University of Richmond
EN-3: Student Life

GreenUR is University of Richmond's student-led sustainability and environmental advocacy club. The group acts as a resource through which students can engage with opportunities for service, activism, and education both on and off campus. In addition to being student-centered, they aim to act as a voice and representative body of University of Richmond in support of sustainable practices in the broader Richmond community.

Outdoors Club is an organization which focuses on creating a sense of community for outdoors enthusiasts by hosting events on-campus, weekend hikes in Virginia, and extended trips across the country over fall and/or spring break. 

The Environmental Law Society is a student organization dedicated to learning about and raising awareness of legal issues in the environment. This organization is devoted to fostering sustainable lifestyles and being mindful of our impact on the environment. Annual events include national lobbying opportunities, partnering and volunteering with an environmental non-profit, outdoor social activities, and events with environmental speakers.

SEEDS (Students Engaging & Enacting Dialogue on Service) Project is a student-run organization that focuses on engaging students in meaningful and sustainable service projects as well as dialogue centered around the social justice and environmental issues in specific communities. SEEDS offers three alternative spring break trips each year to the Gulf Region of Louisiana, the Appalachian Region of West Virginia, and the Detroit area of Michigan to learn about environmental and social issues in those areas and complete service projects.

The Abby Ayers Community Garden, known as Abby’s Garden, was founded in 2009 thanks to the efforts of President Emeritus Edward Ayer’s wife and a group of dedicated staff. The garden has brought together students, faculty, and staff to grow all sorts of fruits, vegetables, herbs, and flowers. In 2020, Abby’s Garden was renovated and expanded as part of the Gambles Mill Eco-Corridor construction. The garden now includes 32 raised beds of 3 different sizes, a covered picnic pavilion, 3 new water hydrants, and a community tool shed. U-shaped keyhole beds, firm mulch paths, and direct proximity to the main paved Eco-Corridor path make the area more accessible for gardeners using wheelchairs or other mobility aids. Since its founding, Abby’s Garden has adhered to organic practices. To help support a healthy ecosystem and to reduce residue on produce, no synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides are used. Sticking to organic practices helps protect the health of our gardeners and our surrounding environment. Beyond environmental health, digging in the dirt can also help reduce stress and improve mental well-being!

Garden beds are available to any member of the University of Richmond campus community, including faculty, staff, and students. Basic tools for gardeners, including hand tools, gloves, rakes, and shovels, are all available for shared use and are stored in our newly constructed tool shed. A committee of faculty, staff, and students oversee the garden and facilitate the lottery process each spring.

Students also have the opportunity through the campus's Bonner Center for Civic Engagement to volunteer with urban agriculture and community garden projects throughout the city. Organizations that students have volunteered with include Shalom Farms and the Peter Paul Development Center's community garden. Through volunteering, students learn about growing food, urban agriculture, and food access throughout the city of Richmond.

The Bench Top Innovations course, a pilot program offered by the Robins School of Business in partnership with UR's Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Initiative (CIE), aims to take a product from ideation to revenue generation in less than nine months. Sustainability has been core to each of their offerings since the first year.

In 2023-2024, they launched NOOSH, an eggplant based dip and spread that is savory, smooth, citrusy, with a kick of spice. Noosh advertises as vegan and low-calorie.

2022-2023 saw Twin Tail Brews launch. This superberry power tea is designed to help buyers focus while producing a calming effect to deliver balanced energy. 

The inaugural 2021-22 batch was absurd and launched an alternative nut-free trail mix! Absurd Snacks is still going strong.  Absurd Snacks crafted their snacks with planet-friendly ingredients like legumes to reduce their footprint. They also partnered with a non-profit overseas to collect waste to be repurposed before it can enter the environment. 

https://robins.richmond.edu/student-experience/bench-top-innovations.html

The Student Managed Investment Fund (SMIF) provides valuable, real-time experiential learning in securities analysis and portfolio management. Managers gain real-world experience in topics and theories that are discussed in the classroom. SMIF is the capstone to investment studies in a sequence of courses developed by the finance department.

Our ESG integration methodology for 2023-2024 continues upon the foundation established in 2020, SMIF’s inaugural year of integrating ESG. SMIF’s Value and Growth Funds include material ESG factors in our investment analysis and decision-making process. In tandem with traditional financial analysis, we believe that evaluating our holdings through an ESG lens helps to provide a holistic view of a firm’s operations, and indicates management’s concern for long-term material risks. Each manager is tasked with independently scoring stocks during pitch preparation. This process is inherently subjective and can vary depending on the implicit. In the 2023-2024 SMIF class, the ESG managers have begun independently reviewing and researching the firm and industry risks to bring forth prior to the pitch voting process. Managers also gauge how a firm stands within its industry’s overall ESG disclosure and goals. SMIF’s mission is to create an educational discussion among managers regarding the more pressing and relevant ESG risks.

Each year the Department of Geography and the Environmental Studies Program partner to bring noteworthy speakers and scholars to Richmond to present lectures related to our global environment through the Global Environmental Speaker Series. https://environmental.richmond.edu/academics/speaker-series/index.html

Each November, in recognition of International Education Week, the UR community "meets in another culture" here on campus. This year, the International Education Center ran a week-long summit with shared experiential learning on local-global sustainability topics from the perspectives of Richmond partners and colleagues from around the world. The goal is to bring local and global scholars and activists into dialogue, held on a university campus with expertise bridging knowledge sets and worldviews for sustainable change.

