Stanford University
EN-3: Student Life

Stanford has more than 10 sustainability-focused student groups that address a wide range of sustainability topics across campus. The most established sustainability organization, Students for a Sustainable Stanford, has been working on campus for more than a decade and contains multiple sub-groups focused on environmental justice, food waste, and sustainability in Stanford's planning, education, media, and waste.

Additional sustainability-focused student groups include Engineers for a Sustainable World, which is developing solar powered lighting solutions for the Philippines; Fossil Free Stanford, which is encouraging university leadership to divest from fossil fuels; and many others. Please see the website for a full list of sustainability-related student groups on campus.

GARDENS
R&DE Stanford Dining has ten organic teaching gardens, and multiple dorms and coops have student-run gardens as well. Stanford Dining also has a greenhouse in one dining hall and hydroponic towers in another dining hall. Student garden managers plant and harvest produce that is used in the dining halls. They are managed by a full-time Farm to Table Coordinator as part of the Sustainable Food Program.

The R&DE Stanford Dining organic teaching gardens offer multiple work days a week in addition to workshops to teach students how to grow their own produce. The most recent organic teaching garden in Roble, the sustainability dorm, supports the academic theme of sustainability in the dorm. In addition, the Seed Library run by R&DE Stanford Dining gives students and the Stanford community free seeds each month that they can plant at home or in the gardens by their dorms.

FARM
In 2014, the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences established the 6 acre O'Donohue Family Stanford Educational Farm. The farm is a living laboratory offering academic and experiential learning opportunities for the Stanford community and beyond. The farm utilizes agroecological relationships and natural diversity to grow over 200 varieties of vegetables, flowers, herbs, field crops and fruit. Students come to the farm to test new ideas about the biological, social and environmental aspects of farming and gain experience in the practice of sustainable agriculture. On-farm research provides students hands-on learning opportunities. Over the course of a year, the farm harvests over 15,000 pounds of organically-grown produce, and R&DE has bought over 20,000 pounds of produce since the farm opened. Those crops feed into a new farm-to-campus program, with fresh vegetables featured at R&DE Stanford Dining in the dining halls, in campus cafes, and at the Teaching Kitchen @ Stanford.

COMMUNITY SUPPORTED AGRICULTURE
Stanford hosts four produce CSAs and one fishery CSA. The R&DE Sustainable Food Program has created a list of on-campus and nearby CSAs and farmers markets and a corresponding map to make it easier for community members to find these CSAs and farmers markets.

FARMERS MARKET
In 2016-17, Stanford opened a weekly farmers market in front of Tressider Student Union.

Stanford Students Environmental Consulting (SSEC) is a group of dedicated, business- and environmentally-focused students at Stanford University that provide consulting services to help organizations address their most challenging environmental problems. In addition to finding answers to tough problems, they also aim to raise awareness for environmental issues and identify practical, sustainable opportunities for the business sector. Lastly, they aspire to foster learning and growth of their members, allowing them to develop and expand their professional skills related to, but certainly not limited to, business, finance, marketing, legal and environmental stewardship.

SSEC members have a diverse range of backgrounds, including engineering, management science, economics and public policy. Leveraging this diversity helps SSEC provide practical, multifaceted sustainable solutions to tough problems. They also connect to a strong community of advisors, including notable professors from the Stanford University research community, venture capitalists, and business school members. Past members of SSEC have gone on to work at top tier management consulting firms, environmental consulting firms, environmental NGOs, energy companies and investment banks.

