University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
EN-3: Student Life

Environmental Awareness Club (EAC): The Environmental Awareness Club is an student organization at UTPA , with a focus on protecting the environment as well as generating awareness on campus and in the community in cleaning up the earth, by promoting the 3 R's (Reduce, Reuse,Recycle), and engaging in awareness-raising activities. This club sponsors events and activities year-round with the university and community. Sustainability Association: The Sustainability Association encourage the students to involve in on campus activities for promoting sustainability to improve the quality of life by adopting sustainable principles. They educate the students and the community members by giving a quality lectures about how to recycle. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Environmental-Awareness-Club/198952467743 https://www.facebook.com/suaatutpa

Community/Agroecology Garden: The Agroecology garden is to provide the university with an on-campus setting for students to learn about the principles and concepts of agroecology—the ecological, biological, and social processes involved in sustainable agriculture. This also includes the study of sustainable food systems, nutrition and health, and social well-being. This garden provides a hands-on outdoor teaching facility where students can learn about food production and its web of ecological, economic, and social implications. UTPA is engaging students in locally relevant research projects designed to address problems faced by organic farmers in South Texas while expanding opportunities for students to study and pursue careers in agroecology and sustainable agriculture. Agroecology students growing food at the institution's USDA certified organic greenhouse/community garden donate portions of the harvest to the institution's food pantry, which helps low income and at risk students meet their necessary and basic food needs. The greenhouse allows students to not only test hundreds of different plant seedlings as a sustainable food system, but also support and contribute to their campus social well-being. The students are also providing (seasonal) harvested organic produce from the community garden through a monthly campus farmers market; bringing healthier choices to the table. Trinity Community Garden: The Trinity Community Garden is a project of Trinity Episcopal Church in Pharr, TX to establish a community garden on the church’s property. In October 2014 and January 2015 approximately 35 students in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas worked on a design for the garden, under the direction of permaculture instructors Wayne Weiseman and Jarad Barkeim, as part of a Permaculture Design Certificate training sponsored by the Office for Sustainability at the University of Texas Pan-American. Through this community garden students can gain experience in organic agriculture and sustainable food systems. They started this community garden to provide nutrition, promote education, build community, and nurture a healthy lifestyle in their community. They conducts nutrition programs to teach low income children in the neighborhood, how to garden and prepare delicious and nutritious meals.

HESTEC Student Leadership Day empower teens by encouraging them to enter careers in Science, Technology and Math. During leadership day, they learn about the different opportunities at their reach through a series of speakers involved in robotics, environmental advocacy and entrepreneurship. Aside from attending conferences they also spend the day participating in hands on activities such as dissecting plants with the Department of Agriculture in order to learn more about them. The Business and Sustainability Workshop is organized by the Office for Sustainability. The guest speaker of the workshop this year was Kevin Wilhelm, a superior adviser in the field of sustainability and environmental change. In the workshop, he addressed the business benefits of sustainability and the fundamentals for implementing business sustainability. Hunger in the RGV is a speaker series organized by the Office for Sustainability. The speaker Joel Berg is the executive director of the New York city Coalition Against Hunger and a senior fellow at the center for American progress. In the speaker series, he explained about hunger in America and in the RGV. He described that more than 36 million people can't afford food America and illuminated how it is going to affect the entire American economy. He explained how to prevent U.S from solving hunger issue. UTPA’s Distinguishing Speaker Series Speaker series draws government officials, community leaders and citizen advocates to campus to spark lively discussion on pressing sustainability-related topics. The series addresses the problems and solutions of sustainability, from global climate change and rural poverty to new business models and investment strategies. Our distinguished speakers include expert practitioners and leaders from across the nonprofit, government, and corporate sectors. Bill Clinton spoke at the Fine Arts Auditorium about pressing issues facing the world that his Clinton Initiative is set to help. Clinton encouraged change for a better world through education, community service and sustainability efforts. He touched on issues such as the world’s fundamental character of interdependence and its profound negative forces of inequality, instability, and