Dickinson College
EN-3: Student Life

There are several sustainability-related clubs and organizations that are senate recognized for the 2023-24 academic year, as well as several student groups who live in sustainability themed housing. Some are listed here:

Eating Ethics Collective:
EEC aims to take an intersectional approach as we provide an open forum for conversation about food and eating ethics. Join us for dinner discussions and garden workdays as we learn together to deepen our understanding of challenges and possibilities within our food system. This collective aims to cultivate a supportive community in which members can discuss the implications of eating ethics and learn about food systems, food justice and food sovereignty.

The Handlebar:
Launched by students, faculty and staff strengthens Dickinson’s living laboratory for sustainability education by providing a context for meaningful service, community building, resource sharing and experiential learning. In the Handlebar, students, faculty and staff work as leaders and volunteers assisting fellow members of the Dickinson Community to learn the sustainable life skills of bike repair and maintenance, building their own bike mechanic and leadership skills, participating in a program that reclaims and reuses materials to provide a valuable environment-friendly benefit to the community, and promoting life skills for more active, healthier and sustainable living.

Outing Club:
The Outing Club aims to get as many people outdoors as possible. The club is a resource for the entire Dickinson community to explore the natural world around campus. Activities include hiking, camping, climbing, canoeing, trail running, rafting, and more. DCOC also works closely with the GearBox on campus, which houses the extensive inventory of outdoor gear available to the club. Members of the Dickinson community are also able to rent a wide variety of outdoor equipment from the Gearbox for personal use.

Outdoor Education House, “Outdoor House”:
The purpose of the Outdoor Education House is to serve as a center for outdoor education at Dickinson. With the college’s forward movement toward more organized outdoor education (e.g., Orientation Trips), the Outdoor Education House serves to consolidate the various branches of outdoor recreation and education at Dickinson into one place with the desire to create, improve upon and execute new outdoor education initiatives. It serves as an open space for any students interested in outdoor recreation with the hope of fostering good outdoor skills and an appreciation for the natural world.

The Peddler:
The Peddler is a sustainable, student-run coffee cart, dedicated to providing Dickinson students and faculty with affordable, high-quality coffee and tea. We also promote sustainability around campus by encouraging students to bring their own mugs for their drinks and make sure to compost all our waste products and promote reusable products as much as possible.

Social Justice House:
The Social Justice House is a special interest house on the Dickinson campus where students with social justice passions bring their academic work, personal experiences, and ideas to a community that supports and reflects social activism. This is a place where students can feel safe and are able to talk about issues that are bothering them, either on or outside of Dickinson’s campus. Throughout the year, students will attend meetings that will be based off anything that someone or a group of people feel like the rest of the house and Dickinson community needs to hear about. We collaborate with other special interest houses that share common goals with us. Overall, the Social Justice House is a family and accepts all who share the same interest of fighting for social justice.

Tree Club:
The Tree Club provides students the opportunity to discuss and explore environmental issues and their intersectionality with other relevant social and economic justice issues. Through experiential learning and facilitated dialogues this group helps empower students to become environmental advocates. The club supports student-led projects related to sustainability.

Tree House:
The Treehouse, aka the Center for Sustainable Living, is a place where sustainability-minded students can live and work together to support and promote sustainability efforts among themselves and throughout the Dickinson College campus. Living at the Treehouse, students explore the interconnectedness and codependence that comes with communal living. For example, each semester, residents choose roles that help the community to run smoothly and also to connect the house with the campus and Carlisle. These roles range from treasurer and secretary to community outreach and ecosystems manager. While there are individual roles played in the Treehouse, a central part of the community is the way in which decisions are made. Weekly meetings provide a time to update each other on projects, but everything is decided through consensus. In addition to residents’ actions to live as a sustainable community, the actual building showcases green technology to the campus and community through our LEED gold certified building (the first of its kind in Pennsylvania). The Treehouse also provides a forum for dialogue and idea exchange relating to sustainability on campus. Regular events are hosted every semester, including Open Mic Nights, Soup and Bread Discussions, and Open Houses.

The Womanist Collective:
The Womanist Collective strives to create revolutionary spaces for BIWOC and TGNCIQ (trans, gender non conform, intersex, queer) people. The collective intends to ground and educate the campus community through conversation, art, and collective action.

The Dickinson College Organic Farm is a 90-acre working farm (about 60-acres of grazing) and educational resource that provides produce to the college’s dining hall, a local food bank, a local farmers' market, and 137 families who are members of the Farm’s Campus Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. Located a short drive from campus in Boiling Springs, PA, the USDA-certified organic farm includes many sustainable operations practices, such as PV arrays, solar hot-water systems, production of biogas, and biodiesel-run tractors and trucks. Students work on the farm growing organic produce and caring for humanely raised livestock as volunteers and paid student farmers under the direction of the farm manager and assistant farm manager. The farm is also a site for numerous research projects, class visits, service learning projects, workshops, and tours.

The Peddler is a sustainable, student-run coffee cart, dedicated to providing Dickinson students and faculty with affordable, high-quality coffee and tea. We also promote sustainability around campus by encouraging students to bring their own mugs for their drinks, and make sure to compost all our waste products.

Dickinson's student-built, student-run, zero-waste bike powered coffee cart has been serving up caffeine and merriment, with a side of sustainability, since 2012.

