Pennsylvania State University
EN-7: Employee Educators Program

In 2018, Penn State Sustainability (formerly known as the Sustainability Institute) began seeding the idea of creating Sustainability Councils in Penn State’s academic colleges, Commonwealth campuses and financial and administrative support units. The purpose of the councils is to advance the University’s strategic goals focused on sustainability, as framed by the Sustainable Development Goals and to ensure that these networks are sharing best practices with each other. Each Council should have the backing of the Dean, or other executive, be led by a leadership-appointed chairperson, and have a charter that outlines its principles and governing structure. There are now 13 Commonwealth campuses with Sustainability Councils. https://sustainability.psu.edu/campus-efforts/sustainability-councils/commonwealth-campuses/

By 2022, 11 colleges had formed councils at the University Park campus. After the foundational steps of creating the group and charter, these councils have focused on integrating sustainability into their unit's strategic plans, engaging their peers in the process. Sustainability Institute staff, led by the Chief Sustainability Officer, convene the Council chairs bi-monthly for a facilitated discussion, which includes networking, support and introduction of sustainability resources for colleges to utilize pertaining to curricular, co-curricular, operation, staff engagement and administration. The College Council Chair network communicates regularly and is provided sustainability news and resources on a bi-weekly basis via our Mainstream newsletter (monthly in the summer). The councils, in turn, facilitate working teams led by peers within their college to address and ensure sustainability throughout the curriculum, operations, and research. Several of these councilshttps://sustainability.psu.edu/councilsandchairs

For the financial and administrative units, there also exists a network of sustainability leaders, the Sustainable Operations Council, which was founded in 2016. The Penn State Sustainability staff has introduced the concepts of sustainability to the thirteen representatives over the past several years, helping them seek not only opportunities for change in their units, but also ways to collaborate for greater impact. These change agents meet with SI staff as a group monthly during the academic year. http://sustainability.psu.edu/sustainable-operations-council

Another tier of this sustainability institutional infrastructure is the Green Teams network. In 2022, there were 32 teams at the University Park campus comprised of staff, faculty, and students who engage their peers and encourage them to take specific actions to help their organization (college, department, building, etc.) operate in a more efficient, innovative, and healthy way. Green Teams can support the work of these councils with peer education activities.

Sustainability Councils and Green Teams focus on their units' audiences which can include faculty, staff and students. The Sustainability Institute offers an orientation to Green Teams, when they are formed and hold two to three meetings annually. As explained above, the Institute meets regularly with Council leaders engaging with an exchange of information to assess progress towards university sustainability goals, identify opportunities for collaborations, and identify barriers needing to be addressed.
Examples of the Green Team activities include: clothing exchange; participation in the Green Paws program; participation in compost changes at the University; educating peers on recycling contamination; investigation of digital business cards.
Examples of Sustainability Council initiatives include: several have established annual faculty and staff sustainability awards; two councils have developed greenhouse gas inventories; Arts & Architecture's council hosted a teaching roundtable on related topics and created a series of podcasts highlighting sustainable practitioners; several colleges offer grants for sustainability-related research; and several councils are involved with inventorying their sustainability-related research; and several councils are involved with inventorying their sustainability-related courses.

The Green Paws Program is a simple, yet effective way for faculty and staff to learn how to use resources efficiently in campus and/or home offices. The program is organized into two levels of certification that signify an office's progression toward higher and higher levels of efficiency, health, and environmental sustainability. The program is oriented towards a group, though each successful participant earns credit for their University Professional Development transcript. Several activities require discussions, benefiting from the group's experience and expertise. To earn a Green Paws Office Certification, 75 percent of all employees signed up for the program from an office must complete all the required actions. By going through the program as a group, participants create a community that is learning together about making sustainable decisions and creating habits that improve the quality of resources, fiscal stewardship and employee health.

Staff and faculty

Over the past three years, Penn State Sustainability has worked to institutionalize sustainability at the University, to embed efforts into the University's research, teaching, operations, outreach and student co-curricular activities. All of these leaders are engaged in learning about University's Sustainability priorities and their relationship to the global Sustainable Development goals. We work with all the units, helping them determine how their efforts can be channeled towards the university and global goals. It was difficult to determine the precise number of hours spent training these champions and estimating the number of hours they have dedicated working with their peers on related activities. We used the 2022 calendar year for this section.