unsustainability. Clinton asserted the importance of the United States to be more competitive in education in order to decrease the withdrawal rates of high school students and increase higher performance rates. Clinton suggested the withdrawal rate comes from students needing to work to help families financially. He purposed that if more high schools were developed like colleges, students could work while pursuing their education. Clinton also addressed prevailing community issues with a central focus on sustainability solutions through his foundation. One possible solution involved establishing solar panels and windmills to create zero emissions campuses. This more sustainable living would preserve energy, be more efficient and create more jobs opportunities for the community. Bill Nye, a STEM Ambassador and engineer by trade has dedicated his life to the promotion of science to children, explaining the importance of STEM education to North America’s economic and environmental future. As a featured guest speaker at UTPA, Nye discussed the importance of STEM for the future of America. Nye addressed topics such as the positive global environmental impacts of STEM education by emphasizing the need to look to scientists and especially engineers to address climate change and the steady increase in the world’s human population. Nye stressed the importance of having big ideas that are technically feasible. The keys to the future will be new ideas and innovations that don’t have people just consuming less of the Earth’s resources, but providing for more of us with less. Nye believes we need to make our world more efficient so that we can provide a high standard of living to people everywhere. Robert F. Kennedy appeared as a guest speaker at The University of Texas-Pan American and discussed “Our Environmental Destiny” with UTPA students. Barely stopping to take a breath, Kennedy ran the gamut from global warming to religion, from corporate corruption of our government to why we must impeach President Bush. He often surprised the audience by quoting Republican presidents such as Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, declaring that today’s NeoCons have dishonored everything these great American leaders stood for. Kennedy characterized protecting our natural environment as a service to God and thus, ourselves. He asserted that nature is part of our infrastructure, and that it enriches us aesthetically and spiritually. Nature ultimately connects us to God; it is the way God talks to us most forcefully. He pointed out numerous cases in which lobbyists and other industry representatives were given key positions in federal environmental programs and used their authority to help industries subvert the law. Kennedy would return to that theme more than once in his speech. And while he said he loathed partisanship and said the worst thing that could happen to environmentalism would be for it to become the province of one political party. America Ferrera shared her life and causes which she is most passionate about with UTPA students and the community. Her most recent project is a 9-part Showtime documentary television series focusing on global warming, entitled “Years of Living Dangerously.” The weekly episodes feature celebrity investigators, who each have a history of environmental activism, and well-known journalists, each of whom have a background in environmental reportage. These correspondents travel to areas around the world and throughout the U.S. affected by global warming to interview experts and ordinary people affected by, and seeking solutions to, the effects of global warming. These actors, activists and reporters act as proxies for the audience, asking questions to find out people's opinions and to discover the scientific evidence. In his latest book, “That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back,” Thomas L. Friedman spoke to UTPA students about making recommendations for meeting four major challenges currently facing the United States: globalization, the information technology revolution, chronic deficits and unbalanced energy consumption. He offers a wake-up call to collective action and, unless we don’t, believes it will soon be too late for us to pass along the American dream to future generations. Friedman is an internationally renowned author, reporter and columnist. He is the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes and author of five bestselling books including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” “The World is Flat,” and “Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – and How It Can Renew America.” Dr. Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist, best-selling author and populizer of science, spoke with UTPA students about the importance of science in many fields, including medicine, computer science, space exploration and even banking and commerce. Dr. Kaku offered a perspective of his field to UTPA students that opened their minds to the future of quantum physics and space travel. Dr. Kaku delivered keynotes at HESTEC’s Educator Day and Student Leadership Day. He is the co-founder of string field theory, and is continuing Einstein’s search to unite the four fundamental forces of nature into one unified theory that will summarize all the physical laws of the universe. Kaku holds the Henry Semat Chair in Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York, and has taught at Harvard and Princeton. Philippe