Cal Poly Humboldt
EN-1: Student Educators Program

CCAT hosts several opportunities throughout the year where student co-directors and seasoned student employees train or teach other student staff and experienced volunteers about certain practices and protocols that are then disseminated to the broader campus community via classes and workshops. In this way, many student contributors and leaders of CCAT (including co-directors, paid CCAT student staff, for-credit course teachers who are students, and selected student volunteers) are peer educators for specific CCAT programming. That said, not every activity of CCAT can be considered a "train-the-trainer" peer education activity, though many are and these recur in an ongoing way throughout the year. One of the things that makes CCAT a functional peer education program is that it has a physical space on campus; that is, CCAT is a student run, student funded, live in demonstration home for appropriate tech and sustainability. Furthermore, CCAT occupies a 2 story house that is solar powered with 34 garden beds, has a grey water system, four total rainwater catchment systems, an attached greenhouse, and a shared classroom and library on the first floor. CCAT is just as much composed of the physical space as it is the people that run it.

Specifically, during the reporting time frame of Academic Year 2021- 2022, activities that meet criteria for this credit include sewing and sustainability (upcycling clothes), urban foraging class using an Ethnobotanical Map of plants on campus that included ethical gathering concepts and plant identification, urban homesteading, natural dye for textiles with natural pigments, how to process and sift compost and how to get started with household composting and vermicompost and bokashi, organic gardening, and teaching that happens on Volunteer Fridays on topics like seasonality of planting and general garden maintenance. CCAT also offers workshops on resource reuse and salvage, often via the resource reclamation station.

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Target audience is inclusive of the broader campus Cal Poly Humboldt. student population. Classes and workshops are open and accessible to all students with no exclusions. Classes counted here are taught by students serving in peer educator roles. This audience is reached through volunteer Fridays, student taught classes offered for-credit, general workshops, and tabling events.

A secondary audience for CCAT offerings is local and regional community; for example at the Humboldt County Fair in August 2022, CCAT worked with Guy Fieri and Zero Waste Humboldt on the annual Chili Cook Off to reduce single use cups and utensils by giving out commemorative mugs and washing utensils on site.

WRRAP offers education to the campus on waste reduction and zero waste practices, resources, and behaviors.
Programs offered to the student population at large include:
-compost workshops (general)
-Reusable Office Supply Exchange (ROSE) - offers donated items for free to students; will include electronic waste in the future in addition to office supplies and textbooks
-Bicycle Learning Center- teaches students to repair and ride bikes; offers salvages materials from and for bikes
-Zero Waste Branch- facilitates green event certification and education on how to hold green and zero waste events; provides water filling stations during graduation; facilitates a pilot paper towel composting project; offers tours of campus composting systems (such as the BioBin and EarthTub) on demand for any campus users, classes, or groups that want to learn more; delivers presentations to classes on waste reduction topics; implements waste sorting guidance by standing at receptacles during campus events (typically called Trash Talks or Trash Cops).
-general tabling - often the group will table for Earth Week, Trashion Show, clothing swaps, and in conjunction with holidays (offering teaching and opportunity for students to make upcycled Valentines Cards and jewelry making from old bike parts)

Specific programs are offered exclusively to the Residence Hall audience, such as:
-trash talks at the beginning of each year in which they train students how to sort waste correctly.
-Also, in Spring 2023 WRRAP will target residents for compost education, as their program for small bucket compost collection will pivot to being offered exclusively to students living in residence halls.
-In a final example where programming is offered exclusively to residents, Donation Dash is an educational program focused on residents when they move out at the end of the year, in which residents are trained and encouraged to separate their giveaway and waste items into specific streams so that they can be donated, salvaged, and properly diverted from the landfill.

The target audience for WRRAP educational programming is generally the complete student body. However, specific programs (as described above) are tailored to smaller or more targeted audiences as content dictates.

Green Campus is group comprised of students which serve in a variety of roles including paid employees, for-credit interns and volunteers. The primary mission of the group is to improve environmental sustainability at the campus by achieving measurable energy and water savings, educating the campus community about sustainability, encouraging daily behavioral changes that benefit the environment, preparing future professionals in environmental fields, and collaborating with other sustainability organizations on campus.

With typically five to six paid employees, and between 2-4 for-credit interns each semester, the group works on the following projects and campaigns:
-Green Workplace Assessment- students consult with staff departments to recommend changes that will result in energy, water, waste, greenhouse gas, and other resources savings
-Energy & Water Competition- students engage with peers in the Residence Hall setting encouraging them to save energy and water, and to attend various sustainability workshops on campus
-Weigh the Waste- students engage with peers in the Residence Dining eatery teaching them about food waste and encouraging them to reduce their own food waste and contribute to brainstorming sessions for implementing institutional practices that will minimize food waste
-Green Speed Networking- students execute a matchmaking event whereby students are put in small groups and matched up to sustainability professionals from the community so that they may ask questions and get advice about how to successfully land careers in the green jobs sector
-Earth Week- students routinely contribute activities to Earth week programming, including but not limited to Trashion Show, energy business networking, film screenings, and organizer skill building/advocacy.
-Trashion Show- students host a competition whereby their peers submit fashion entries that must be made of "trash". Event has been held during Earth Week, and during the Fall Zero Waste Conference.
-General tabling & sustainability outreach- students employ best practices for translating awareness to action
-Other Dining Sustainability practices- students complete research and implementation exercises on a broad array of topics including but not limited to updating waste sorting signage, completing waste audits for Dining Services, making recommendations for environmentally friendly food and beverage containers, among other sustainability measures.

All Green Campus students are trained on the skills needed to successfully host each program/activity listed below through a combination of activities, workshops, shadowing activities, and exercises from more experienced student team members and by the Supervisor filling in gaps as needed. Once trained up, peer educators offer their skills and services to the student population at large, though some programs serve targeted sectors of student populations (such as within the Energy & Water Competition where peer educators serve the Resident population only). Skills that students learn from their Green Campus peers and then begin deploying in real world situations for the larger student population include a diverse set of concepts, spanning general concepts like agenda planning, meeting facilitation, best practices for graphic design, to more specific sustainability concepts such as energy analysis, completion of waste audits (Dining support), and best practices for translating stakeholder interest and awareness into realized utility and resources savings.

Most programs of Green Campus seek to engage any and all students, though a few are organized to reach more targeted stakeholders. For example, the Energy & Water Competition seeks to engage students who live in Residence Halls only, and the Weigh the Waste Campaign seeks to engage students who eat the J Dining Eatery. However, Earth Week activities, general tabling exercises, Green Speed Networking and Trashion Show are all campaigns that seek to engage 100% of the student population.

The answer 100% as the figure representing "percentage of students served by a peer-to-peer sustainability outreach and education program" has been selected here because most peer education activities implemented by CCAT, WRRAP and Green Campus truly are offered and available to 100% of the student population at Cal Poly Humboldt.

This answer does not indicate that 100% of students actually receive or benefit from these peer education activities, but per the Technical Manual parameters for this credit, which state "a group of students may be served by a program even if not all of these students actively participate," we believe it is accurate to say that selected programming from CCAT and selected programming from Green Campus is available to all students and therefore 100% is the most accurate figure to report here.

In addition, readers may note that CCAT, Green Campus and WRRAP have been mentioned in other areas of the report, such as in selected responses to EN 3 Student Life but effort has been made within this credit (EN 1) to target specific descriptions of how these programs go beyond provision of resources that simply enrich student life to, in many cases, serve as robust peer-to-peer education programs.