My last two sessions of AASHE 2011 both dealt with farmers markets, from two very different perspectives: a school in British Columbia with a resistant food services contractor and a school in Arizona with campus-wide support.

A sustainability manager and a professor of forest ecology from University of Northern British Columbia talked about their experiences starting up a farmers market in the far north. As can be expected, fresh fruit and vegetables are lacking, and they focus more on dried, canned, or otherwise preserved food. They work hard to make the market not just a place to shop, but to socialize and be entertained, as well. (A definite argument for music at Berklee’s market.) They don’t have the support of their food services contractor, which, as you can imagine, makes it more difficult. We’re lucky to have a food services director, Jessica Mackool from ARAMARK, who is passionate about these issues. She singlehandedly started the farmers market during Green Week this April and quickly expanded it to a monthly event.

Danielle Smyth and Scott Green from the University of Northern British Columbia

The other presentation was much more applicable to our situation. The sustainability coordinator (Rebecca Reining) and the food services director (Katrin Shum) from Arizona State University detailed the planning of their farmers market. This was all initiated by the students, who did a report on a market’s viability and requested it repeatedly. A pilot market was held in September 2009, and monthly markets began in February of 2010 (expanded to twice a month in October). This was a broad collaboration between the sustainability office, wellness program, ARAMARK, health and counseling, Arizona Farmers Markets, and many more. (I feel like I’ve had blinders on that I haven’t even considered involving our wellness program in our own farmers market.) Three offices even transferred $1,000 from their own budgets to support the market, and members of the committee spent 4–5 hours a week working on it.  Their schedule is 9:00–2:00 every other Tuesday, September through November and January through April. Berklee’s runs April through October, and I definitely saw a drop off in attendance this summer. However, I’d hate to ignore the summer students, and with such an urban campus, I have to think we could get more local residents attending in the summer with more marketing. Some other suggestions that we could take to help students actually use the food: selling local and organic prepared lunches and offering microwavable recipes.

It was heartening to see someone struggling with the same issues we have, if on a larger scale, and hear their solutions to them. October 27 is our last farmers market of the season, but I hope that we can build a larger coalition to bring Berklee’s farmers market back better than ever in April.

More than anything at AASHE 2011, I hope that the lessons from Leith Sharp’s talk stay with me once I get back to work. The former sustainability director at Harvard, she focused on change management strategies for large organizations. My big takeaway? My role at Berklee (and the sustainability coordinator’s, if we ever get one) is not to do all the sustainability work, but to enable others all around the college to do it. In grantmakers’ language, it’s capacity-building. As I’ve heard over and over again at this conference, we’re doing our jobs if we’re helping to create leaders all around the college, from student environmental group presidents to subcommittee chairs  to project heads. Having this distributed network of leaders is what will really effect change.

On that note, I just want to take a moment to say thanks to John Eldert, Berklee’s VP of Administration. I can see that in sending me to AASHE this year, and in supporting my sustainability efforts in general, he’s doing exactly what Leith’s talking about, enabling leadership in others. I can’t wait to talk this all over with him!

Leith Sharp opened her session with a little song.

As Leith put it, our role is threefold:

• Removing risk and fostering stability for others to lead successful change
• Creating forums for people to be socially supported, elevated, and engaged with their peers
• Taking calculated risks (personal and professional) to create tension and force change

Some tips for accomplishing this:

• Start with pilot programs. They’re low risk, they require little preapproval, and their success builds momentum. A sustainability office should be a pilot program incubator. Innovation requires iteration (my new favorite word), learning day by day.
• Adult learners want to learn from each other. Skill sharing programs  are the way to go, empowering people and spreading knowledge. Everyone has their specialty.
• Just do it. In large, lumbering institutions, when there’s not an already established decision-making process for something, the default is either to do nothing or to get approval from absolutely everybody. Often, if you start the program, its momentum will carry it along past any objections.

So far AASHE 2011 has been a combination of inspiration and practical advice—a good mix, I think. It’s all a bit overwhelming, though. After spending a day and a half meeting people from colleges with lots of resources devoted to sustainability, sometimes with a couple dozen people in their AASHE delegations, I was wondering how I fit into all of this. I’m not a college president, or a sustainability manager, or even a faculty member able to make decisions about how to allocate her classes’ time. It was beginning to make me feel a bit useless and lonely.

