Calvin University
AC-8: Campus as a Living Laboratory

Student Employment -Work the Woods
Our vision is to inspire a new generation of environmental leaders in creation care through on-the-job work experiences. We employ Calvin University students to work in a variety of positions both during the academic school year and in the summer. Student employees of the Calvin Ecosystem Preserve & Native Gardens gain valuable experience and develop skills that prepare them for future careers in a variety of fields, including: environmental science, education, environmental education, interpretation, biology, recreation, and nonprofit work.

Student Employment: Sustainability Interns
The campus employs three students with the job title 'Sustainability Intern,' tasked with investigating, planning, updating and reporting in the following areas: STARS Sustainability Intern (responsible for collecting and reporting STARS data); SIMAP Sustainability Intern (responsible for conducting and reporting a campus carbon footprint analysis using SIMAP); Kill-a-Watt Sustainability Intern (responsible for planning and overseeing the January sustainability initiative Kill-a-Watt)

Calvin Ecosystem Preserve and Nature Gardens:
The Calvin Ecosystem Preserve & Native Gardens employs about 2 dozen students each year. During the summer field season, 7 students were employed on a full-time basis and served the campus as Stewardship Interns, Cartography Interns or Horticultural Interns. These students learned hands-on land management techniques to restore the 104-acre Ecosystem Preserve. These skills make the students highly employable so their impact will extend far beyond the confines of our campus. Many of these students end up serving in similar ways, but at reduced hours, during the academic year. The Ecosystem Preserve also serves as an outdoor classroom for ENST 210, ENST 302, and BIOL 344 (and lab). BIOL 344 students are actively involved in ecological monitoring projects that help inform land management decision in the Preserve.

Environmental Career Panel – offered each semester by and through the Bunker Interpretive Center, in collaboration with Bunker Staff:
Discover your path! Gain insight into your future career as you hear panelists speak about the journey to his/her current position. Learn about a variety of environmental careers from professionals working in the nonprofit, government and business worlds. Panelists will speak about their current positions, academic and career paths, and will share advice with students wanting to work in the environmental field. These programs are open to all college and high school students.

Projects: 1) Engineering 333 2021-2022 projects 2) CEAP

In Fall 2022, the ENGR 333 students were presented with the challenge of presenting solutions to reduce Natural Gas CO2 Emissions as it relates to then President LeRoy's Climate Commitment to be carbon neutral by 2057.
Link: https://calvincollege-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/personal/eal33_calvin_edu/Ea-N5BDIURhBhy08Kwc_E8UBnLlX5qj-3blFLcajOKNUCw?e=d3jY6e

The Calvin Environmental Assessment Program (CEAP) started in 1997 and has been an ongoing initiative where science, engineering, and economics courses assess different aspects of sustainability for the university as class projects.

Positive Outcome for Air & Climate: Energy reduction through the CERF program has reduced GHG emissions by switching out major lighting systems across campus.

A fuller description of CEAP follows: The CEAP initiative began in 1997 and has been ongoing ever since. It is a collaborative effort of faculty across Calvin’s campus, but mainly in the sciences, whose focus is the understanding of the campus and local ecosystem. The goal is to impact the college and local municipalities as well as individual behavior. In this innovative program, faculty dedicate a regular lab session or project to collecting data that contributes to an overall assessment of the environment of the campus and surrounding area. Classes form working teams related to particular environmental issues. The data forms the basis for recommended changes in campus policies, for programs that target individual behavioral changes, and for identifying issues that involve and impact the adjacent neighborhoods. The program is dramatically increasing natural science faculty and students’ involvement in service-learning. CEAP is developing a model that can be used by other colleges and universities to move faculty to greater engagement with the local community.

The Bunker Interpretive Center is a LEED-Gold rated building. Part of its exhibit hall is an interpretive display on the many ways the building incorporates sustainable materials, architectural practices, and technology. The building itself is used as a model for sustainability in general with first-year CORE 100 classes that visit for a class session.