The Stanford Graduate School of Business Social Impact Fund provides MBA students with hands-on experience in generating a beneficial social or environmental impact alongside a financial return. The program gives MBA students a hands-on experience with philanthropic “impact investing." Faculty, alumni, and expert practitioners provide strategic guidance to students on co-investing, sourcing, structuring deals, measuring impact, portfolio allocation, and exits. The fund is geographically flexible and invests in early-stage for-profit ventures in the following areas: (1) environment and energy; (2) health care and wellness; (3) education; (4) urban development; and (5) food and agriculture. Student investment managers gain: (1) hands-on experience in impact investing; (2) preparation for a future career in impact investing or as social entrepreneurs, understanding how investors work; (3) application of classroom knowledge to real-world impact investing; (4) a deeper understanding about issues in particular fields; and (5) a stronger network of alumni, social entrepreneurs, and investors focused on impact in industries of interest. Visit: http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/organizations/invest/other-ways/centers-initiatives

Additionally in 2018, Stanford University committed $10 million over a 10-year period for a new initiative that will develop an expanded platform of educational and research opportunities for students and faculty with interests in responsible, sustainable and impact investing and governance. Visit: https://news.stanford.edu/2018/12/04/trustees-adopt-new-investment-responsibility-framework-stanford-university-commits-10-million-educational-research-initiative/

Stanford hosts a vast array of conferences and events targeted at engaging students in sustainability. The list below describes a representative sample, but is not comprehensive of all Stanford’s offerings.

CELEBRATING SUSTAINABILITY
The Office of Sustainability organizes an annual "Celebrating Sustainability" event around Earth Day. Celebrating Sustainability was hosted in 2018 for the seventh year in a row as an interactive festival designed to educate members of the campus community about Stanford's sustainability achievements and opportunities for individual action through engaging activities and displays. In 2016, the event was connected with academic programming in the form of the Connecting the Dots symposium, a conference sponsored by the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy that is focused on sustainability across multiple topics, such as energy, water, and waste.

GLOBAL ENERGY FORUM
In 2018, the Precourt Institute facilitated the 2018 Stanford Global Energy Forum. The forum offered participants an opportunity to gain visibility of emerging trends in energy, gain insights about rapidly transforming sectors of the global energy ecosystem, identify connections and opportunities between these sectors while fostering connections among peers who are advancing global energy policy and practice. Details are available at: https://gef.stanford.edu/
The Precourt Institute for Energy also hosts the Global Climate and Energy Project Symposium each fall to discuss energy research for deep global decarbonization. Details are at these sites.

C3E WOMEN IN CLEAN ENERGY SYMPOSIUM
Also in 2018, Stanford's Director of the Office of Sustainability presented at the annual C3E Women in Clean Energy Symposium. This symposium brought together professional women and students, as well as representatives from partner governments, to build a strong and interconnected network to advance the use of clean energy.

ENERGY@STANFORD CONFERENCE
Every year, Stanford hosts the Energy@Stanford & SLAC conference, which is open to all interested incoming graduate students seeking to find out more about energy initiatives at Stanford. The Precourt Institute for Energy also hosts the Global Climate and Energy Project Symposium each fall to discuss energy research for deep global decarbonization. Details are at these sites: https://energy.stanford.edu/energystanford-slac/energystanford-slac-2018 https://gcep.stanford.edu/events/index.html
In April 2017, SSS hosted the annual Earthfest celebration during Admit Weekend to showcase Stanford’s student sustainability initiatives for recently admitted students and their parents. An activities fair and live music attracted hundreds of attendees to the celebration, which featured several sustainability-focused student groups working in energy, carbon offsets, and reducing food waste.

ZERO WASTE WEEK
In February 2017, SSS also aligned with the campus Recyclemania competition to host Zero Waste Week, a friendly competition encouraging students to avoid producing waste for one week. The group collected over 100 student pledges to reduce waste, using emails and prizes to increase participation. SSS co-hosted a midweek event with the Stanford Women’s Community Center entitled “Greening the Crimson Tide: A Talk on Eco-Menstruation.” The event entailed a lively discussion on options for zero-waste menstrual products. One of these options, menstrual cups, will now be sold at a discounted rate on campus through Stanford’s Sexual Health Peer Resource Center (SHPRC).