So Carman Schlamb’s session couldn’t have come at a better time. It was titled “Breaking the Circle of One, or Am I the Only One on This Campus Who Believes in Sustainability?” Schlamb talked about her frustration at years of effort that didn’t seem to lead anywhere. Without a sustainability office at Seneca, students focused on on-the-ground projects, administration focused on economic factors, and there was no institutional memory—whenever a passionate person left, all their work left with them. It wasn’t easy to ferret out what she called the “hidden curriculum” and “hidden partners.” She reached out to people through educational poster sessions and open forums where people presented what their areas were doing. Students helped her to break the barriers between offices. Through this process, Schlamb found that there was a person interested in sustainability just one floor below her!

Bill Dillon’s talk later that day complemented Schlamb’s perfectly. He’s vice president of NACUBO and a certified negotiation trainer, and some of his tips were familiar from the (one!) Negotiation and Conflict Resolution class that I took at Tufts. His main point was that every negotiation is not just about achieving the immediate objective, but also elevating your relationship. He pointed out some tactics to be aware of when others use them:

• Emotional tactics: confrontation, threat, tease, body language
• Power tactics: only the messenger, it’ll never get approved, third-party pressures, violins, deadline
• Logical tactics: limiting, foggy memory, fair and reasonable, expert info

He also suggested some alternatives, like creating a neutral environment, asking first for input from others before sharing your ideas, disclosing your feelings, depersonalizing, and pausing for 10-seconds (it’s a long time!). These may seem obvious, but I find I actually need to think consciously about things that other people may do instinctively.

These two sessions back-to-back emphasized that building a sustainability movement takes a lot of collaboration. I’ve been trying to encourage that at Berklee, but I think I need to do it more consciously in order to be successful.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m at AASHE in Pittsburgh this week. I’m attending the conference in two roles: as a staff member at Berklee involved with the sustainability committee and as a student in Tufts’ Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning program. I really felt pulled back and forth between these roles on the first day. Between the STARS workshop, the student summit, the keynote speech, and the expo hall, I was running around like crazy, even missing lunch. No wonder they have a meditation room!

Bill McKibben

There was a dramatic difference between the very practical workshop in the morning and the student summit keynote by Bill McKibben in the afternoon. I’ve always thought McKibben’s 350.org protests were an inefficient use of energy, but I can see how his enthusiasm for them can be infectious. He’s an entertaining speaker, and his emphasis on the immediacy of climate change is welcome, but I’m worried that he discourages students from doing anything but protesting. At one point he seemed to disparage the point of the entire conference by calling it all just “changing lightbulbs in your dorms.”

K. Christian Bayart from Macalester College reports on the Sustainability Student Worker Network he started.

Luckily, the student presentations after his talk showed that not everyone shared his views. I was especially impressed by the student who created a sustainability student employee network (sometimes by co-opting pieces of jobs in other department that weren’t being fully utilized) and the students who organized their college’s STARS data collection (by making it the final project for an Environmentalism 101 class).

Majora Carter’s keynote detailed her work with Sustainable South Bronx and her consulting company, the Majora Carter Group. Her entrepreneurial mentality and eloquence are so strong that they made me feel at the same time inspired and inadequate. Really—check out her TED talk.

AASHE executive director Paul Rowland pulled it all together when he exhorted the assembled 2,000 sustainability professionals to thoughtfulness, but warned “thoughtful hermits are probably good people—and they probably have a very small carbon footprint—but that’s not sufficient to make a difference in the world.” Harried from a day of running around and wanting nothing more than to shut myself away in my hotel room, I felt like he was speaking directly to me. We’re all doing a lot of thinking this week; now we just have to get back to work and turn that into action.

I’m in Pittsburgh today, for the AASHE conference. Truthfully, I’ve never thought much about the city before, and I’m surprised that it’s so environmentally conscious. From the David Lawrence Conference Center (the first to be granted LEED Gold certification); to the hotels’ environmental initiatives; to the city’s planned mixed-use green community, Riverparc, a lot of thought has been put into reducing the city’s environmental impact.

Pittsburgh's nickname is "the city of bridges." It purportedly has three more than Venice.

Of course, thought kind of had to be put into it. The city’s history of steel production—at one time 1/3 to 1/2 of the country’s total—led to smog that rivaled the worst of the Industrial Revolution. Through an extensive cleanup campaign, air pollution has been steadily decreasing for years, but in 2011 the American Lung Association still ranked it the 3rd worst city in the U.S. for short-term particle pollution. Still, the transformation is as impressive as Boston Harbor’s. Check out Pittsburgh Green Story for more info.

More about the conference itself still to come…