There is a Student Investment Group (SIG) that is student governed. This group focuses on financial initiatives broadly, but because of Dickinson's commitment to sustainability, many of the club's projects have contributed to exploring ESG principles of Dickinson's investments. The functionality of the group closely resembles that of a hedge fund and at the same time is the best possible educational resource to begin the process of developing the skill set required by the finance industry. Specifically, SIG analysts compete in a virtual trading game, practice presentation and communication skills, and develop research to support the Executive Board’s management of the SIG Flagship Portfolio.

Dickinson annually awards the Sam Rose ’58 and Julie Walters Prize at Dickinson College for Global Environmental Activism. The prize was created to focus attention on the need to reduce the impact of human lives on the planet, particularly given the rising population predictions for this century. The $100,000 prize has now supported nine winners who have all conducted 3-5 day campus residencies to interact with students in public lectures, small round table discussions, class visits, and leader lunches. Winners include:

Bill McKibben - 2012
Lisa Jackson - 2013
James Balog - 2014
Mark Ruffalo - 2015
Elizabeth Kolbert- 2016
Brett Jenks- 2017
Our Children's Trust- 2018
Natural Resources Defense Council- 2019
Armond Cohen- 2020
Varshini Prakash - 2021
IPCC - 2022
Tara Houska - 2023

The residencies were established to allow close interaction with students as the donors wanted to endow the prize at Dickinson because they fully support sustainability across curriculum, which promotes student awareness of the environment and training for professional careers in the sciences as well as responsible living for the protection of all life forms.

https://www.dickinson.edu/homepage/749/the_sam_rose_58_and_julie_walters_prize_at_dickinson_college_for_global_environmental_activism

Two Dickinson College arts events brought forth the profound significance and beauty of water into the spotlight with a lens on sustainability. The production was called Current and it was an interarts performance that combined the talents of Dickinson’s music and art faculty. Current examined the waterscape as history and revealed the consequences of the way we’ve interacted with this vital natural resource. It featured performances by Jennifer Blyth, professor of music; James Martin, assistant professor of music; and the Heare Ensemble, of which Blyth is part; as well as a video installation by arts faculty Todd Arsenault ’99. This performance targeted students but also the community at large.

https://www.dickinson.edu/news/article/3915/

Outdoor education at Dickinson aims to introduce Dickinson students, faculty, and staff to the recreational and educational opportunities provided by these natural resources. The program is housed in Campus Life, and many programs focus on sustainability, local resources, and Leave No Trace principles. Outdoor education programs include the Dickinson rock wall in the Kline Center, Wilderness Introduction to Life at Dickinson (WILD) pre-orientation programs, outdoor leadership and skill workshops, and alternative break trips.

In addition to the administrative leadership, the student-governed partner, the Dickinson Outing Club, has maintained a strong contingency of members trained in Leave No Trace policies. Their members seek to implement sustainable practices during their excursions. Additionally, many members are involved in various sustainability initiatives on campus and enhance their appreciation for the natural world through this club and other opportunities.

The Handlebar:
Launched by students, faculty and staff strengthens Dickinson’s living laboratory for sustainability education by providing a context for meaningful service, community building, resource sharing and experiential learning. In the Handlebar, students, faculty and staff work as leaders and volunteers assisting fellow members of the Dickinson community to learn the sustainable life skills of bike repair and maintenance, building their own bike mechanic and leadership skills, participating in a program that reclaims and reuses materials to provide a valuable environment-friendly benefit to the community, and promoting life skills for more active, healthier and sustainable living. Bike repair is a sustainable life skill that Dickinson continues to contribute time and resources to support throughout ongoing programming.

The Center for Sustainability Education, the Alliance for Aquatic Resource Monitoring, and the Dickinson College Farm all hire students to run programming and operations. These three programs consistently employ over 35 paid student positions each semester.

The overarching goals of all these positions are to provide students the opportunity to create and/or improve sustainability programs and/or operations at Dickinson in an effort to fulfill the objectives of our climate action plan and educate students on how to live more sustainably.

The Sustainability Graduation Pledge reads as follows:

“I PLEDGE TO APPLY SUSTAINABILITY LEARNING AND VALUES FROM MY DICKINSON EXPERIENCE AS I EXPLORE AND IMPROVE THE SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONSEQUENCES OF ANY ORGANIZATIONS FOR WHICH I WORK AND THE COMMUNITIES IN WHICH I LIVE."

The sustainability graduation pledge has been active since 2013.

Graduating seniors are also eligible to join Alumni for a Sustainable Dickinson, a group founded in 2003 that works to promote sustainability at Dickinson amongst our alumni community.

We developed a “Green Event Checklist” for event planners on campus as a guide for individuals to consider sustainability in event planning. The checklist helps make events more sustainable and help planners consider the environmental and social impacts of various aspects of event programming on campus. This checklist helps organizers to explore and practice Dickinson values including sustainability, leadership, ethical reasoning, and inclusivity.

https://www.dickinson.edu/info/20226/student_life/3906/club_and_event_resources/3

Our approach to sustainability is distinctive for making sustainability a part of every student’s education, infusing it across our liberal arts curriculum, drawing on our strengths in global education to explore and compare experiences of different cultures, and using active learning methods that empower students to connect their classroom studies with sustainable campus operations, resources such as Dickinson's organic farm, and engagement with the world beyond campus borders. Much of this happens outside the classroom in the programs mentioned within this create.

Dickinson is committed to engaging students, faculty and staff in diverse aspects of sustainability throughout campus life.