The Humanities Center has a speaker series for it's inaugural year titled "How and whay do we represent nature?" This question invites us to consider “representation” in both its political meaning and its aesthetic meaning. “Nature” is represented in paintings, poems, scripture, music, dancing, novels, laws, regulations, equations, activisms, advertising campaigns. This question asks how environments—and often their relations to human concerns—are represented across media, geographic and cultural contexts, and different historical moments. 

Each year, with the exception of 2024, UR has been a part of the Richmond Environmental Film Festival, hosting a film on campus during the weeklong event. Although the film festival did not happen this year, we hosted a film screening of a local documentary called Headwaters Down, a film about friends that take a canoe trip down the James River and learn about environmental threats to its health and safety along the way.

As a part of International Education Week, there was a gallery showing and breakfast in the International Education Center featuring environmental-based photos. The exhibit was called: "Fragile Interconnectedness: Greenland & the Amazon"

The Office for Sustainability hosts opportunities for park cleanups where students, faculty, and staff learn about what it takes to keep litter out of our local parks. This has also been a great opportunity for the UR community to connect.

The University's Outdoor Adventure and Recreation Program (OAR) offers a wide range of trips each fall and spring, including hikes, kayaking, tubing, camping, skiing, rock climbing, and mountain biking. All of the scheduled trips involve educating participants on outdoor ethics and risk management. OAR also hosts custom trips for specific courses, river cleanup events, and University sports teams. OAR hosts the Appalachian Trail Adventure pre-orientation program for 20 incoming freshmen. A student-run Outdoors Club focuses on nature-based recreation, including hiking, biking, surfing, climbing, and backpacking.

A student-run Outdoors Club focuses on nature-based recreation, including hiking, biking, surfing, climbing, and backpacking.

Both OAR and the Outdoors Club include Leave No Trace principles in their training.

The Earth Lodge Living Learning Community participates in outdoor activities that include hiking and camping in state and national parks.

There is also a student Rock Climbing Club at the University. All of these groups make their best efforts to plan ahead and travel by trail, concentrate their activity, clean up after themselves, and leave what they find behind. The University Recreation and Wellness center also provides camping and kayaking equipment for rental to students as well as information about outdoor recreation opportunities.

Humanities Theme: How and Why Do We Represent Nature?

Each year the Humanities Center invites everyone on campus to ask a question in common. Beginning in 2024–25, they will use four cyclically recurring questions that already get asked across schools, departments, and majors; across time periods and objects; and across languages and research methods.

The Humanity Center hosts lists of courses that address the theme question in some way, and sponsor events throughout each academic year that provide opportunities for cross-campus, interdisciplinary dialogue. The Center’s yearly theme helps us to sense and tap into a distributed network of humanities practices on campus and makes apparent how central they are not just to a liberal arts education but to all living in a dazzlingly complex global world.

This question invites us to consider “representation” in both its political meaning and its aesthetic meaning. “Nature” is represented in paintings, poems, scripture, music, dancing, novels, laws, regulations, equations, activisms, advertising campaigns.

This question asks how environments—and often their relations to human concerns—are represented across media, geographic and cultural contexts, and different historical moments. 

It invites us to self-reflexively ask how humanistic practices—especially artistic, scholarly, and pedagogical ones—have been sites of resource use and accumulation, and how experimental texts and events across many media and embodied performances might disrupt and re-envision those ecological entanglements.

The question invites us to look at “nature” again, go over its history as a concept and field of aesthetic and philosophical knowledge, to learn, perhaps, how to see and feel it differently in a moment of unfolding climate catastrophe.

https://humanities.richmond.edu/theme/nature.html

Well 100, Introduction to College Life at UR, includes a module on sustainability for all first-year and transfer students.

The Office for Sustainability also has a virtually accessible sustainable living guide called the "Spiders Guide to Sustainable Living". The guide includes information about how to be sustainable on and off campus, along with resources for getting involved in sustainability. https://sustainability.richmond.edu/involved/students/spiders-guide-to-sustainable-living.html

The Office for Sustainability hires 6-9 student interns each semester. This internship empowers students to develop their understanding of sustainability and affect change on campus in different concentrations. Students interact with faculty, staff and other students in a variety of capacities and relating to many different aspects of sustainability. Internship position focus areas change from semester to semester and include programming, communications, greenhouse gas accounting, food recovery, the community garden, waste reduction, and more. The program also provides educational opportunities to the interns about how sustainability works on personal and global scales alike.

There are also internship positions offered through the Departments of Geography and Environmental Studies. These students focus on local and global topics, and their work includes working with Indigenous communities in the Amazon and creating a record of trees on campus. 

The UR Rethink Waste office employs 10-15 students called Rethink Waste Representatives every semester. Rethink Waste Representatives provide waste education and run a free store concept, Spider Exchange. They also provide support with waste management assessment.

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Other url's to support this submission:

https://as.richmond.edu/student-research/symposium/index.html

https://sustainability.richmond.edu/involved/students/ursa.html

https://museums.richmond.edu/visit/index.html

https://livinglearning.richmond.edu/endeavor/index.html

https://sustainability.richmond.edu/involved/students/green-room.html

https://studentjobs.richmond.edu/job-openings/index.html 

https://sustainability.richmond.edu/involved/students/spiders-guide-to-sustainable-living.html

https://humanities.richmond.edu/theme/nature.html