Indiana University Bloomington
EN-3: Student Life

(Not an exhaustive list)

Alpha Phi Omega (APO)
Alpha Phi Omega is a National Service Fraternity -- college students gather together in an organization based on fraternalism and founded on the principles of Leadership, Friendship and Service. Its aim is to further the freedom that is our national, educational and intellectual heritage. APO, specifically the Mu Chapter at Indiana University Bloomington, is open to any IUB student who would like to join. Given that they do not have a house, members of social fraternities and sororities are welcome as well as anyone who lives in a residence hall or off-campus. APO has partnered on various sustainability-oriented community service projects, including helping out with a trash audit that documented all of the trash put in dumpsters around campus that could actually be recycled (about 50%).
http://www.indiana.edu/~apo

American Fisheries Society at IU: AFS@IU builds on the traditions and history established at IU from famous icthyologists such as David Starr Jordan and Carl Eigenmann, by providing students interested in water resourses an outlet to become involved. AFS@IU is a student subuit of the American Fisheries Society (AFS) and is focused on Fisheries Management and Conservation.

Bloomington Community Orchard at IU (BCO-IU)
Bloomington Community Orchard at IU aims to follow the mission instated by the BCO to dream, build, and share the orchard with the entire community. Expanding onto the IU campus means bringing the values that we as an organization are so well known for - sustainability, community-building, and education - onto IU's campus and into the hearts and minds of its students. We do this by working to take the "campus garden" outside of its physical walls, and bring those kinds of projects right onto IU's campus. This organization will also educate students about the local food movement in Bloomington and ways to cultivate a healthy community. We will be holding meetings to discuss ways in which students can take on roles within the orchard.
https://beinvolved.indiana.edu/organization/BCO-IU/about

Collins E-force
E-Force is the student environmentalism group within Collins Living Learning Center. Membership is open to all residents of Collins Living-Learning Center.
https://sites.google.com/site/collinsstudentgovernment/student-organizations/e-force

Concerned Student- Scientists at IU
This is a group of scientists (faculty) and science supporters (faculty and students) that are organized in defense of science. They promote the accurate representation of science in the media, in education, and in the design of legislation; And engage with the public to communicate science, especially as it relates to core issues of public policy, like climate change.

Ducks Unlimited IU Chapter
This club is the IU chapter of Ducks Unlimited; an organization dedicated to the conservation, restoration, and management of wetlands and associated habitats for North America's waterfowl.
https://beinvolved.indiana.edu/organization/DUIU2

Emergent Theatre
The purpose of this organization is to provide a safe place and space for students to convene and engage in civil dialogue that galvanizes positive responses to social injustice in local, national, and global communities. The organization will host community workshops, create theatre productions, as well as partner with various diversity and inclusion campus initiatives. This group will not function as a combative organization. The purpose is to specifically promote peace, unity, and camaraderie across social barriers.
https://beinvolved.indiana.edu/organization/EmergentTheatre/about

Environmental Law Society (ELS)
The specific goals of ELS are to promote the organization, local community awareness and education concerning the environment; to provide an interface between the student body and the legal community, to represent the student body’s interest in environmental law within the law school community, throughout the State of Indiana, and in cooperation with other schools and environmental groups. The ELS seeks to provide a forum for critique and/or support of the legal system, current laws and regulations, and actions undertaken by other groups that concern the environment.
http://www.law.indiana.edu/students/activities/environmental

Environmental Management and Sustainable Development Association
The Environmental Management and Sustainable Development Association (EMSDA) is a professional student organization through the School of Public and Environmental Affairs. It has been established to provide a forum for exchange of ideas and information, enhance students career preparation through interaction with professionals and establish a network for potential positions and/or internships related to environmental management or sustainable development. In addition, we promote environmental and sustainability education, and support awareness of issues and ideas that affect people and the environment.
http://www.indiana.edu/~iuemsda/

Fair Trade at IU

Global Brigades at IU
Global Business Brigades at Indiana University strives to create a level of sustainability in third world countries, in particular, Panama. They do this by consulting microenterprises on week-long trips to rural areas of Panama. Students are able to learn about the Panamanian culture while teaching community members basic knowledge of business concepts learned here at Indiana University.
http://iugbb.weebly.com/

Indiana Public Interest Research Group (INPIRG)
Throughout the 1970s, and now since 1997, students who have been involved with their INPIRG campus chapter have not only learned how to investigate a problem and come up with a practical solution. We've also learned how to convince the media and decision-makers to pay attention and take action. In other words, through INPIRG we gain an educational experience in democratic citizenship. In addition, we get a chance to face up to society's big problems, take action, and win concrete changes that improve the quality of our lives.
http://inpirg.org/iu

