Williams College
EN-10: Community Partnerships

This student-run project engages students and community volunteers to weatherize homes in towns near Williams College during a one-day event in November. Students caulk, install weather stripping, insulate hot water pipes, provide and install energy efficient bulbs. The goal of the project is to help low-income homeowners prepare for the winter through making their homes more comfortable and energy efficient, promote community ties, and provide students with an opportunity for learning skills in energy-efficiency that they can apply to their own homes and engaging in community efforts. This program was run in the fall of 2019 and cancelled in 2020.

In 2021, we made a COVID-pivot and provided home winterization kits to ~50 local homeowners. Students called households in advance to ask what supplies they needed, and then kits were assembled and distributed to the households according to the materials they requested. In addition, 26 students volunteered with Window Dressers, a local non-profit that builds reusable insulating window inserts. Williams students participated in ~40% of their shifts. In total (shifts with and without our students), the event built 245 inserts which are estimated to save 25,725 gallons of heating fuel over 10 years. Window Dressers gives ~25% of inserts to low-income households, who join with other community volunteers, students, and paying clients to build the inserts together.

Since its inception in 2008, students and volunteers have weatherized hundreds of houses of low-income and elderly neighbors, which has made a significant impact on the comfort of the homeowners and also increased the energy efficiency of their homes and subsequently saved them money on heating and cooling costs. This also has measurable carbon emission reductions from fuel saved in heating.
We run Winter Blitz:
https://sustainability.williams.edu/initiatives/winter-blitz/
We sent volunteers to Window Dressers: https://windowdressers.org/

The Community Climate Fund is a carbon-reduction fund that supports local community projects and is administered by the Center for EcoTechnology. To date, over $170,000 has been invested in projects that support carbon reduction efforts in the community. Projects are chosen based on the benefit they provide to the community, particularly underserved groups, and learning opportunities for students.
https://sustainability.williams.edu/community-climate-fund/

This class focuses on project work in which students apply the concepts learned to tackle an actual community problem. Small teams of students, working in conjunction with a client in the region and under supervision of the instructor, conduct a planning project using all the tools of a planner, including research, interviews, survey research, mapping, and site design. The project work draws on students’ academic training and extracurricular activities, and applies creative, design thinking techniques to solve thorny problems. While the course occurs regularly, the projects vary (we are designating this project short-term because the individual projects are, even though the course itself is long-term).
https://catalog.williams.edu/envi/detail/?strm=&cn=302&crsid=011152&req_year=0