Cousteau, explorer, social entrepreneur, environmental advocate and the grandson of famous explorer Jacques Yves Cousteau, spoke with hundreds of Rio Grande Valley high school students who attended Student Leadership Day at the UTPA’s HESTEC. He asserted the importance in finding innovative ways to fix the damage that has been done to the earth and to improve the lives of the global population. Cousteau, who co-founded the nonprofit environmental education program EarthEcho International with his relatives, showed video clips of stories he did for CNN on the deteriorating health of the coral reels off the coast of Key West, Fl., and how one community in Haiti began gardens to provide food security to their neighborhoods. He encouraged the students to think of ways to help their own communities, to set goals and to believe in their dreams. Office For Sustainability Speaker Series As the world increasingly seeks environmentally-friendly solutions to more complex problems, Jay Harman’s biomimetic message gains more and more attention. An award-winning entrepreneur and biomimetic inventor, Jay Harman has taken a hands-on approach to his lifelong fascination with the deep patterns found in nature. In the process, he has founded and grown multi-million-dollar research and manufacturing companies that develop, patent, and license innovative products, ranging from prize-winning watercraft to interlocking building bricks, afterburners for aircraft engines, and non-invasive technology for measuring blood glucose and other electrolytes. He is credited with being among the first pioneering scientists to make biomimicry—the science of employing nature in advancing sustainable technology—a cornerstone of modern and future engineering. His latest ventures—PAX Scientific, PAX Water Technologies, PAX Mixer, and PAX Pure—design more efficient industrial equipment including refrigeration, turbines, fans, mixers, and water treatment based on Jay’s revolutionary concepts. Aside from his entrepreneurial exploits, Jay started a boarding school to teach kids about the environment in Australia—and made it his mission to bring the subject of biomimicry to the public. Born and raised in Australia, Jay started his career as a naturalist with the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, but quickly demonstrated talents as an inventor. In 1982, he founded ERG, Ltd, which grew into one of Australia’s largest technology firms with a capital value as high as $3 billion. Since then, Jay has been at the helm of numerous companies recognized as global leaders in their respective fields. The culmination of Jay’s work is the development of “Nature’s Streamlining Principle,” a guideline for translating nature’s extraordinary efficiencies into industrial applications. Jay’s goal—both as an author and an entrepreneur—is to show industry that improving the efficiency of industrial equipment is beneficial for both the bottom line, and the planet. Kevin Wilhelm, a pre-eminent consultant in the field of business sustainability and climate change spoke with UTPA students about the ways to develop skills using sustainability to drive profit, business value and innovation. He is the CEO of Sustainable Business Consulting & Education, a Seattle-based consulting firm focused on delivering business value through the integration of sustainability. He is also an acclaimed author, speaker and teacher and has developed a series of online courses and modules around sustainability for both the corporate world and academic markets. Joel Berg is leading the anti-hunger movement in America. He is executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. He is also author of All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America?, the definitive and most well-reviewed book on American hunger in the last decade. Berg spoke with UTPA students on how we can work together towards a more equitable society. Berg has led the Coalition Against Hunger, which represents more than 1,100 nonprofit soup kitchens and food pantries in New York City and the more than 1.5 million low-income New Yorkers who live in households that cannot afford enough food. The organization works not only to meet these residents’ immediate food needs but also to enact innovative solutions to help society move, “beyond the soup kitchen” to ensure self-sufficiency for all Americans. Seth Patterson is an avid naturalist and self-taught photographer who first discovered photography as a means to share his passion for nature with the world. Now a lifelong pursuit, Seth focuses on using his photography as a tool to help educate and inspire conservation in his native Texas home as well as during his travels across the globe. Patterson took the UTPA students on a visual journey through the pages of “El Valley – The Rio Grande Delta”, a coffee-table book that was awarded a Gold Medal in the 2001 Independent Publisher of the Year contest. Seth is both a freelance photographer as well as an employee of Gorgas Science Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on conservation through education. Seth’s work for GSF centers on imagery and incorporates much of his photography and graphics design abilities. The Trans-Atlantic Sustainability Seminar was a culmination of a relationship UT Pan American and its College of Business Administration have had with the Leuphana University in Germany. For the past 15 years, the institutions have organized study abroad opportunities for students from their