Stanford University
EN-7: Employee Educators Program

Through the Building Managers program, occupants in all buildings across campus have the opportunity to be trained to become sustainability champions, with the ultimate goal of subsequently training their peers to improve the sustainability performance of their collective spaces.

Building Managers work with the Office of Sustainability to better understand the most pressing sustainability challenges in their buildings and what they can do to solve them. Building Managers also attend an annual meeting and receive monthly newsletters with resources, almost always including sustainability best practice guidance.

Then, Building Managers engage their colleagues in the buildings to solve those sustainability challenges through the outreach and training vehicles of their choice. For instance, many Building Managers work with their colleagues to ensure energy efficient and sustainable landscaping practices are used. Additionally, the Building Managers are responsible for implementing tasks associated with annual holiday closure events, where unused equipment is turned off while the building is unoccupied.

Each of these activities is at a different frequency, which is why the 'total number of hours worked annually' metric reported below may seem lower than expected based on the other metrics reported.

The target audience for this program is all employees in the Stanford buildings, which, at least pre-pandemic, is essentially all employees. Even still, most elements of this program have continued during the pandemic and the program is anticipated to fully resume post-pandemic.

Central Energy Facility docents are Stanford staff and faculty members who are responsible for leading tours of the Stanford Energy System Innovations (SESI) Central Energy Facility (CEF). In a typical year, approx. 240 employees receive a CEF tour from the docents.

The new CEF came online in April 2015 and received acclaim both internally and externally because of its contributions to Stanford's 68% emissions reduction by 2017. The CEF's innovative nature makes it popular among the Stanford community, so a tour system was set up for staff in several departments to become docents and subsequently lead tours for other Stanford staff, faculty, students, and other visitors. Initially, directors within the Department of Sustainability and Energy Management and the Department of Project Management were asked to nominate employees in their groups to attend the docent training. Subsequently, volunteers were also accepted from any department across campus if they met qualifications.

The typical path to become a docent is outlined as follows:

1) Pre-reading of the tour guide packet and other materials
2) 60-minute training session, led by Office of Sustainability staff and CEF facility managers
3) A group "test tour" is required for evaluation purposes, as either a technical tour leader or a general tour leader.
4) Office of Sustainability staff match tour requests with docents and notify the docent of the time, nature of the group and expected attendance.

Please note that this program has largely been suspended due to the Covid-19 pandemic but is highly expected to resume in the future. In the interim, virtual tours are being provided by docents to peers upon request.

The primary target audience for the CEF docents are campus faculty, staff or students. All employees (staff and faculty) may participate in a tour and are therefore served by this program.