University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
PA-1: Sustainability Coordination

The purpose of the Environmental Sustainability Mentorship Committee (ESMC-formerly the Environmental Sustainability Committee) is to promote the ideals and practices of environmental sustainability at UWM. The ESMC is also in charge of allocating the Green Fund and mentoring students to help them implement student-led sustainability projects on campus. ESMC (a collaborative group between the Student Association Senate, students, student organizations, faculty, and administration) discusses, initiates, and implements sustainable environmental policies, practices, and procedures.

Alycia Lewis-Chair Adyson Leonard-Vice Chair Santiago Moreno Islas-Student member Citaly Leon-Student member Courtney Raatz-Student member Kate Nelson-Chief Sustainability Officer (staff) Glen Fredlund-Professor & Director, Conservation and Environmental Science Program (faculty) Linda Corbin-Pardee-Union Program Manager (staff)

The Office of Sustainability at UW-Milwaukee, founded in 2008, assesses, supports, and drives sustainability initiatives across campus operations, student life, and throughout academic affairs. By building cross campus and community collaborations, integrating sustainability into campus planning initiatives, assessing impacts over the long term, and working from our own sense of place and purpose, UW-Milwaukee manages its resources wisely and makes sustainability relevant to its teaching and research mission. Past initiatives include Energy Matters, a campus wide energy efficiency program with Facility Services, supporting stormwater green infrastructure with the School of Architecture, initiating and growing campus gardens with many across the UWM community, bike planning with the assistance of Campus Planning and Community Design Solutions, and multiple outreach programs with the Share the Earth series.

The Chief Sustainability Officer oversees the Office of Sustainability at UW-Milwaukee. Significant activities and accomplishments of the Office in the past three years include, but not limited to: - Resource Management Contracting-By introducing performance-based contracting for waste and recycling services, UWM put a wrench in the for-profit hauling business. Such an effort brought to light true cost and discrepancies. Through it all, UWM was better able to gather data and right size. Such savings helped justify a new position for the Office, a Waste & Recycling Specialist was hired 18 months ago. This new capacity is helping to build new resiliency on campus to the crashing recycling markets. -Bike Hub Study- the Office worked with internal stakeholders, the City of Milwaukee, Rails to Trails Conservancy, and Milwaukee County to create an engineering study to improve bike infrastructure, on campus and with trails and city bike lanes leading to campus. The Study, aided by Toole Design, will now help UWM coordinate and prioritize efforts and funding strategies with all partners involved. -Energy savings since 2009, allowed UWM to qualify into Second Nature's Carbon Credit Purchasing Program (C2P2). Carbon savings are now verified and sold on the open market with other partners in the C2P2 program. The savings were put into a new roll-over fund for conservation, that the Office manages. Right now, UWM is rolling out retrocommissioning because of these new found funds. (Note: UWM does not keep its savings usually, all savings go back into a general UW System fund, so these are new dollars for conservation.) -Three seasons of the "Learn.Earn.Grow." program have successfully launched and been completed. L.E.G. is a youth urban agricultural jobs program with several public schools. Besides learning the skills of urban agriculture, the high school students from under-represented populations and schools are exposed to higher education (at UWM and at the tech school. MATC), peer to peer relationship skills, financial literacy, nutrition, resume building, etc. The produce grown is sold to UWM and used in the kitchens for healthy, hyper-local eating on campus. - UWM received the U.S. Department of Education's Green Ribbon School award in 2016 as well.