respective universities, and for the past year, students from UTPA and Leuphana University have been working together in a course that addresses sustainability initiatives including those in energy, transportation, waste, water management and public policy. Sustainable Energy for South Texas is a one-day symposium which exposes students and faculty to a selection of current research directions in energy, oil and gas exploration, with a focus on sustainable technologies. Panel discussion and keynote address will cover carrier opportunities and possibilities for undergraduate students to consider. Speakers and panelists will also feature the success of women and underrepresented groups in these fields. UTPA hosted the award winning entrepreneur and biomimetic inventor Jay Harman as its Earth Week Distinguished Speaker for the year 2014. Harman discussed about his work in Biomimicry with the students, staff and faculty. He is stimulating the research and development of the industry of manufacturing to think out of the box and to start really inspiring their designs in nature's design's. Dr. Michio Kaku is the first guest speaker for UTPA's Distinguished Speaker Series for the 2012-2013 school year. In his speech he addressed the importance of science in many fields, including medicine, computer science, space exploration, banking and commerce to the students, faculty and staff. He is a theoretical physicist and co-founder of string field theory. He is the author of several international best sellers and also hosts his own national weekly radio program Science Fantastic. Thomas L. Friedman, is a Internationally renowned author, reporter and columnist. In his speech he explained the students, staff and faculty the four major challenges united states is facing currently. Such as globalization, the information technology revolution, chronic deficits and unbalanced energy consumption. o Distinguishing Speaker Series Speaker series draws government officials, community leaders and citizen advocates to campus to spark lively discussion on pressing sustainability-related topics. The series addresses the problems and solutions of sustainability, from global climate change and rural poverty to new business models and investment strategies. Our distinguished speakers include expert practitioners and leaders from across the nonprofit, government, and corporate sectors. Bill Clinton spoke at the Fine Arts Auditorium about pressing issues facing the world that his Clinton Initiative is set to help. Clinton encouraged change for a better world through education, community service and sustainability efforts. He touched on issues such as the world’s fundamental character of interdependence and its profound negative forces of inequality, instability, and unsustainability. Clinton asserted the importance of the United States to be more competitive in education in order to decrease the withdrawal rates of high school students and increase higher performance rates. Clinton suggested the withdrawal rate comes from students needing to work to help families financially. He purposed that if more high schools were developed like colleges, students could work while pursuing their education. Clinton also addressed prevailing community issues with a central focus on sustainability solutions through his foundation. One possible solution involved establishing solar panels and windmills to create zero emissions campuses. This more sustainable living would preserve energy, be more efficient and create more jobs opportunities for the community. Bill Nye, a STEM Ambassador and engineer by trade has dedicated his life to the promotion of science to children, explaining the importance of STEM education to North America’s economic and environmental future. As a featured guest speaker at UTPA, Nye discussed the importance of STEM for the future of America. Nye addressed topics such as the positive global environmental impacts of STEM education by emphasizing the need to look to scientists and especially engineers to address climate change and the steady increase in the world’s human population. Nye stressed the importance of having big ideas that are technically feasible. The keys to the future will be new ideas and innovations that don’t have people just consuming less of the Earth’s resources, but providing for more of us with less. Nye believes we need to make our world more efficient so that we can provide a high standard of living to people everywhere. Robert F. Kennedy appeared as a guest speaker at The University of Texas-Pan American and discussed “Our Environmental Destiny” with UTPA students. Barely stopping to take a breath, Kennedy ran the gamut from global warming to religion, from corporate corruption of our government to why we must impeach President Bush. He often surprised the audience by quoting Republican presidents such as Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, declaring that today’s NeoCons have dishonored everything these great American leaders stood for. Kennedy characterized protecting our natural environment as a service to God and thus, ourselves. Kennedy asserted that nature is part of our infrastructure. It enriches us aesthetically and spiritually. Nature ultimately connects us to God; it is the way God talks to us most forcefully. He pointed out numerous cases in which lobbyists and other industry representatives were given key positions in federal environmental programs and used their authority to help