Rollins College
EN-2: Co-Curricular Activities

Rollins college recognizes Eco – Rollins, a student led organization that regularly hosts “What’s the Green Tea” sessions where they educate their peers on current environmental challenges prevalent in the news or pop culture. They then discuss and look for solutions to these challenges as a group Eco Rollins also facilitates off campus trips to various nature preserves, state parks, and botanical gardens to encourage ecological learning and interactions with Florida’s native wildlife.

Rollins recognizes the Local Roots club, a student led initiative to help peers engage in plant production and local agriculture on campus through our campus urban farm and indoor hydroponic towers. We also have many clubs that focus racial equity and social justice, including our Student Justice for Palestine club, and the Voices Women’s Empowerment Club, both of which host event to educate campus on pressing challenges in their respective areas of concern, and brainstorm together what differences can be made here on campus to support change.

The office of sustainability hosts many annual events to engage students with sustainability practices on campus and teach them how to implement these practices into their everyday life. In the fall semester we annually host a tabling fair for Florida Climate Week where students can engage with tables by creating small upcycled crafts. In the spring, we host another tabling fair with community partners for Earth Day, brining in sustainable businesses and local changemakers to share their experiences with our students. This includes Black Hammock Bee Company – local beekeepers and honey sellers that travel with their bees, Good Fils Co – a sustainable refillery that discourages single use plastic containers, and many more. We also host in the spring an on-campus thrift store day “Swap N Shop” where students can purchase a $7 ticket to get as many donated items as they would like, and sustainable fashion show “Rethinking Fashion” that showcases sustainable brands and upcycled clothing. Each semester we hold a “Fair Trade Your Finals” where students can grab free fairly traded goods as they study for final exams, and learn more about Fair Trade items, how they are audited to be fair trade, and the importance of spending their money wisely when it comes to the way products are produced and handled. This past fall we implemented a new event, hoped to be run annually, targeted at off campus commuter students to encourage sustainable commuting efforts through our partnership with Rethink Your Commute.

The Social Impact Hub, in which the sustainability office is house, supports their “InnovaTars”. This is a student group that works to educate their peers on the U.N. SDGs through events and social media, while also finding ways to implement these on our campus. This includes events like Rethinking Fashion, a sustainable fashion show on campus that connects students to sustainable brands. Rollins also recognizes a Sustainability Senator within our SGA who must pass one piece of sustainability focused “legislation” each semester to be implemented across campus. This year’s current senator is working on a marketing campaign to educate peers on proper recycling techniques and try to minimize recycling contamination on campus.

The Sustainability Office offers one paid work study and two paid non work-study employment opportunities currently, but have employed more federal work study students in the past. Two of these positions are for our bike attendants, who help maintain and repair our campus bike fleet. We also employ an office assistant who helps with marketing materials and the planning of student engagement events.

Our Foxbike program is a student led and run initiative on campus. Our bike attendants are responsible for keeping inventory of our bike shop, placing orders for supplies with the sustainability coordinator, answering email and phone requests for repair appointments and completing those appointments, doing daily checks on returned rentals to ensure they are ready to be rented out again, and communicating daily with our library staff who check our bikes in and out to ensure they know which bikes are available and where students should pick them up from.

Found the average amount of event interactions with general students, added to known volunteers and student organizations, and known participants of sustainability programing such as our Foxbike renters, and divided by total student population. On average, 60 non volunteer students will interact with sustainability events. We have 14 known greenhouse and farm volunteers, 5 work study and student workers that contribute to the sustainability office, 3 community engagement courses with 24 students in each course, three students in the Fresh Water Alliance that co-host select sustainability events, 12 students who rented semester bikes, and 15 distinct students in our Eco Rollins and Local Roots Club. Our total student population is 3,047.

Each event engagement is tracked with a small clicker that tallies the number of people who stopped to have a conversation about sustainability. These numbers were collected from all events and an average engagement total was found. This average engagement was added to the number of known volunteers in our office, urban farm and greenhouse, and added to the number of student participants in sustainability focused student orgs excluding overlap. This total was then divided by our total number of students.