The CERF engineering student projects have implements, measured, and assessed energy reduction mechanisms such as motion sensors to reduce energy consumption from lighting. Over $300,000 and 3,000,000 kWh have been saved to date through these student projects which began in 2009 and have continued to be implemented through the present semester.

Latest July-Sept. 2021 Quarterly Report:
https://calvin.edu/about/sustainability/cerf/images/CERFQuarter3Report2021.pdf

The Calvin Dining Services purchases some of its vegetables from the Calvin community Garden which is itself a lab for ongoing biology student research projects.

Calvin's Food Recovery Network (FRN) is a student-lead organization which recovers unused food from Calvin dining halls and disburses it to local nonprofits who serve those in need. Find there website here: https://calvin.edu/offices-services/student-organizations/food-recovery-network

The Calvin Ecosystem Preserve and Nature Gardens contain 3 acres of formal native demonstration gardens including 23-themed native garden beds. Some themes include, rain garden, prairie demonstration garden, oak savannah demonstration garden, pollinator gardens, dune demonstration garden, shoreline restoration, etc. Over 60,000 native plants have been installed in this 3 acre site since 2018. The native gardens are used as inspiration to the rest of campus to convert traditional turf grass to native garden beds.

Student research projects have also resulted in some installations of rain gardens and bioswales on campus.

Through Plaster Creek Stewards, installed by students:
"Whiskey Creek Bioswale, Calvin University Campus:
This S-curved, multi-tiered bioswale receives the stormwater from a 2-acre parking lot used by students at Calvin University. The stormwater previously blasted into Whiskey Creek, a tributary to Plaster Creek, causing serious erosion and carrying chemicals and sediment that accumulated on the surface of the parking lot. Now the stormwater must slowly travel through a long, s-curved swale full of thirsty native plants and trees and rise to the level of a spillover pipe before entering a wetland where any extra water can be slowly released to the creek. This site has a trail network that visitors can hike on to see the bioswale as part of their visit to the Calvin University Ecosystem Preserve. This project has been funded wholly or in part through Michigan Department of Environmental Quality’s Nonpoint Source Program by the United States Environmental Protection Agency."
From https://calvin.edu/plaster-creek-stewards/restoration/projects/

The CERF projects installed low-flow shower heads in the dorms and in student apartments in 2013-2015. These have saved water and reduced energy use. As of Sept 2021, the CERF has saved 7,290,335 gallons of water, with implementations such as low-flow shower heads in the dorms.
See page 11 of: https://calvin.edu/about/sustainability/cerf/images/CERFQuarter3Report2021.pdf

Also, The Bunker Interpretive Center in the Calvin Ecosystem Preserve and Nature Gardens is a LEED certified building that has composting toilets (Japanese foam flushing toilets which use only 3 ounces of water per flush). The BIC also utilizes a gray-water system where all water discharged into sinks is collected in gray-water tanks and is pumped through the solarium in the lab where it is cleaned by the plants and then transpired back into the air.

The Energy and Environmental Sustainability Committee (EESC) has been meeting formally since 2007. This group of sustainability-minded faculty and staff invite student representatives to join and participate in these monthly meetings. This is the group that drives much of the sustainability-related work on Calvin's campus, including planning and coordinating sustainability projects. Students play an active role in meeting discussions, and are given action items to contribute to the progress of the group and its tasks.

The Investor Relations committee of the Board of Trustees is working with the student group, Knight Investment Management (KIM). The students in KIM present evaluate sustainability aspects of companies as part of the process of preparing proposals for the committee.
Organization details:
https://calvin.edu/offices-services/student-organizations/knight-investment-management

In 2021, Calvin joined the Campus Nature Rx community in the interest of equipping and encouraging students to gain the wellness benefits from time in nature. In addition to the 104-acre Ecosystem Preserve and Native Gardens and its hiking trails, a cartography intern created a map of greenspaces on campus and in the local region.

Information about Bunker Interpretive Center activities for Campus- and Public Engagement came from Jennifer Howell.

ENGR 333 info came from Matthew Heun.