Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Sustainability Focus Award Ceremony

Posted by Melissa Aaberg

Congratulations!

The first annual Sustainability Focus Award ceremony honored four students: Greg Koch, Stephanie Trijillo, Kimberley Dukes, and Megan McAfee.

The Sustainability Focus award recognizes students who have completed a broad range of sustainability related courses. The award is designed to encourage students to learn to see environmental issues from multiple perspectives and to increase their experience in this multi-disciplinary topic.

Speech by Josh Liebschutz:

The inspiration for the PCC Sustainability Focus Award started back in 2008. I was working in the SY Environmental Center with a student, Michelle, who was in her 7th college and was starting to get a little frustrated. I thought “It’s too bad there isn’t some sort of award that Michelle could get for taking so many classes.” Another student, Daniel, whom I was talking to about this, said that there was… that PCC offered several Focus Awards, something I did not know about. Daniel was, himself, planning on earning the foreign language focus award. So I knew then that PCC needed a focus award for Sustainability, although at the time I was a new part-time instructor with little understanding of how to make such a thing become real.

Why did PCC need a Sustainability Focus Award? Because we live in a world with massive environmental problems that threaten peoples and wildlife across the planet and there is almost no financial incentive for students to address these issues, besides working for nonprofits that must fundraise constantly. And although there are more and more large organizations that are creating positions for sustainability managers and staff, often these positions become tokenized as the people in the positions do not want to develop confrontational relationships with their supervisors and bosses. And so we cannot rely on the small percentage of people who acquire these positions to solve our large-scale societal problems. What we need is a world in which the average person has an understanding of environmental sustainability. Sure it is great if, say, PGE has a sustainability manager, but my guess is that manager needs the general employee population to support initiatives and to back sustainability initiatives.

PCC for example, has something called a Climate Action Plan, which was created through a long process of seeking input from all the different groups on campus, including student groups, auxiliary services, faculty, and physical plant staff. All these groups were asked to provide input into what they thought was possible about improving sustainability at the college. Almost everything in the PCC Climate Action Plan bubbled up from this large varied population. We have a Sustainability Manager, thankfully, who could organize the ideas, weed out the wheat from the chaff, and who could present the ideas in a clear tabulated manner. This is the Climate Action Plan which was eventually brought to the PCC Board of Directors for approval and which now guides the college’s environmental activities.

So my point is that we need everyone to be educated about sustainability, not only individuals who are specifically moving towards a degree in that field. The PCC Sustainability Focus Award allows us to encourage sustainability education, to demonstrate a pathway in sustainability education for interested students, and to empower individuals to realize that they are important leaders on this topic. Furthermore, it hopefully demonstrates to would-be employers that these individuals are likely to be an asset to their companies because these individuals are highly engaged, critical thinkers who think about the BIG picture.

A couple years after the Sustainability Focus Award was first conceived, a council called SPARC, sustainability practices and resources council, was created by the college to address sustainability issues in curriculum. It is SPARC that took the idea further, creating a subcommittee to try to make the award a reality. Although I have been working on the award since the beginning, it has definitely been a group effort. Many faculty and administrators have provided guidance, opened doors, and provided feedback on the award.

Today, for the first time, we are handing this award out to our students. Unlike the original vision, this award was intentionally created not to encourage students to spend 7 years in community college but was instead designed to be achievable through a normal course of study in just 2 years. Thus it does not include classes with many prerequisites and tries to include mainly courses that are taught on multiple campuses. The award also does not include any non-transferable course which leaves out many classes that would otherwise be included.

Nevertheless, despite making the award as attainable as possible, only 4 students were able to claim and accept the award. These 4 students, Greg Koch, Stephanie Trijillo, Kimberley Dukes, and Megan McAfee completed the requirements for the award without even knowing the award existed (as I mentioned this is the first time it is available). Clearly these students were personally interested in sustainability enough to take all these sustainability-related courses with no plan on receiving any acknowledgement, so they are indeed very special people!

Moving forward, the Sustainability Focus Award is going to be working on creating some advertising materials about sustainability pathways at PCC including how new students can plan to win this award, so that new students can make more informed choices when they register for classes, and hopefully in future years the number of awardees each year grows. But this year we are extremely pleased to begin this tradition with our 4 award pioneers, Greg, Stephanie, Kimberley, and Megan.