LECTURE SERIES
Stanford hosts many lecture series each quarter dealing with the environment, including topics such as energy, climate change, conservation biology, and a wide variety of other subjects. The student-governed Stanford Energy Club and Students for a Sustainable Stanford both maintain calendars of such events. One example is the Annual Stanford Energy Week, which is a four-day conference bringing together students, academics, and industry leaders at the frontier of energy. The Stanford Energy Club also has a weekly newsletter that helps distribute this information to students, faculty, and staff. These events are also featured in the Sustainable Stanford newsletter. More details on these events and the newsletter are at: https://energyclub.stanford.edu/highlighted-events https://sustainable.stanford.edu/resources/cardinal-green-newsletter
Examples of sustainability lectures held at Stanford include the Stephen H. Schneider Memorial Lecture held each spring by Students for a Sustainable Stanford (SSS), which features leaders in the environmental field. Dr. John Holdren, Chief Science and Technology Advisor from 2009 to 2017 under President Obama, was the keynote speaker at the 2017 event, which was attended by over 500 students and community members. Additionally, in 2015 and 2016, SSS’s Environmental Justice Week connected environmental issues with the communities being impacted by climate change through a series of lectures, panels, discussion forums, and movie screenings.

EARTHFEST
In April 2017, SSS hosted the annual Earthfest celebration during Admit Weekend to showcase Stanford’s student sustainability initiatives for recently admitted students and their parents. An activities fair and live music attracted hundreds of attendees to the celebration, which featured several sustainability-focused student groups working in energy, carbon offsets, and reducing food waste.

In 2018, Stanford's Institute for Diversity in the Arts hosted an "Art + Community: Conversations on Sustainability" on May 30, 2018. The event's attendees were encouraged to think about sustainability and what it means for them, the justice movements, and the planet. A-lan Holt, Associate Director, Institute for Diversity in the Arts moderated the conversation with Donte Clark (poet and community activist, actor The North Pole Webseries). The North Pole is a political comedy highlighting schemes in which the characters attempt to save the place they call home, including facing global warming challenges. Visit: https://diversityarts.stanford.edu/events/art-community-conversations-sustainability

The ongoing series Rooted Words is organized by Professor of the Practice Thomas Hayden and a small group of others in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. The group's goal is to create a community gathering place to bring poetry and prose back to earth science. One recent gathering of this group was held at the O'Donohue Family Farm, and participants were asked to share excerpts from their own writing with one another.

Stanford Outdoor Education (SOE) is a member driven, student-operated, collaborative organization that advises outdoor education experiences for Recreation & Wellness, Student Activities and Leadership (SAL), Stanford School of Medicine, Residential Education, the Haas Center, and other formal SOE campus partners.

SOE's Adventure Program offers exciting outdoor trips, courses and clinics each quarter and over intersession breaks. The Adventure Program is subsidized by the Stanford Outdoors (SO) student group, providing student members the opportunity to participate in outdoor experiences at the lowest possible cost. All outdoor trips organized by the Adventure Program follow Leave No Trace Principles. A listing of trips and clinics offered by the Adventure Program can be found here: https://adventure.stanford.edu/trips/
SOE also operates the Outdoor Center, which is home to a full-service rental and retail facility, a lounge, an outdoor resource library, a trip planning area, a multimedia classroom and one of the largest collegiate climbing walls in the country. Resources regarding Leave No Trace principles are available here: https://lnt.org/about/board The lounge of the Outdoor Center serves as a central meeting space for Stanford community members who are interested in outdoor adventures.

Each year, Stanford runs Three Books, which is a summer reading program for incoming freshmen designed to foster intellectual excitement and provide a foundation for discussion upon arrival on campus. At least one of the books is typically sustainability-themed. In fact, in 2017, the Three Books program was led by Noah Diffenbaugh, a faculty member in the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences. The books chosen by Diffenbaugh all had themes pertinent to social, economic and environmental sustainability, the most notable of which was "The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History" by Elizabeth Kolbert. The other two books chosen were "Homegoing" by Yaa Gyasi and "Salvage the Bones" by Jesmyn Ward. In 2018, the faculty moderator, José David Saldívar (Professor of Comparative Literature), chose books on the theme of Globality and Migration. Previously, the Three Books program has also included "Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines" by Richard A. Muller, which focuses on the science and politics of sustainability issues, especially related to global warming and alternative energy.