industries subvert the law. Kennedy would return to that theme more than once in his speech. And while he said he loathed partisanship and said the worst thing that could happen to environmentalism would be for it to become the province of one political party. America Ferrera shared her life and causes which she is most passionate about with UTPA students and the community. Her most recent project is a 9-part Showtime documentary television series focusing on global warming, entitled “Years of Living Dangerously.” The weekly episodes feature celebrity investigators, who each have a history of environmental activism, and well-known journalists, each of whom have a background in environmental reportage. These correspondents travel to areas around the world and throughout the U.S. affected by global warming to interview experts and ordinary people affected by, and seeking solutions to, the effects of global warming. These actors, activists and reporters act as proxies for the audience, asking questions to find out people's opinions and to discover the scientific evidence. In his latest book, “That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back,” Thomas L. Friedman spoke to UTPA students about making recommendations for meeting four major challenges currently facing the United States: globalization, the information technology revolution, chronic deficits and unbalanced energy consumption. He offers a wake-up call to collective action and, unless we don’t, he believes it will soon be too late for us to pass along the American dream to future generations. Friedman is an internationally renowned author, reporter and columnist. He is the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes and author of five bestselling books including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” “The World is Flat,” and “Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – and How It Can Renew America.” Dr. Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist, best-selling author and populizer of science, spoke with UTPA students about the importance of science in many fields, including medicine, computer science, space exploration and even banking and commerce. Dr. Kaku offered a perspective of his field to UTPA students that opened their minds to the future of quantum physics and space travel. Dr. Kaku delivered keynotes at HESTEC’s Educator Day and Student Leadership Day. He is the co-founder of string field theory, and is continuing Einstein’s search to unite the four fundamental forces of nature into one unified theory that will summarize all the physical laws of the universe. Kaku holds the Henry Semat Chair in Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York, and has taught at Harvard and Princeton. Philippe Cousteau, explorer, social entrepreneur, environmental advocate and the grandson of famous explorer Jacques Yves Cousteau, spoke with hundreds of Rio Grande Valley high school students who attended Student Leadership Day at the UTPA’s HESTEC. He asserted the importance in finding innovative ways to fix the damage that has been done to the earth and to improve the lives of the global population. Cousteau, who co-founded the nonprofit environmental education program EarthEcho International with his relatives, showed video clips of stories he did for CNN on the deteriorating health of the coral reels off the coast of Key West, Fl., and how one community in Haiti began gardens to provide food security to their neighborhoods. He encouraged the students to think of ways to help their own communities, to set goals and to believe in their dreams. o Office For Sustainability Speaker Series As the world increasingly seeks environmentally-friendly solutions to more complex problems, Jay Harman’s biomimetic message gains more and more attention. An award-winning entrepreneur and biomimetic inventor, Jay Harman has taken a hands-on approach to his lifelong fascination with the deep patterns found in nature. In the process, he has founded and grown multi-million-dollar research and manufacturing companies that develop, patent, and license innovative products, ranging from prize-winning watercraft to interlocking building bricks, afterburners for aircraft engines, and non-invasive technology for measuring blood glucose and other electrolytes. He is credited with being among the first pioneering scientists to make biomimicry—the science of employing nature in advancing sustainable technology—a cornerstone of modern and future engineering. His latest ventures—PAX Scientific, PAX Water Technologies, PAX Mixer, and PAX Pure—design more efficient industrial equipment including refrigeration, turbines, fans, mixers, and water treatment based on Jay’s revolutionary concepts. Aside from his entrepreneurial exploits, Jay started a boarding school to teach kids about the environment in Australia—and made it his mission to bring the subject of biomimicry to the public. Born and raised in Australia, Jay started his career as a naturalist with the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, but quickly demonstrated talents as an inventor. In 1982, he founded ERG, Ltd, which grew into one of Australia’s largest technology firms with a capital value as high as $3 billion. Since then, Jay has been at the helm of numerous companies recognized as global leaders in their respective fields. The culmination of Jay’s work is the development of “Nature’s Streamlining Principle,” a guideline for translating nature’s