University of Oregon
PRE-2: Points of Distinction

In an effort to support the continued sustainability of our students, the University of Oregon has created Feed the Flock, a multi-pronged effort to combat student food insecurity on campus. The initiative is overseen by the Food Security Task Force, comprised of students, faculty and staff, and co-chaired by the Program Director of the Student Sustainability Center and the Dean of Students. The programs connect sustainability to basic needs. For example, Leftover Textover is a program that simultaneously eliminates food waste from excess catering and gives students free food on campus. When a catered event has leftover food, an event organizer can send a text message to enrolled students that alerts them to the location of the food. Other programs include free farmer's markets that connect students to local food systems, SNAP enrollment events and cooking classes that feature fresh, local foods.

University of Oregon updated its Climate Action Plan in 2019. This update included multiple actions, as well as a commitment to review the plan annually and update it on a five-year cycle. In order to make strategic, feasible choices to lower our greenhouse gas emissions in the future, this second iteration of the plan includes several studies designed to assess our options. These include but are not limited to:
-A willingness-to-pay study on internal carbon pricing at the UO. This study was a collaboration with Professor Trudy Cameron and PhD candidate Ryan Walch from Economics. Their survey instrument has been modified for use by other campuses.
-A review of options to transition away from natural gas for our main campus heating system.
-Sustainable commute options, led by Transportation Services, which conducts an annual commute survey to determine campus needs and has already piloted a new park-and-ride option, in partnership with the Lane Transit District, who added in an additional bus stop to support these campus commuters.

The UO Office of Sustainability launched the Grow Pod initiative in 2018. The Grow Pod consists of a shipping container built out for high-productivity food growth that supports ongoing research, learning, and innovation for sustainable urban food production. During the first months of the project, we focused on testing out growing systems and learning how to operate pod. We also conducted a brief study of the emerging industry of controlled environment agriculture. As part of this study, we collected case studies of existing container farm initiatives and a bibliography of relevant academic studies and contemporary news articles. The bibliography also includes a list of shipping container consulting firms, equipment companies, university initiatives, and social enterprise efforts.

Currently, the Grow Pod supports students through introductory-level curricular and co-curricular programming. In year one, students in UO Community for Environmental Leaders Academic Residential Community (ARC) raised a variety of common garden crops, conducted research presented at the annual Undergraduate Research Symposium, and grew starts to market to the campus community. Now in its second year, the Grow Pod is being used to foster undergraduate student research and to engage and educate interested students in the Environmental Leaders ARC and the Native American and Indigenous Studies ARC.