Net Impact Sustainable Business Club Graduate Chapter
Net Impact fosters Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) within businesses by reaching out to future business leaders, namely MBA students and graduates. The Net Impact chapter at Kelley continues to grow and was recently recognized by national headquarters at the 2010 National Net Impact Conference for having the largest increase in conference attendance. Originally created in 2008, the Kelley Chapter continues to progress from previous developments such as CSR curriculum integration, CSR career resources and development, and an ever-expanding national network of passionate young students and professionals. Our goal is to educate, equip, and inspire Kelley students and faculty to leverage business as a tool for social impact in Bloomington and beyond.
http://kelley.iu.edu/NetImpact/index.html

Net Impact Sustainable Business Club Undergraduate Chapter
he undergraduate Net Impact chapter at Kelley strives to educate Indiana University students about sustainable careers and enterprises as well as provide opportunities and connections in the industry. Net Impact is a new generation of leaders who use our careers to tackle the world’s toughest problems. Members put business skills to work for good throughout every sector, and by doing so, they hope to show that it’s possible to make a net impact that benefits not just the bottom line, but people and planet too.
http://kelley.iu.edu/netImpactundergrad/

Oxfam Club at Indiana University
OC at IU is a self-managed organization that is affiliated with Oxfam America. In alignment with Oxfam America's mission and current campaigns, OC at IU aims to construct and carry out projects and initiatives focused on alleviating poverty, hunger, and social injustice on both the international and local levels.
https://beinvolved.indiana.edu/organization/OCIU/about

REAL Food IU

Reinvest IU
Calling for IU Foundation to divest from fossil fuel companies, and for IU as a whole to take action for our environmental, financial, and moral standing.
https://www.facebook.com/reinvestIU/

Revitalizing Animal Well-Being (RAW)
RAW is the first successful animal advocacy group on the IU Bloomington campus. RAW has worked with various organizations, RPS, and other student groups to bring about better lives for animals.
http://www.indiana.edu/~iuraw/

Social Enterprise Engagement at Kelley (SEEK)
Social Enterprise Engagement at Kelley (SEEK) expands the boundaries of business by exploring the intersection between enterprise and social responsibility through empowering Kelley students to apply their professional and diverse skillsets.
https://beinvolved.indiana.edu/organization/SEEK

SPEA Undergraduate Student Association
SPEA USA was founded to improve the undergraduate experience at SPEA through discussions, professional events, networking, community service and social outings. Participating in SPEA USA events and meetings is a great way to make new friends, meet faculty and network with professionals in your career field.
http://www.indiana.edu/~speausa/index.htm

Student Sustainability Council
The Student Sustainability Council (SSC) oversees the management of the IU Sustainability Fund, an optional student fee by which students may donate $5 while registering for classes. Individuals and student organizations, regardless of association with the SSC, are encouraged to submit proposals to use the funding for sustainability-advancing projects on campus.
http://www.indiana.edu/~iubssc/sustainability_fund/index.php

VegIU
The Vegan/Vegetarian Organization at Indiana University Bloomington is a social & support group for those interested in vegetarianism and veganism. We provide resources that help people live their life as a vegan or vegetarian. Every one of us has different reasons for pursuing a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle, including health-related, environmental, personal morals, and ethical principles. Beyond assuring our organization is informative, VegIU creates social opportunities for anyone interested in making friends and eating veg-friendly food.
http://www.indiana.edu/~vegiu/index.php

There are also a number of other student organizations that are not focused on sustainability as their primary objective, but who often work on sustainability initiatives. These include:

Graduate Professional Student Government (GPSG)
The fundamental mission of the Indiana University Graduate and Professional Student Government (GPSG) is to serve and advocate for the interests of graduate and professional students on the Bloomington campus. Having gained formal recognition as the government of the graduate and professional students at IUB, the GPSG functions as a united voice to express the concerns of this population to the administration, student body, and Bloomington community.
http://www.indiana.edu/~gpso/

IU Student Association (IUSA)
The IU Student Association is a congregation of Indiana University students that work to protect student rights, enrich student life, and improve Indiana University. Students join together to voice common concerns, hopes, grievances, and most importantly, to take action to realize an even stronger University.
http://iusa.indiana.edu/

IU Student Foundation (IUSF)
The mission of the IU Student Foundation is to create student leadership opportunities by conducting campus events that raise funding for working student scholarships; as well as guide the undergraduate student toward recognition and appreciation of his or her future role as a meaningful, supportive Indiana University alumnus.
http://www.iusf.indiana.edu/

