Primary Project Leader: Vrinda Ohri

Talk Green to Me was a series of sustainability seminars that ran from January 2015 to March 2015. The aim of these seminars was to use an interdisciplinary and unique approach to educate about various aspects of sustainability.

There were originally eight seminars planned but as we began working on the seminars, we realized that realistically, we couldn’t do that many. We also realized that based on the original schedule we had created, the seminars would extend into April during final exam time. This would pose a severe problem as many, if not all, students would rather focus on their final exams than attend a sustainability seminar. To better accommodate everyone’s schedules, we decreased the total number of seminars. However, to compensate for this, we increased the length of each seminar to about two hours (March was slightly longer as it was our finale seminar).

The first seminar was run in January 2015. For a first time event, the attendance rate was satisfactory and marked a good start. We had approximately 5-10 students attend and the presentation focused on the various forms of energy currently available and future research prospects. This presentation was student-led.

The second seminar was run in February 2015. This seminar had a presentation on the water wars of the world and how water was being treated like a commodity instead of a basic human right. This presentation was student led. However, this seminar had the poorest attendance. We attribute this primarily to Reading Break. The break occurred the week right before the seminar when most of the student population was on vacation and so our advertising attempts weren’t very successful.

The last seminar was run in March 2015. This seminar had two presentations: one by a student on food sustainability and the other by Dr. Bruce Larson in the department of Forestry on the sustainability of forests. This seminar had the highest attendance rate of about 15-20 people. Given our failure in February, we had doubled our advertising efforts and contacted various clubs around campus like Common Energy to help us advertise. Given this level of exposure, we were able to attract far more people to the seminars.

In terms of waste, we made these seminars as waste-free as possible. We bought on an as-needed basis (ex. Juice was bought once and was able to be used for all three seminars). Additionally, any materials that we bought were either recyclable or reusable. In total, we spent approximately $225 out of our budget of $400 on this event due to our economical and thrifty buying habits. In fact, the vast majority of this cost comes from food (sandwiches, sushi, etc.).

In conclusion, we feel that the seminars were a success. We were able to attract, educate, and engage a wide variety of students about sustainability and were able to foster direct interaction between an extremely educated source (Dr. Larson) and the general student population.