Middlebury College
EN-5: Outreach Campaign

In January 2016, the Middlebury Center for Social Entrepreneurship hosted its fifth annual symposium. The symposium allowed audience members a shot at hands-on thinking about what motivates them and how they can act. Participants engaged in activities that sought to open their minds to the injustices they see, and to envision what they might do about them. The first workshop was geared towards finding a problem of personal meaning and the second sought to discover an initiative one could take to improve the Middlebury community. The overall theme: anything’s possible.

The On Leading a Life of Meaning and Purpose symposium drew hundreds college students from Middlebury and New England, community members, faculty and staff, and local high school students.

The Green Panther Challenge is a new program (2015) through the Office of Sustainability Integration (OSI) and Athletics that seeks to engage student athletes and their fans by challenging them to up their practice of sustainability in sports. OSI and Athletics are working together each year by choosing a challenge theme for teams to work on throughout their season. Teams, under the leadership of their coaches and Green Liaisons, meet the yearly challenge on two levels: Individual teams set their own "better practices" for team-efforts to meet the challenge, such as better recycling in the locker rooms, using reusable water bottles, minimizing their use of disposable items etc. OSI and Athletics will host department-wide events throughout all 3 seasons that aim to engage fans in helping meet the challenge during games. Players and teams can play a key role in making this a success. This year’s theme is Waste Reduction. We will be holding a series of “Perfect Sort” game days, where our goal is to have fans correctly sort all their waste during the game into recycling, compost and trash in order to reduce what goes into the landfill.

We hosted 3 Perfect Sort Gameday events that were attended by hundreds of students, faculty, staff and community members. Sorting rates increased from 5% correct sorting to 95%.

In the Spring of 2016, EatReal, a student-run organization at Middlebury College that promotes conscientious consumption among the student body, organized RealFood Week. The week consists of a broad array of academic and extracurricular programming that seeks to engage all facets of the Middlebury community. Events included a campus-wide local dining hall meal, a local dinner event, and speakers from local farms.