Residence Halls Association (RHA)
Indiana's Residence Halls Association is committed to developing and maintaining a safe, respectful and productive student environment, and to empowering this community of students and protect its interests while contributing to the greater community of IU and beyond. To do this, RHA provides leadership opportunities, programs and social interaction in an academic environment, is an active channel of communication that creates proactive solutions while effectively representing our residents to the university, and exposes the student community to diverse, new ideas and experiences in order to improve and preserve residents’ quality of life. This includes environmentalist and sustainability-themed goals and initiatives.
https://sites.google.com/site/iurhawebsite/

Trockman Microfinance Initiative (TMI)
The Trockman Microfinance Initiative (TMI) is a student organization registered through the Kelley School of Business and is part of Kelley's Institute of Social Impact (KISI). Through education, volunteering, consulting, and traveling, TMI gains a greater understanding of microfinance, while striving to create a diverse perspective of complex social issues.

IU Campus Farm, Campus Garden Initiative, Hilltop Garden and Nature Center, and the Bloomington Community Orchard's IU chapter all address organic agriculture and sustainable food systems.

The IU Campus Farm @ Hinkle-Garton (Bloomington Restorations Inc.) focuses on regenerative agriculture, urban farming practices, food justice, and organic food production that integrates learning and life skills, science and art, and tradition and innovation. The Farm's mission is to promote sustainable food systems education through (food) production, research, creative activity, service, and outreach to the campus, community, and beyond. Through the sustainability know-how and the energetic optimism of IU students, staff, and faculty, we will plant the seeds of sustainability scholarship and practice.

The campus garden is an IU Office of Sustainability project that aims to foster environmental and social sustainability by creating interactive, edible gardening spaces on the IU-Bloomington campus.

Hilltop Garden and Nature Center serves as an educational and recreational resource for youth gardening, Indiana University, and the surrounding community to learn about gardening and to connect with nature.

The Bloomington Community Orchard is an organization from the people, for the people, and to the people. We are dedicated to growing fruit for the community to share and enjoy.

The Sustainability Fund is a student-driven and student-run fund created to facilitate positive, sustainable change on IU Bloomington’s campus. The projects aim to further the three pillars of sustainability: economic, social, and environmental, while creating a direct, measurable, and lasting impact on the students and the campus community.

Each semester when students register for classes, they have the option to check a box for the Sustainability Fund and donating $5.

Themester events: https://themester.indiana.edu/
The College’s Themester program is a focused and multi-faceted inquiry into a variety of topics that change each fall semester. It fosters the exchange of ideas and connects the issues our faculty teach in the classroom to our students’ lives through courses, lectures, exhibits, films, and more. The cross-disciplinary approach of Themester encourages discovery, growth, and engagement in today’s vital and relevant conversations.

Elinor Ostrom Speaker's Series, Office of the Provost Engaged Conversations, SPEA political series and others all engage students in conversations of sustainability.

Recent sustainability speakers at IU have included Denise Abdul-Rahman, Environmental Climate Justice Chair of the Indiana NAACP; Former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy; and W. Kamau Bell, sociopolitical comedian and host of the CNN docu-series "United Shades of America," speaking on subculture and race in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

IU "First Thursdays" explore issues of sustainability via cultural events, including local food economies, and cultural competencies.

The IU Cinema often hosts sustainability-themed viewings. Relevant screenings in 2019 included:
Eating Up Easter
Rising Tide: The Crossroads Project Live Performance
This Changes Everything
Working Together: Research and Water Governance on Mount Kenya
Garbage Dreams
King Corn
Black Gold

Indiana University Outdoor Adventures is an outdoor recreation program that serves the Bloomington campus and surrounding community. Outdoor Adventures gives people the opportunity to rent or buy quality camping and hiking gear, organize custom experiences, take skills courses for college credit, or sign up for adventure trips. It utilizes Leave No Trace principles on all of its trips, as well trains its leaders in their use.

Not only does Indiana University Outdoor Adventures (IUOA) follow No Trace Principles, their staff contains a few Leave No Trace Master Educators and Trainers as well. Leave No Trace is an integral part of their program, which is one of the reasons IUOA offers a one-credit class through the School of Public Health twice a year which sometimes offers students the opportunity to become Leave No Trace Trainers, the first level of training within the Leave No Trace curriculum.

As part of First Year Experience, IUOS also designed an early immersion experience in campus and community sustainability for incoming students as an option for students who wish to have an intensive orientation experience prior to Welcome Week.

The College of Arts and Sciences Themester program is described as "Grounded in our undergraduate curriculum, Themesters are imagined as extended opportunities to engage with students, colleagues, and the wider community in conversation on challenging issues. We hope that Themesters will be a catalyst for students and faculty alike to move our curriculum and research forward in exciting directions. Themesters should also push boundaries by encouraging us to reconsider old truths and investigate new perspectives. We want to use Themester to promote cross-departmental collaboration and thus to experiment with bridging disciplines and approaches."