Additionally, the Stanford Outdoor Education program leads Stanford Pre-Orientation Trips for incoming freshmen before they arrive at Stanford. These trips are designed to be immersive experiences that ease the transition to life at Stanford and foster Stanford identity, community, and personal growth through activity, self-reflection and mentorship in outdoor and wilderness environments. More information on the wilderness trips is available at: https://adventure.stanford.edu/spot/

MY CARDINAL GREEN
The Office of Sustainability offers a comprehensive engagement and educational portal to all students called “My Cardinal Green." My Cardinal Green empowers students to engage with sustainability regularly, while tailoring specific actions for targeted groups (ex. year, dorm type, department). In creating a platform that the individual can engage with year-round, sustainability and the specific actions that one can take to contribute to the effort become standard operating procedure, rather than one-time asks. Engagement in the platform entails taking a 15-minute survey about campus lifestyles and current sustainability behaviors in order to inform the personalized recommendations made available through the platform. Individuals earn points by taking sustainability actions, and they earn incentives once they accrue enough points. Recommendations span a wide range of difficulty, from “take a first step” actions, such as “Learn how to properly dispose of 5 new materials” to more advanced actions such as “Establish a home composting program.”

TEACHING KITCHEN
The Teaching Kitchen @ Stanford, created in partnership with the Jamie Oliver Food Foundation, teaches students cooking skills, including cooking plant-forward recipes, while also teaching them about sustainability. Visit: https://rde.stanford.edu/dining/teaching-kitchen

GARDENS AND SEED LIBRARY
The R&DE Stanford Dining organic gardens offer multiple work days a week in addition to workshops to teach students how to grow their own produce. In addition, the Seed Library run by R&DE Stanford Dining gives students free seeds each month that they can plant at home or in the gardens by their dorms. Visit: https://rde.stanford.edu/dining/organic-gardens

SEASONAL CAMPAIGNS
Stanford offers a number of seasonal campaigns directed at students that encourage students to pledge to take a simple sustainability action. The actions are related to each campaign's theme. For instance, the Cardinal Green Buildings campaign is offered in the fall and encourages students to unplug their appliances when they leave for Winter Break in conjunction with its energy conservation theme. In the winter, students are asked to pledge to sort their waste properly in conjunction with the Recyclemania campaign, and in the spring, students have the opportunity to learn about water conservation and systems on campus. In 2018, the spring Water Wise campaign was themed "Water Conservation is a Way of Life," encouraging students to embed water conservation into their behaviors through small daily actions. Finally, students are very involved in Give & Go, where they are encouraged to correctly sort their waste and donate reusable items as they move out at the end of the year. These are all sustainable life skills that students are made aware of through the Sustainable Stanford campaign series.

SUSTAINABLE STANFORD INTERNSHIPS
The Sustainable Stanford Internship Program (managed by the Office of Sustainability in partnership with sustainability staff and organizations across campus) provides 35+ paid opportunities for students to gain hands-on experience implementing programs that influence on-campus sustainability. Sustainable Stanford Interns work on projects covering various campus sustainability topics (waste, water, housing, food), under supervision and direction from campus sustainability staff. Each intern commits to an academic year-long program working to manage a campus sustainability project and bring about tangible results. In addition to gaining experience in sustainability project design and implementation, interns learn about the variety of careers in sustainability across campus and develop a network of cohorts through program orientation and final presentations.

CARDINAL CAREERS
Additionally, one of the tenants of the new Cardinal Service initiative offered by the Haas Center is Cardinal Careers, an effort to help students discover career paths in public service and sustainability. Specifically, Stanford's Haas Center for Public Service offers the Community Work-Study Program, which provides an opportunity for students to develop and participate in a significant service experience while earning a portion of their financial aid award. This program is available during the academic year and the summer. It provides the freedom for eligible students to design a service experience in collaboration with a partnering organization. Placements during the academic year are typically on campus and in the local community while summer placements can be at qualified organizations anywhere in the United States.