extraordinary efficiencies into industrial applications. Jay’s goal—both as an author and an entrepreneur—is to show industry that improving the efficiency of industrial equipment is beneficial for both the bottom line, and the planet. Kevin Wilhelm, a pre-eminent consultant in the field of business sustainability and climate change spoke with UTPA students about the ways to develop skills using sustainability to drive profit, business value and innovation. He is the CEO of Sustainable Business Consulting & Education, a Seattle-based consulting firm focused on delivering business value through the integration of sustainability. He is also an acclaimed author, speaker and teacher and has developed a series of online courses and modules around sustainability for both the corporate world and academic markets. Joel Berg is leading the anti-hunger movement in America. He is executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. He is also author of All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America?, the definitive and most well-reviewed book on American hunger in the last decade. Berg spoke with UTPA students on how we can work together towards a more equitable society. Berg has led the Coalition Against Hunger, which represents more than 1,100 nonprofit soup kitchens and food pantries in New York City and the more than 1.5 million low-income New Yorkers who live in households that cannot afford enough food. The organization works not only to meet these residents’ immediate food needs but also to enact innovative solutions to help society move, “beyond the soup kitchen” to ensure self-sufficiency for all Americans. Seth Patterson is an avid naturalist and self-taught photographer who first discovered photography as a means to share his passion for nature with the world. Now a lifelong pursuit, Seth focuses on using his photography as a tool to help educate and inspire conservation in his native Texas home as well as during his travels across the globe. Patterson took the UTPA students on a visual journey through the pages of “El Valley – The Rio Grande Delta”, a coffee-table book that was awarded a Gold Medal in the 2001 Independent Publisher of the Year contest. Seth is both a freelance photographer as well as an employee of Gorgas Science Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on conservation through education. Seth’s work for GSF centers on imagery and incorporates much of his photography and graphics design abilities.

From Trash to Treasure Recycling Art Exhibit As part of the UTPA’s Earth week, the College of Arts and Humanities students hosted the Recycled Art Exhibit at the Library Gallery. The students were given a month to work on their pieces and were told to use different artistic means to express how they see the world. The artwork featured used traditional methods such as paint, ceramics and sculptures, but also incorporated recycled materials such as, aluminum cans and tree parts. The exhibit displayed a variety of artistic style, inspiring onlookers to consider the positive impact of a sustainable world. Trendy Trashing Runway In commemoration of Earth Week, The Student Sustainability Association hosted the Trending Trashing Runway show. Creative fashionistas proved with a little snip and tuck you can design amazing outfits and at the same time reduce, reuse, and recycle. The participants used a variety of recycled materials to create original pieces, all without spending any money. Mariachi Aztlan Cruzar La Cara de La Luna • http://www.utpa.edu/news/2014/06/mariachi-aztlan-and-lyric-opera-of-chicago-continue-exciting-fusion-of-two-genres.htm The Mariachi Aztlán performed “Cruzar La Cara de La Luna,” the world’s first mariachi opera, with the Houston Opera Company. Their outstanding performance caught the attention of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, who then invited them to performed “Canciones y Arias” with the Lyric Opera cast. In addition to a mesmerizing performance, the group’s directors, Guerra and Francisco Loera and members of the Mariachi Aztlán, participated in community engagement and educational activities that are organized by Lyric Unlimited, an initiative of the Lyric Opera of Chicago to expand their community engagement and educational programs throughout the Chicago area, particularly those areas where opera is a lesser known genre. The engagement activities include lecture demonstrations for students in the nearby community of Waukegan and the largely Hispanic Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen, workshops for both instructors and students of the Chicago Mariachi Project and Q&A sessions with students following dress rehearsals and performances. Additionally, Mariachi Aztlán played side by side with student performers at planned and impromptu sessions. We contend that artistic work is essential both for cultural heritage through the work’s reference and re-interpretation of culture, and for sustainability as a reflection on the current and future state of society. Artistic work is often considered an intangible cultural asset, and hence, the contribution of creative workers is often overlooked in a policy environment and is reflection on the current and future state of society. More practically, exploring musical artifacts and performance practices from different cultures and times can contribute to our understanding of cultural heritage and highlight cultural sustainability as an essential professional disposition.

