-symposium/

June 2018 A local Boy Scout from Holland built 5 of these bat boxes for Hope College as his Eagle Scout project. They will be placed around campus to provide new “Residential Housing” for the local bat population.

New project: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Community-Based Partnerships Presidential Initiative of Hope College and Holland, Michigan
https://hope.edu/news/2020/academics/grant-funds-program-to-foster-college-community-partnerships-because-theres-no-place-like-home.html
“Our guiding objectives include celebrating diversity and cultivating unity,” said Dr. William Pannapacker, a professor of English who as senior director of Mellon programs at Hope wrote the grant proposal. “What does it mean to be home? How do we expand that vision? How do we educate our students and prepare them for lives of leadership and service in a changing local community? And how do we as a community address the challenges that prevent Holland from being even more inclusive, welcoming and oriented towards the flourishing of everyone?”
“We anticipate projects focused on local challenges such as inclusion, housing, health care, environment, technology, infrastructure, education, incarceration, employment, social mobility, entrepreneurship, economic development and civic culture,” he said. “But the form that they take can involve nearly anything, as long as they weave together the needs of the community with our faculty and students and engage with the liberal arts mission of the college, especially including the humanities and arts.”