Since its inception, a number of Themester themes have aligned with sustainability-related themes.

2018: Animal + Human: Since prehistoric times, the lives of non-human animals have been interwoven with those of human animals. At the same time, humans have become increasingly aware of our encroachments on non-human animals through urbanization, deforestation, and hunting, and of our role in the extinction or near-extinction of many species, as well as how animal agriculture contributes to global warming.

2015 - At Work: The Nature of Labor on a Changing Planet. Today we are undergoing a seismic shift in the way we experience our work lives. Accepted generalizations about labor and work have been thrown into doubt by robots, networks, algorithms, and the rise of global finance. The notion of lifelong stable work for a single employer or even in a single economic sector has all but vanished. Consumerism rather than labor generates our cultural and economic values and self-fulfillment. The relationship between work and leisure has undergone a major transformation. Education, training, and skills can hardly keep up with the ever-changing demands of fluid workplaces. Communication technology has decoupled the workplace as a geographic or social unit from the realm of production and profit and accelerated our perception of time. As unprecedented as the new US workforce is, however, much of the world still works in circumstances difficult to relate to our own, as industrial wage-laborers or in precarious informal economies. Themester 2015 will explore the cultural, technological, and historical legacy, the contemporary significance, and future implications of these dramatic and ongoing changes in the worlds of work.

2014 - Eat, Drink, Think: Food from Art to Science. This Themester aims to provoke debate and discussion concerning the vast networks of peoples, technologies, and environmental systems that make even the simplest meal possible. Common issues that demand our attention in contemporary times include: What are the implications of state regulation of diet and nutrition for a society founded on a commitment to individual liberty? How much responsibility should the diner or chef bear for the way the food that they serve was harvested or processed? How can we feed 10 billion people without causing irreparable ecological damage, and should we care about how equitably that food is distributed? These and other questions explore the ways in which our representations and consumption of food connects us to our social, cultural, and biological worlds.

2013 - Connectedness: Networks in a Complex World. We link to one another, to the virtual world, and to various environments through networks that exist at all levels of human activity. Networks are more than neutral, random or sterile connecting structures. They can facilitate or deny access to a wide array of resources, and provide real intervention points for social, institutional and global change. Themester 2013 focuses squarely on the role of connectedness as a force in society and in our lives as unique individuals, partners, citizens and members of a global community. Whether particles, people or policies, human experience is embedded in dynamic streams of networks that shape our very existence.

2012 - Good Behavior, Bad Behavior: Molecules to Morality. Themester 2012 explores the meanings of "good behavior" and its counterpart “bad behavior” in all senses: aesthetic, ethical, adaptive, useful, essential, etc., applied to the realms of the living and non-living. Our discussions encompass moral philosophy, behavioral biology, the social sciences, mathematics, law, material science, cosmology, the literary, visual, and dramatic arts, and more. All contribute to our understanding of the possibilities and limits of telling good from bad and behaving accordingly.

2011 - Making War, Making Peace. in what ways are both war and peace implicated by the use of violence to achieve so-called “desirable” results? How does our understanding of wartime violence shape how we imagine “peace,” or vice versa, how might the production of a “positive peace” through efforts like the promotion of human rights, campaigns for nonviolence, efforts at reconciliation, etc. influence the ways in which we cognitively engage the practices and conditions of war? And what are the consequences—intended and otherwise—for how we animate warlike or peace building attitudes and behaviors?

2010 - sustain•ability: Thriving on a Small Planet. The Fall 2010 Themester will catalyze IUB’s emerging leadership in sustainability, providing students and faculty an opportunity to begin the interdisciplinary work needed to create sustainable communities locally and around the world, and creating an educational opportunity for undergraduates that they will carry far into the future.

Students learn sustainable life skills through workshops at the Campus Garden, cooking demonstrations at the annual Big Red Eats Green festival hosted by the Sustain IU Food Working Group, and through the peer educator program.

The IU Sustainability webpage also provides resources for living sustainability on campus.

The IU Office of Sustainability has an internship program that employs 14 to 18 undergraduate and graduate students for the summer and into the following academic year. Interns participate in an informal seminar focused on sustainability knowledge and practice, as well as generally professional skill development. Undergraduate students receive $12/hour for their work, while graduate students receive $15/hour.

At the end of the internship, the student interns put on a symposium to share their progress. The event typically features three sustainability internship presentations, a poster session featuring work from each of the interns, and lunch featuring local food. There is no cost to attend.

None at this time.