Yale University
EN-1: Student Educators Program

The Residential College Sustainability Liaisons are a group of 16 undergraduates that assist in the implementation of the Sustainability Action Plan for their college. All 14 Action Plans follow a shared template and sequence of programming to ensure that critical topics such as climate action, materials, food, health and well-being, and more are covered. However, because each college has its own distinctive culture we developed a tailored document for every college. To ensure ongoing engagement and authentic programming, the Office hired 16 Sustainability Liaisons – one to two per college – to work closely with their Operations Managers to implement their plan and to innovate ways to embed sustainability into the culture of the student body.

Each College Action Plan is structured around nine themes, one for each month the students are on campus: Move-In, Leadership and Empowerment, Food Systems, Climate Action, Materials, Technology, Well-being, Travel and Transportation, Built Environment and Stewardship, Move-Out. This gives structure to the Liaison’s communications, which include monthly sustainability newsletters, series of action-oriented posters and stickers, Climate Action pledges, and pop-up events.

All Yale College students.

Each College Action Plan is structured around nine themes, one for each month the students are on campus: Move-In, Leadership and Empowerment, Food Systems, Climate Action, Materials, Technology, Well-being, Travel and Transportation, Built Environment and Stewardship, Move-Out. This gives structure to the Liaison’s communications, which include monthly sustainability newsletters, series of action-oriented posters and stickers, Climate Action pledges, and pop-up events.

Students apply through the Student Employment portal and go through a selective interview process with their college’s Operations Manager. Each of the 14 colleges’ Sustainability Liaisons are selected based on their knowledge around and passion for sustainability, their communication, teamwork, community building skills, and their willingness to drive inclusive and sustainable culture shifts in their college community, among other factors. The position is open to all students living on-campus.

The Sustainability Liaisons go through a series of two orientation events to prepare them to conduct peer outreach.
The first session includes the Full Time Staff member from the Office of Sustainability and the cohort of Liaisons to begin breaking the ice and building community among the group. Together, they walk through each college’s Sustainability Action Plan and begin making a monthly plan for implementation. It includes time to brainstorm about long-term college sustainability initiatives and innovative pilot projects that might not be spelled out in the plan. Environmental justice is stressed in this session as a crucial part to sustainability programming to ensure that Liaisons are engaging their student community with justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in mind. This time is also spent going over specific job requirements, including bi-weekly accountability updates and other logistical concerns.

The second session includes all of the Liaisons, the full Office of Sustainability team, all of the Operations Managers, as well as campus leaders from key operational departments such as Hospitality, Energy Management, Waste Management, and more. These campus leaders will give an introduction to the work that they do and the resources that they can provide to the Liaisons. The goal of this session is to give the Liaisons a high-level understanding of the campus-wide sustainability initiatives to be able to best inform their peers, as well as to help the Liaisons understand how they fit into the university’s sustainability priorities.

These sessions ensure that before embarking on their new role, the Sustainability Liaisons have a working knowledge of their college’s action plan, the historical sustainability work conducted at their college, as well as the ways in which their work connects to the university-wide Yale Sustainability Plan 2025. Throughout the school year, the Sustainability Liaisons meet monthly as a group to discuss shared successes and challenges, to plan out the forthcoming month’s outreach activities, and to find opportunities for cross-campus collaboration. The Liaisons also receive ongoing support in weekly small-group or one-on-one meetings with their Operations Manager and/or Office of Sustainability staff.

The Students for Sustainable Waste Reduction at Yale School of Public Health was founded in 2017 as a student organization to promote environmental stewardship at Yale School of Public Health (YSPH).

The target audience is the entirety of the YSPH community (faculty, staff, and students).
In its inaugural year SWAY established a BYO campaign to promote an internal cultural shift at YPSH towards reducing unsustainable disposable item use and transitioning to reusable items instead. In this initiative SWAY procured and distributed reusable food and beverage containers to the entire YSPH community to avoid the use of disposable items (paper, plastic, Styrofoam) and stop current unsustainable food/catering disposable item practices. This program has been on hold due to COVID, but if normal events resume, the program will resume, as well.

This year, the group is helping to coordinate graduation gifts of reusable tote bags and food/beverage containers for students who were not able to benefit from the 2020 BYO policy for catered events.

The central aim of the Environmental Stewardship Committee (ESC) at the Yale School of the Environment (YSE) is to increase environmental awareness and stewardship at YSE. This professional school should serve as an environmental leader on campus through waste management practices, energy use, and environmental communication and education.

All Yale School of the Environment (YSE) students are engaged in sustainability education and outreach through the work of the Environmental Stewardship Committee.

Students are hired to work on the ESC who are inspired by the idea of providing stewardship of our school community, and expanding our community’s understanding of our impacts on the environment. Students work in teams to engage their peers on a variety of issues from energy efficiency, to waste management, to sustainable procurement, to long range sustainability planning. Students leverage past reports from ESC researchers to give them a sense of the history of stewardship at YSE. For many projects, students seek professionals, professors, and practitioners of many sorts to help inform their strategies and the broader learning going on at YSE. Peer-to-peer education in recent years has included outreach about the benefits of reuse (including the promotion of reusable containers for use at food carts); educating the community about electronic waste through e-waste recycling drives; and conducting a “carbon challenge” to raise awareness about energy usage as part of the University’s Carbon Charge program; educating community members about foraging and agroforestry in urban settings. These efforts served to educate students and the School community at large.

Green Action in Architecture (GAIA) is a student group devoted to addressing sustainability and environmental health and wellbeing issues within the Yale School of Architecture, as well as promoting broader discussion of environmental considerations as they pertain to architecture generally. The target audience for GAIA includes all School of Architecture students. Student educators are trained at the beginning of the academic year through a training video. The Sustainable Architecture Roundtable teaches students the basics of environmental design in the core graduate curriculum. In individual studio work though, students are working alone and might have questions in regards to sustainable design strategies, or wish to push their work to a higher level of ecological integration. The weekly roundtable fosters a community of environmentally-focused designers to help forward each other’s work, and the field as a whole.

For the Yale School of the Environment Environmental Stewardship Committee (ESC), one student works both through the academic year and through the summer on the forest garden; thus, we are reporting 52 as the number of weeks the student educators program is active annually.