• Life Skill Programs: o College Assistance Migrant Program http://portal.utpa.edu/utpa_main/dess_home/casp_home/camp_home The College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP) assists students who are migratory or seasonal farmworkers (or children of such workers) enrolled in their first year of undergraduate studies at an IHE. The funding supports completion of the first year of studies. Competitive five-year grants for CAMP projects are made to IHEs or to nonprofit private agencies that cooperate with such institutions. The program serves approximately 2,000 CAMP participants annually. Services include outreach to persons who are eligible, counseling, tutoring, skills workshops, financial aid stipends, health services, and housing assistance to eligible students during their first year of college. Limited follow-up services are provided to participants after their first year.

Since its inception, The Office for Sustainability has employed over 40 Fellows, Scholars and Interns. Sustainability Fellows Program The Office for Sustainability and the Office of the Provost have implemented the Sustainability Fellows Program, a campus service learning-initiative that provides talented UTRGV graduate students the opportunity to work closely with the Office of Sustainability staff. As part of The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), UTRGV is submitting its first ever documentation of sustainability efforts on campus by means of the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System, STARS. To advance sustainability in this higher education institution, Sustainability Fellows serve as Graduate Research Assistants, working 20 hours per week to help coordinate sustainability activities, engage in educational and community-based initiatives, and perform other tasks integral to the mission of the Office of Sustainability. Two Sustainability Fellows will be selected each semester. Reappointment for a second semester is contingent upon satisfactory performance of assigned duties. Each fellow will receive a designated stipend per semester. Sustainability Scholars Program The Office for Sustainability is collaborating with the Office of Undergraduate Research in efforts to implement the Sustainability Scholars Program. This service-learning program provides talented UTRGV undergraduate students the opportunity to work closely with the Office for Sustainability staff and stakeholder groups on a range of campus based sustainability projects. Under The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) and STARS program students examine and assess social, economic, and environmental practices that promote or impede sustainability. The greater goal of the research effort is to help the UTRGV community become a cleaner, greener more sustainable institution. Throughout the experience, Scholars will learn how to construct and implement a formal research design, receive training in research ethics and relevant methods for data collection and analysis, and use their results to help create and evaluate policies and programs for sustainability initiatives at UTRGV. Sustainability Scholars were selected in the fall and spring semester for a 20 hour a week commitment and awarded a stipend along with up to three credit hours of mentored Undergraduate Research. Sustainability Intern Program welcomes both graduates and undergraduates from all majors and backgrounds as sustainability interns. Under the direction of the Office of Sustainability, UTRGV students work 10-15 hours per week applying their experience and education to assist in designing and executing sustainability themed campaigns and events, representing the Office for Sustainability as well as assist in campus wide sustainability data collection efforts for the implementation of UTRGV sustainability goals. http://portal.utpa.edu/utpa_main/dba_home/sustainability_home/sustainability_res/res_jobs

http://www.utpa.edu/news/2013/10/hestec-student-leadership-day-empowers-teens-to-change-the-world.htm https://portal.utpa.edu/portal/page/portal/utpa_main/dba_home/sustainability_home/images_files_page/Tab/kevinwilhelmbio.jpg https://portal.utpa.edu/portal/page/portal/utpa_main/dba_home/sustainability_home/images_files_page/Tab/Joel-berg-resized.png https://rfkin2008.wordpress.com/tag/utpa-distinguished-speaker-series/ http://www.utpa.edu/news/2013/09/utpa-teams-with-german-university-to-promote-sustainability.htm https://portal.utpa.edu/portal/page/portal/utpa_main/dba_home/sustainability_home/images_files_page/Jay_Harman_Bio_%20June%202013.pdf http://www.utpa.edu/news/2012/08/physicist-author-michio-kaku-to-be-distinguished-speaker.htm https://rfkin2008.wordpress.com/tag/utpa-distinguished-speaker-series/