Western Kentucky University
EN-9: Staff Professional Development

The Office of Sustainability provides a variety of sustainability education and development opportunities throughout the year. These include workshops, demonstrations, and guest lectures on sustainability topics. As part of WKU's Cultural Enhancement Series, Joel Sartore lectured on photography as a medium for outreach and education on sustainability-related issues such as climate change, habitat destruction, loss of biodiversity, and extinction. 500 WKU students, faculty, and staff attended. WKU Resource Conservation and the Office of Sustainability worked with Housing and Residence Life to train 60 Residence Assistance on how and why to recycling in Residence Halls and on other Sustainability related efforts on campus. The Sustainability Coordinator presents to 30 staff members on sustainability at WKU with the goal of developing Sustainability Champions at the annual Staff Leadership Institute. Environmental Service Attendants, Facilities and Grounds employees, and several offices (Student Activities, WKU Libraries, WKU Planning, Design, and Construction, etc.) around campus go through a recycling demonstration as a form of sustainability professional development, where they learn what is and is not recyclable on campus, led by the Coordinator of Resource Conservation, Beth Gafford. Employees continue to learn more about recyclables on campus through peer-to-peer interaction as they come onto the job, and learn more about what they will encounter as a WKU employee. WKU employees in the Facilities Front Office and Facilities HVAC (two separate offices with separate purposes housed in the same building) host a friendly, but fierce, recycling competition between the two staff offices, determining by overall weight who recycled the most over each month's time! This recycling competition between staff offices allows for the fun, but educational opportunity to become even more acquainted with what is and is not recyclable on campus.

WKU Facilities and the WKU Office of Sustainability offers professional development opportunities to its sustainability staff through the financial support and funding of attendance at the annual AASHE STARS Conference, several food waste documentary screenings, as well as inclusion in online webinars on GameDay Recycling initiatives, food waste diversion, and campus recycling.

Our percentage is based on the summation of 165 (1/3 of 500), 60, and 30 =255 staff members reached through sustainability training or professional development, which is 10% of total 2450.