HAAS CENTER UNDERGRADUATE FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM
The Haas Center also runs the Undergraduate Fellowship Program, which offers resources for Stanford undergraduates who wish to make contributions to public service organizations and communities. Depending on the fellowship, fellows can participate in either prearranged placements or self-designed fellowship opportunities in both domestic and international settings. The Haas Center offers grants to undergraduate students interested in this type of service experience, in addition to operating several other grant programs to help cultivate students' passion for service.

TOMKAT CENTER INTERNSHIP PROGRAMS
The TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy also has two summer internship programs for students. The objectives of the summer internships are for students to gain work experience, develop applied engineering knowledge, learn entrepreneurship in a startup environment, and build upon their academic studies. Descriptions of the two programs are below:

1) TomKat Center-supported Internships: The TomKat Center offers a limited number of paid summer internships to Stanford undergraduate students at exciting Stanford-affiliated sustainable energy startup companies.

2) Industry-supported Energy Internships: The TomKat Center works with several exciting sustainable energy startup companies to help recruit talented Stanford undergraduate and masters students for paid summer internship positions.

A list of the internship positions available to students through these programs and more can be found at these sites: https://tomkat.stanford.edu/internship-positions https://tomkat.stanford.edu/education/energystartup-summer-internships

OPENXCHANGE
In 2015-2016, funding to support sustainability events and dialog was offered through Stanford’s OpenXChange, a year-long, campus-wide effort to strengthen and unify Stanford through purposeful engagement around issues of national and global concern. Through this program, students, staff, and faculty received grants to support sustainability events, courses, and fieldtrips. Visit https://openxchange.stanford.edu/

KNIGHT-HENNESSY SCHOLARS PROGRAM
In 2016, the launch of the Knight-Hennessy scholars program was announced, which is a graduate-level scholarship program to prepare a new generation of global leaders with the skills to address the increasingly complex challenges facing the world. The inaugural class of scholars began at Stanford in Fall 2018. Ambitious in scope and scale, Knight-Hennessy Scholars annually admits 100 high-achieving students with demonstrated leadership and civic commitment, who are nominated by their undergraduate universities. The goal is to select students from a wide range of backgrounds and nationalities. Upon admittance to Stanford's graduate programs, scholars will receive funding for three years to pursue master's or doctorate level degrees, or professional programs along with education in leadership, innovation and other curricula designed to develop scholars' capacity to lead ambitious change in a complex world. The program is named for alumnus Philip H. Knight, MBA '62, philanthropist, American businessman and co-founder of Nike Inc., who is contributing $400 million, and Stanford's outgoing 10th President John L. Hennessy. For more information, visit https://knight-hennessy.stanford.edu/

SUSTAINABILITY GRANT PROGRAMS

MEL LANE GRANT PROGRAM
Mel Lane Student Program Grants are provided to student-driven and managed environmental projects that make a measurable impact on an issue through action or applied research. Preference is given to projects that focus on environmental sustainability within one of the following topic areas: built environment, climate, food security and supply, natural capital, ocean and coasts, public health, sustainable development and water. In addition, projects should involve Stanford students and provide an educational experience for students and the broader community. Proposals are accepted twice a year during fall and winter terms. The institute has an annual budget of $10,000 to support projects. For more information, visit https://woods.stanford.edu/mel-lane-program.php

TOMKAT CENTER INNOVATION TRANSFER PROGRAM
The Tomkat Center’s Innovation Transfer Program helps Stanford inventors of sustainable energy technology bridge the gap between research and commercialization. Grants are awarded to develop prototypes, to refine business plans, and to conduct customer trials and market research. The teams, which mostly comprise Stanford students, must have a Stanford faculty advisor to compete for a grant. The program assigns an industry mentor to each funded project for ongoing guidance as the teams assess market opportunities, plan the commercialization of their inventions, and prepare to launch startup companies. The program helps participants develop a business-centric approach through Stanford resources, like the Stanford Entrepreneurship Network. The program also connects teams with relevant entrepreneurs, executives with experience in startups and venture investors. For more information, visit https://tomkat.stanford.edu/innovation-transfer